'Coulda been the Buffalo Bills': How Cincinnati's greatest team became the Big Red Machine
The San Francisco Giants touted George Foster as the next Willie Mays, or at least the prospect who would replace the aging superstar.
Until the day in May when the rookie finished some swings in the batting cage and heard the voice that altered his career forever.
“Get out of the cage, rook!” barked Gaylord Perry, the Giants’ veteran spitballer.
Foster obliged. Then headed behind the cage, pushed the barrel of his bat under Perry’s chin and told the All-Star pitcher, “Don’t you ever tell me to get out of the cage.”
“Next day George was a Cincinnati Red,” Ken Griffey said.
On May 29, 1971, the Giants got Frank Duffy and Vern Geishert, and the Reds got a 22-year-old kid who would become one of the most fearsome sluggers in franchise history.
And the Big Red Machine was born.
Or was it?
In fact, Foster's arrival in Cincinnati is only a small, if important, piece of the story of how a very strong and dogged Reds team rose from among a formidable pack of major-league contenders to earn its all-time moniker and secure its rarified place in baseball lore.
As for when exactly the Cincinnati Reds of Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench morphed into the Big Red Machine of sports history books, well, that depends on who you talk to.
Joe Morgan makes Michael Jordan-type impact on Cincinnati Reds
By the time Foster arrived, the Reds already were the reigning National League champs, having lost the 1970 World Series to the great Baltimore Orioles pitching staff of Jim Palmer, Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar.
“We beat them in ’70,” Palmer, the Hall of Famer, said, “before they had Joe Morgan. That changed the whole dynamic of the team.”
Morgan was acquired from the Houston Astros in an eight-player trade exactly six months after the Foster trade, a strong if abrasive personality that fit right into a Reds clubhouse of strong personalities in a way that didn’t work in Houston.
“He could steal bases. He could hit home runs,” Palmer said. “He just added another dimension – high average, a great defensive player.
“It’s kind of how Michael Jordan made the Bulls better. That’s what Joe Morgan did to that team.”
Wait. Michael Jordan?
“I mean, you don’t get a better catcher than Johnny Bench,” Palmer said. “But, again, when you get somebody that’s that dynamic offensively, it changes everything.”
In fact, that trade from the Astros also netted the Reds three more players who were part of the back-to-back championships: Gold Glove center fielder Cesar Geronimo, 15-game winner Jack Billingham and bench outfielder Ed Armbrister.
Palmer isn’t the only one who identifies that moment as the day the engine started for that team.
“When Joe came over, it really started, everything was structured. Now there was definition to all of that,” Bench said, “I mean, we could outslug people, we could outdo teams (in multiple ways).
“People would come to watch us take batting practice. People would come to watch us take infield. And when we walked on the field, it was the old adage that we knew that we were going to beat them, they knew we were going to beat them, and we knew that they knew we were going to beat them.”
And so the Big Red Machine was born.
But not so fast.
Los Angeles reporter gets credit for Big Red Machine nickname
The team that made its indelible mark on a city and a baseball nation 50 years ago this fall already had long owned the Big Red Machine nickname – going back to the days of Lee May leading the team in home runs and Bobby Tolan leading the league in steals.
“It was ’69,” said Perez, the Hall of Fame cleanup hitter. “Joe wasn’t there yet. Johnny wasn’t (an MVP) yet. It was because we had eight guys in the lineup, and six were hitting .300, and then the Big Red Machine started there.”
It was July of that year that the first known use of the nickname was seen in print.
And even after that, there was some debate over who came up with the name, a debate mostly stirred by Rose, who claimed he did. Rose’s car was his little red machine, inspiring him to call his powerful team the Big Red Machine, he’d said.
“I don’t think so. No,” Perez said with a chuckle and smile. “Pete …”
“Oh, no, no, no,’’ Bench said. “It was some writer. May have been from L.A. Because that was the time where, ‘God, they’re like a machine.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, like a Big Red Machine.’ “
Longtime Los Angeles baseball writer Bob Hunter, a member of the baseball writers wing of the Hall of Fame, gets credit for the nickname.
“Bob Hunter’s great. Bob was a wonderful guy,” Bench said. “I think that’s more true than whatever (else is out there).”
But nobody considers even that 1969 birth of the nickname in Hunter's stories about the Dodgers and their hard-hitting rivals to the east the birth of what history considers the Big Red Machine.
Birth of Big Red Machine nickname debate continues
Palmer, now an award-winning broadcaster, said he doesn’t remember hearing the Big Red Machine nickname at all in the 1970 postseason.
So was it only after the Foster trade? Or the Morgan trade? Or Sparky Anderson’s hiring as a no-name, first-time manager ahead of the 1970 season? Or general manager Bob Howsam's emphasis on speed and Gold Glove defenders up the middle with the opening of Riverfront Stadium and its billiard-table playing surface the same year?
“It didn’t really become the Big Red Machine until they stuck me and George in the lineup,” said Griffey, who fell one hit short of a batting title in 1976 and made three All-Star teams as one of the most overshadowed stars in the game – first by his ensemble cast of Hall of Fame teammates and then by his Hall of Fame son.
In fact, it was all of those moments.
For all its enduring aura, mystique and legacy, the Big Red Machine as it’s celebrated five decades after its epic, 7-game World Series championship over the Red Sox evolved into the form that separated it from so many other great teams in the 150-year history of major-league baseball.
“The nucleus was there. Pete was there. Tony was there. And then Joe came over and it just sort of evolved from that,” Bench said.
Hunter might have provided the concept, but Morgan provided the key to the ignition.
Perez was the clutch and the steel that held the clubhouse together, Bench the steering, Rose the premium fuel, Davey Concepcion and Cesar Geronimo the leather interior of an unheralded Gold Glove group of fielders.
“The emotional side of it is not just for us,” Bench said. “It was for the thousands and the millions of fans that we created for the Big Red Machine.”
And, yes, when Foster and Griffey joined the everyday lineup in earnest in 1975, it took off.
Pete Rose position change made Big Red Machine complete
“It started to come finally when Pete made that move from left field to third base, and we solidified the middle of the lineup with George,” Griffey said.
Rose was a Gold Glove outfielder until then (and an All-Star second baseman before that).
Early in 1975, Anderson asked him if he would consider moving to third base to help the lineup. Rose had bristled and sulked early in his career when a former manager ordered him to move off second base.
“But Sparky always asked me,” Rose said during a conversation with The Enquirer last season. “Would I mind going to left field? Would I mind going to third base? I would always see the handwriting on the wall when it would help the team. So I said sure.”
Rose earned All-Star selection that year at a fourth position in his career (and would later make it five with first base).
“Sparky could have been a used-car salesman,” Bench said. “I think he sold cars after he retired. But he could convince you."
Bench added: “The difference between a good manager and a great manager is the good manager will tell you that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. The great manager will convince the cat that it’s necessary.”
The defensive realignment was made for good in late May, with both Foster and the new cat at third thriving.
“If Pete didn't move, that would never happen,” Foster said. “That gave me the opportunity to play every day. From then on the Big Red Machine started to roll.”
Within two weeks – 50 years ago this week – the Reds swept the Chicago Cubs to take over first place in the National League West for good in 1975. By the end of the month, the Reds had a seven-game lead. They won the division by 20 games. Cincinnati finished the season on a 78-32 (.709) tear.
And just like that the Big Red Machine was born.
Except for one thing.
“It was the Big Red Machine,” Bench said, “the great Big Red Machine, the one and only Big Red Machine.
“But we hadn’t won.”
They hadn't won a damn thing.
“We coulda been the Buffalo Bills,” Bench said.
One final step needed – winning a World Series
Those Reds had three Hall of Fame players, a Hall of Fame manager, baseball’s all-time Hit King (who may one day join the others in the Hall), four league MVPs, seven All-Stars in their eight-man lineup and five guys with a combined 26 Gold Gloves.
But they had lost the 1970 World Series to the Orioles and the 1972 World Series to the Athletics. They won 99 games and the division in 1973, but lost to the Mets in the playoffs. And the Reds won 98 games in 1974 but finished second to the Dodgers in the division and missed the playoffs.
And then Carlton Fisk hit a 12th-inning home run off the foul pole at soggy Fenway Park in the wee hours of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. And the heavily favored, big, bad, Big Red Machine was on the verge of another big, bad, red-faced finish to October.
“After we lost that game when Carlton Fisk hit that home run, we were talking about what a great game we played that day and all those big plays and all that,” Perez said. “Sparky came up and said, ‘What are you guys talking about?’ “
Once the manager realized the tone, Anderson delivered his own tone and message, as Perez recalled: “Some people are calling us the Big Red Machine. Nobody can call us that if we lose this World Series, because we haven’t beat anybody yet!”
Both Bench and Perez said the thought of losing the series never occurred to them.
“We said, ‘Don’t worry about it Sparky, we’ll win tomorrow,’ “ Perez said. “And we did. We won. And then we won the second year. We beat the Red Sox and the Yankees. We beat two dynasties. Teams that have been around forever. We beat them and that’s it.”
The Big Red Machine. For once. For good.
For 50 years and counting.
This story is part of an ongoing series this summer on the Big Red Machine’s first championship in 1975.