The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds
Posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 4:41 am
- ISBN13: 9780061582561
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
There are memorable teams in baseball—and then there are utterly unforgettable teams like the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. From 1972 to 1976, the franchise known as the Big Red Machine dominated the National League, winning four division crowns, three league pennants, and two World Series titles. But their 1975 season has become the stuff of sports legend.
In The Machine, award-winning sports columnist Joe Posnanski captures all of the passion and tension, drama and glory of this extraordinary team considered to be one of the greatest ever to take the field. Helmed by Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson, the lineup for the ‘75 Reds is a Who’s Who of baseball stars: Pete Rose, Ken Griffey, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, George Foster, Cesar Geronimo, and Dave Concepcion. Like a well-oiled engine, the ‘75 Reds ended the regular season with 108 wins and finished a whopping 20 games ahead of their closest division competitor, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
But that remarkable year was not without controversy. Feuds, fights, insults, and run-ins with fans were as much a part of the season as hits, runs, steals, and strikeouts. Capturing this rollicking thrill-ride of a story, Posnanski brings to vivid life the excitement, hope, and high expectations that surrounded the players from the beginning of spring training through the long summer and into a nail-biting World Series, where, in the ninth inning of the seventh game, the Big Red Machine fulfilled its destiny, defeating the Boston Red Sox 4-3.
As enthralling and entertaining as the season and players it captures, The Machine is the story of a team unlike any other in the sport’s glorious history.
Man, what a disappointment. I think Posnanski’s one of the best sports writers around, but this book is almost embarrassing. The problem begins with the subject matter: the Cincinnatti Reds of the mid-seventies. What more is there to say about this over-covered team? How much ink has already been spilled? Posnanski adds nothing new to the story. If that wasn’t bad enough, Posnanski also feels the need to describe, as blandly as possible, life in the seventies. Yes, we know Gerald Ford was dealing with a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate country. Yes, we know Bruce Springsteen made the covers of both Time and Newsweek. Yes, we know Jaws changed the way the movie industry operated. My advice: Read Sokolove or Shropshire.
Rating: 1 / 5
Fluff. The kind of book you can sit on a bench in bookstore and “read.” It appeals to fans of the Big Red Machine. Especially those who live in the past. Which is all they have: 2 WS titles and a disgraced icon. The ‘75 team was great, but hardly the best ever, q.v. the 1998 NY Yankees, a team which had pitching. The Reds staff was joke.
Rating: 1 / 5
I wanted to like this book. Joe Posnanski is a terrific writer. His newspapers columns, magazine articles, and blog posts are among the very best of any sportswriter of this generation. His subject matter is fascinating – perhaps the best baseball team in recent memory, if not ever. It seems like a wonderful combination, but ultimately the book is disappointing.
First, the book presents minimal new information. Posnanski’s biggest challenge is that this team, this era of baseball history, and especially the 1975 World Series have all been well documented in literature. He needs to add something to the conversation, but there’s very little in the book that hasn’t been covered before. Posnanski’s new contributions are too often rooted in pop-psychology (Rose had an overbearing father, the team believed they could not lose and so they didn’t, etc).
Similarly, the player profiles add minimal depth to what you probably already know about them. One notable exception is Ken Griffey, a quiet underappreciated player who rarely received press coverage while he was playing. Posnanski’s interviews with Griffey add quite a bit to the story line.
Next, the writing seems aimed at a junior-high audience (with the exception of some adult language and situations.) Far too many sentences read like something out of a feel-good sports novel for teenage boys. The greatest sportswriters of our generation (Bill James, Roger Angell, Leigh Montville) are able to cover their subjects with sophisticated prose and a willingness to challenge their audience to think and rethink. Posnanski himself does this with most of his writing. Not so here, and the book suffers for it.
Finally, the author omits, or gives minimal treatment to, many of the most interesting questions about this team. For example, the core of this Reds club was together from 1972 (when Morgan left the team) through 1978 (Rose’s last year in Cincinnati). Why did the 1975-76 versions suddenly dominate the world? Yes, they had a great lineup, but that was true in many of the surrounding seasons as well. No player, with the exception of Morgan, delivered his peak performance in 1975. The pitching staff, while effective, has nary a Hall of Famer on it. And no one who was particularly close. Gullett may have been brilliant for a brief window of time, but that’s it. The rotation and bullpen on these Reds teams does not compare favorably at all when put up against the other great teams in baseball history. Posnanski gives little insight into why this team suddenly gelled into a behemoth, aside from a bit of the pop psychology referenced earlier.
Or he could have gone in a related direction – how well does this club compare to the great teams in history. Posnanski devotes a few paragraphs at the end to providing his thoughts, but those opinions are extremely subjective with little analysis behind them.
Other greenfield topics could have included a look at how the club was put together over time: which players were drafted, which were acquired in trades, etc. How did these players progress through the minor leagues? Morgan was notoriously undervalued in Houston, where the Astrodome severely hampered his statistics; did someone on the Reds see and understand this? If so, that would make Cincinnati well ahead of their time in player evaluation. Or did they just get lucky? Many of the Reds players were foreign born…did Cincinnati have more or better resources scouting talent outside of the US? All of these questions and others would have provided tremendous depth to the story and would have given Posnanski a wealth of new angles to cover. Instead we get too many pages about the publicity stunt that was baseball’s 1,000,000th run.
If you are a younger fan, or not all that familiar with this great team, The Machine is a fine read. You’ll learn quite a bit about the club and its players. If you have more than a passing knowledge of the ‘75 Reds, you’ll more than likely be disappointed.
Rating: 2 / 5
The joke stereotype of chinese food is that you feel hungry again an hour later. Well, I got this book in the mail today, just finished, reading it and loved it but feel hungry for more. Posnanski writes very well. The pages flew by and I learned all sorts of things that I didn’t know about both the iconic and less famous players on that famous Reds team. And I think all the insights to the personalities of the different players were wonderfully delivered with realistic nuance. Pete Rose is crude. But he’s also generous. Johnny Bench is certainly more polite and presentable than Pete and never went in for any sort of gambling thing, but he seems to (at that point) have been living out a shallow, stereotypical big time jock sort of life. Etc etc. Posnanski paints both the good and bad of these guys in what seems a very insightful evenhanded way. But you end up wanting more.
Rating: 5 / 5
Relives the team, and the series. like all reds fans we are still in awe of the resilience of the team.
Rating: 3 / 5