The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds
Where to buy The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Tale of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds books online?
- 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 Huge 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 meadow. 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 finished the regular season with 108 wins and finished a whopping 20 games yet to be of their closest division competitor, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
But that remarkable year was not lacking 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 tale, Posnanski brings to plain 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 Huge Red Machine fulfilled its destiny, defeating the Boston Red Sox 4-3.
As enchanting and entertaining as the season and players it captures, The Machine is the tale of a team unlike any additional in the sport’s glorious history.
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Fluff. The kind of book you can sit on a bench in bookstore and “read.” It appeals to fans of the Huge Red Machine. Especially persons who live in the past. Which is all they have: 2 WS titles and a disgraced icon. The ‘75 team was fantastic, but hardly the best ever, q.v. the 1998 NY Yankees, a team which had pitching. The Reds staff was joke.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Man, what a disappointment. I reflect Posnanski’s one of the best sports writers around, but this book is nearly embarrassing. The problem starts with the theme 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 tale. If that wasn’t terrible enough, Posnanski also feels the need to clarify, 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.
Reader’s 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 theme 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 largest 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 small in the book that hasn’t been covered before. Posnanski’s new contributions are too regularly 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 silent underappreciated player who rarely received press coverage while he was playing. Posnanski’s interviews with Griffey add reasonably a bit to the tale 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-excellent sports novel for teenage boys. The greatest sportswriters of our generation (Bill James, Roger Angell, Leigh Montville) are able to take in their subjects with sophisticated prose and a willingness to challenge their audience to reflect and rethink. Posnanski himself does this with most of his writing. Not so here, and the book suffers for it.
Finally, the leader omits, or gives minimal treatment to, many of the most appealing questions about this team. For example, the core of this Reds club was together from 1972 (when Morgan joined the team) through 1978 (Rose’s last year in Cincinnati). Why did the 1975-76 versions suddenly dominate the world? Yes, they had a fantastic lineup, but that was right 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 place up against the additional fantastic teams in baseball history. Posnanski gives small 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 fantastic teams in history. Posnanski devotes a few paragraphs at the end to providing his thoughts, but persons opinions are extremely subjective with small analysis behind them.
Additional greenfield topics could have included a look at how the club was place together over time: which players were drafted, which were bought 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 a name on the Reds see and know this? If so, that would make Cincinnati well yet to be 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 inspection talent outside of the US? All of these questions and others would have provided tremendous depth to the tale and would have agreed Posnanski a wealth of new angles to take in. As a replacement for 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 fantastic team, The Machine is a fine read. You’ll learn reasonably 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.
Reader’s 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 legendary players on that legendary Reds team. And I reflect all the insights to the personalities of the different players were wonderfully delivered with realistic hint. 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 huge time jock sort of life. Etc etc. Posnanski paints both the excellent and terrible of these guys in what seems a very insightful evenhanded way. But you end up wanting more.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The 1975 Cincinnati Reds (who repeated as World Series champs in ‘76, sweeping my Philadelphia Phillies in the NLCS) were one of the legendary baseball teams of my (relative) youth. With free agency disrupting the game in the late 70s, some even ventured to argue that the Reds would be “the last fantastic team.” Of course, the late-90s Yankees place paid to that presumptuous assertion, but the ‘75 Reds were plenty excellent, with one of the best eight-man lineups ever, a colorful (if to some extent unorthodox) manager in Sparky Anderson, and an underrated pitching staff of interchangeable parts which anticipated the “relief-pitching revolution” that has gifted us with so many 3 1/2-hour games in these latter days. Featuring such stars as Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Tony Perez, the Reds entered the ‘75 season as a formidable but flawed team: they had lost two World Series and one NLCS between 1970 and 1973 and seemed to have been eclipsed as an NL West power by the Dodgers. They got off to a poor start in ‘75, splitting their first 36 games, but then rocketed to the best regular-season record (108-54) since the 1906 Chicago Cubs. The upstart Boston Red Sox gave them all they could handle in one of the classic World Series — winning the most legendary game of the affair as Carlton Fisk’s histrionic homer settled Game 6 in 12 innings — but Cincinnati clawed back from a 3-0 deficit in Game 7 to take the title.
Posnanski, a writer for the KANSAS CITY STAR, provides us with the expected tidbits of back tale and gossip that have accumulated over three decades (ending with the pathetic sight of a banned Pete Rose selling, if not his soul, then certainly a large part of his dignity in a Las Vegas casino). He goes beyond the expected, but, by weaving cultural events from the year 1975 into his narrative. ‘75 was a hard year for America, with South Vietnam falling, inflation roaring, Watergate a painful recent memory, and Jimmy Hoffa vanishing. The Reds, who stuck to a strict dress and hair code as a matter of organizational policy, represented a conservative part of the country that factually felt under siege. Even Sparky Anderson establish himself challenged when his son refused to cut his hair. The Reds could at least take some support in the fact that, thanks to their World Series battle, interest in baseball — that most traditional of American sports — was revived after a long period of quiescence. Reading the book brought back many memories of persons days. Posnanski deserves credit for injecting some real quality into what could have been your standard “where are they now?” pot-boiler.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5