The Machine by Joe Posnanski

Author:Joe Posnanski [Posnanski, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061901690
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-04-09T07:00:00+00:00

Lee Trevino, the only professional golfer out there who consistently could beat Jack Nicklaus, was struck by lightning while sitting under a tree at the Western Open in Oak Brook, Illinois. Tennis players Jimmy Connors and Ilie Nastase yelled at a man in the crowd at Wimbledon, causing quite the stir in London. A woman named Nancy Fitzgerald won the Indianapolis city golf tournament, though she was eight months pregnant at the time.

The newspapers tried to calm the shark fear by pointing out, helpfully, that only fifty people each year were killed by sharks in the whole world, while more than three hundred died in the United States alone from bee and wasp stings. There was no reported surge in bee and wasp panic, however. People all over the country still reported shark nightmares after seeing Jaws. “I’ll never go swimming again,” Martha Lecaroz of Saugus, Massachusetts, told the United Press International senior editor assigned to report the mass hysteria that Jaws was causing. On Cape Cod, the movie-line recording warned that adults should not see it before they went swimming.

The papers reported that a nineteen-year-old woman named Cheryl Petit was expected to live a normal life after doctors replaced her defective heart valve with one made of pig tissue. President Ford signed a bill into law that would help middle-income people get financing to buy homes. Jewel thieves in Paris pretended to be delivery boys and stole more than $4 million worth of diamonds from the ex-wife of the Revlon cosmetics emperor.

And Joe Morgan tried to adjust to his new life as the best player in baseball. He liked the attention, but he did not know how to deal with it. Funny thing, he had spent so much of his life bitterly fighting back at the perceptions. He signed with the Houston Colt .45s, he always said, because the scout, Bill Wight, approached him after a game in college and said, “You’re a really good player.” Other scouts had come to talk to him, but all of them called Joe a good little player. And it was that word, “little,” that bit of condescension, that inspired Joe Morgan. He would face down that patronizing word for the first ten years of his career. He hit with power, he stole bases, he intimidated pitchers in any number of ways. And still people saw that five-foot-seven ballplayer with the tiny glove that looked like it was a toy out of a Cracker Jack box. And it inspired him more.

Now, though, they could not help but see his greatness—and what was left to prove? What was left to drive him? Morgan had uncharacteristically clipped something out of the morning paper—he was among the league leaders in batting average, home runs, runs, runs batted in, and stolen bases. All five categories. He wanted to send that clipping to his father.

“I have never seen anyone, and I mean anyone, play better than Joe has played this year,” Sparky told reporters. Nobody argued. Joe was on another level.

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