Pete Rose @ baseball-reference.com
Joe Morgan @ baseball-reference.com
Johnny Bench @ baseball-reference.com
Tony Perez @ baseball-reference.com
The Big Red Machine. The greatest lineup of its era. Pete Rose. Joe Morgan. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. Four future Hall of Famers in the same batting order. The 1972 Cincinnati Reds were supposed to be one of the most fearsome offenses in baseball history.
In 35 simulated timelines, the Machine ran on two cylinders.
Johnny Bench hit .286 with 7 home runs and 17 RBI. Tony Perez hit .266 with 4 home runs and 23 RBI. Those two showed up. Every timeline, every strategy engine, Bench and Perez did their jobs.
Pete Rose hit .205 with zero home runs and 3 RBI. Joe Morgan hit .211 with 1 home run and 8 RBI.
The two most famous players on the roster - the face of the franchise and the back-to-back MVP - were the two worst hitters in the lineup.
Pete Rose is the all-time hits leader in Major League Baseball. 4,256 career hits. No one in the history of the sport has more. His nickname is Charlie Hustle. His entire identity is built on contact, on relentless, grinding, inescapable contact.
Across 35 timelines, he went 30 for 146.
That is a .205 batting average. That is what you expect from a September call-up, not the Hit King. He hit zero home runs. He drove in 3 runs. In 146 at-bats. Three RBI. He went hitless in 16 of his 35 games. Nearly half. Charlie Hustle went to the plate and hustled back to the dugout empty-handed almost every other game.
Twelve innings. Five at-bats. Five chances to be the hero in a one-run World Series game. Zero hits. The game went to extras and Rose still couldn't find a gap. Oakland won 4-3 without Rose ever reaching base.
Another 12-inning game. Another 0-for-5 from Rose. But this time Cincinnati won anyway - 4-3. The Big Red Machine scraped together a victory in spite of its biggest star going hitless. They didn't need Charlie Hustle. They won without him.
This is the game where Cincinnati's pitching staff threw a combined no-hitter and lost. Ten Cincinnati batters recorded hits off Ken Holtzman.
Pete Rose was not one of them.
His team got 10 hits. He got zero. In the cruelest game in 35 timelines, the Hit King couldn't hit.
Joe Morgan won the National League MVP award in 1975 and 1976. He is considered one of the greatest second basemen in the history of the sport. In 35 timelines of Game 4, he hit .211 with a single home run. He went hitless in 13 games.
If you had told Sparky Anderson that his second baseman would go 32-for-152 with 1 homer across 35 postseason games, Anderson would have benched him. But you can't bench Joe Morgan. And the multiverse knew it.
Six at-bats. The game lasted 15 innings. Morgan came to the plate six times and failed to reach base even once. Cincinnati won 2-1 anyway. Fifteen innings of baseball, and the back-to-back MVP contributed nothing at the plate.
In Timeline 7, Pete Rose went 0-for-5. Joe Morgan went 0-for-6. The two best contact hitters on the Big Red Machine combined for 0-for-11. Between them: zero hits, zero walks, zero times on base. Cincinnati lost 4-3 in 12 innings. The Machine's two biggest stars combined to produce absolutely nothing.
The quietest game in 35 timelines. Fourteen innings. A single run scored. Morgan went 0-for-5. Five at-bats across fourteen innings and nothing to show for any of them. Cincinnati won 1-0, and Morgan had no part in the only run that scored.
Here is the Big Red Machine's batting order, sorted by what they did across 35 timelines:
Johnny Bench: .286, 7 HR, 17 RBI, 22 BB.
Tony Perez: .266, 4 HR, 23 RBI, 11 BB.
Bobby Tolan: .239, 1 HR, 10 RBI.
Pete Rose: .205, 0 HR, 3 RBI.
Joe Morgan: .211, 1 HR, 8 RBI, 19 BB.
Bench and Perez combined for 11 home runs and 40 RBI. Rose and Morgan combined for 1 home run and 11 RBI. The greatest lineup of its era was carried by its catcher and its first baseman. The left fielder and the second baseman - the two players history remembers most fondly - were passengers.
The Machine was not broken. It was half-broken. And in a series of one-run games, half a Machine is not enough.