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close to trading Doggie to Boston for a rookie third baseman, Butch Hobson, and a tall beanpole of a pitcher named Roger Moret, but that fell through. There was even some talk about Doggie going to three-time World Champion Oakland for third baseman Sal Bando, but Oakland’s owner, Charlie Finley, was dependably undependable and that deal died in committee.
    That left only one trade on the table, and it looked all but certain: Perez would go to the New York Yankees for their All-Star third baseman, Graig Nettles. The trade made too much sense not to happen. The Yankees needed a quiet leader, someone who could help lift the team from a ten-year World Series drought, their longest since World War I. And Nettles would give Sparky Anderson that third baseman who could play breathtaking defense and hit long home runs. Back home in Puerto Rico, Doggie imagined himself in Yankee pinstripes.
    But that trade disintegrated too. The Reds wanted a pitcher thrown in. The Yankees wanted someone they could plug in at third base. Talks stalled. Then talks broke off. Negotiations began again. Then broke off again. Middle East talks. Then one day, Howsam became frustrated with it all and announced that there would be no trade. A miracle. “Who knows?” Howsam told reporters. “This spring I may look at our ball club and say I’m the luckiest son of a gun for not making a deal.”
    The rest of the winter, Tony Perez wondered how it would feel to come back to the club. Everyone knew the Reds almost traded him. Would everyone look at him differently? Would they lose a little respect for him? Would they worry about him? Would they treat him like a sick patient?
    “Hey, Doggy,” Morgan said. “They can still trade your ass anytime, you know. I can just picture you after one year in that American League as a designated hitter. You’d balloon up to 280 pounds.”
    “Fatty,” Perez said, flexing his arm, “it all muscle. And your biggest muscle is your mouth. You better get to that Nautilus, they waiting for you. You on the list.”
    Perez grinned. It was just the same.
    March 13, 1975
    TAMPA
REDS VS. TWINS
    Gary Nolan did not understand what was rumbling around in his stomach. He had never felt the butterflies before. They fluttered and flapped in his stomach, gnawed at his esophagus, kicked at his small intestine. This was spring training. The game did not even count. He thought, So that’s how nerves feel. Gary Nolan was back pitching for the Cincinnati Reds. He was not quite twenty-seven years old.
    Gary noticed how Carol, his wife, was looking at him through the netting as she sat behind home plate. How many times had he seen that haunted look the last couple of years? She was scared for him. Well, hell, it figured. He was scared too. This was their last shot. There was no point in making it sound any prettier than that. Gary had not won a major league baseball game in more than two years. He had not even pitched in a real big league game since August 1973, back before Watergate blew up. Gary stood on the mound, threw the last of his warm-up pitches, and then reached around with his left hand and massaged his right shoulder; the shoulder did not hurt exactly, but it did not feel right either.
    All around the field, newspaper reporters watched him closely; their spiral reporter’s pads were out and pointed at him. He was the story of camp: the Amazing Comeback of Gary Nolan. He was what everyone was talking about. Sparky, too, was staring at him, piercing him with his eyes, and teammates in the field leaned forward toward him. Gary could not shake the feeling that on his first pitch of the game, the stitches holding his shoulder together would rip apart and his arm, quite literally, would detach and fly toward home plate.
    How did he get here? Gary remembered so vividly that warm summer evening in Oroville, an old gold rush town in California that—like most gold rush towns—had dwindled and deterioratedthrough the years. Gary was