Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (11 page)

Chapter 7

Cooperstown, 2012

T
HE LOOKS that Rose drew as he moved about Cooperstown on that 2012 induction weekend were not directed solely at him but also at his companion Kiana Kim. The keen, almost rubbernecking, interest stemmed partly from the implausible May-December romance and partly from the fact that for much of the time in Cooperstown Kim wore tight, skimpy jeans shorts, high heels and a strapless blouse. Even with a Reds cap on she did not quite blend in with the crowd. Kim is tall, fit and leggy and has modeled in all manner of poses and states of undress. Her explanation for why people sometimes stopped on the street and asked to take pictures with her is that folks in Cooperstown were not used to seeing “a girl from L.A.”

Kim’s enormous breasts were a popular topic of conversation throughout the weekend, and their uncertain fate was to form a plotline in the upcoming reality show on TLC. Some years ago Kim had a breast enlargement in hopes of aiding her modeling career. “I figured bigger is better,” she says. Now, older and wiser, she wanted to have her breasts scaled back down. “A tit reduction,” Pete called it off camera. He was solidly opposed.

One night in Cooperstown Pete, Kiana and her children Cassie and Ashton went for dinner with a couple of television producers who were exploring the possibility of doing a documentary on Rose for HBO, a project unrelated to the reality show. (During his Friday autograph session at Safe At Home, Rose was fitted with microphones under his shirt. “That’s HBO on this mike, TLC on this mike,” he said tugging at each shoulder. “I feel like I’m going to get electrocuted.”) Over dinner Pete and Kiana sounded out the group on some potential titles for the TLC show, playing directly on Kim’s ample chest and Pete’s tough past—including the five months he served in prison for filing false tax returns: “We could call it
The Jugs and the Thug
,” Kim offered with a laugh. “Or,
The Melons and the Felon
.” Pete said he kind of liked
The Playmate and the Cellmate
but that his top choice would be
Tits and Hits
. He understood that having the breast reduction would be entirely Kiana’s decision and sensing the inevitable—Kim would indeed have the procedure on the reality show, which aired in early 2013—he grumbled, “And what about me? I’m the one who tucks these babies in every night.” The grown-ups snickered but Kiana’s children looked away. Then young Cassie said suddenly, “You know Pete is the same age as my grandma.”

So, briefly (sigh):
Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs.
, is what the show was finally called. The six-part series centered around Pete and Kim’s relationship and a domestic life challenged by the fact that Rose spent as many as five days a week living and signing autographs in Las Vegas, and sometimes as little as a few days a month at Kim’s place in Valencia, Calif. They had met in 2007 at a Mercedes dealer at which Kim was buying a car. Pete, there to visit with the dealership owner, a pal, asked Kiana if she would like a signed baseball from him. “Why?” she asked. Kim didn’t know who Rose was—for a little while after they were introduced she thought he had played for the Redskins, not the Reds—but he wooed her by offering to set up her and a friend in a hotel room if they ever came to Vegas. Rose at that point had been married for more than 20 years to his second wife, Carol, but this in no way dampened the enthusiasm of his pursuit. Kim did indeed come to Las Vegas for a visit and Rose later made an appearance at a hair salon Kim owned in Valencia, creating some buzz. Not long after that he brought her with him onto the
Howard Stern Show
, an appearance that according to Kim’s website briefly made her “the #1 searched person on Google.”

Kim is quick and savvy in conversation and she saw
Hits & Mrs
., her business successes and her arrival as the acknowledged fiancée of the Hit King as “an inspiration to other Korean women that yes you can make it in America.” Her parents emigrated from South Korea to California to open a liquor store when she was five, and she has been inspired by their determination and their hard work. Her father’s a baseball fan (he “flipped, in a good way, when he found out about me and Pete,” Kim says) although his English remains only fair. During a getting-to-know-you lunch that aired on the reality show, Rose pulled out a mobile device and showed her parents—who were allegedly unaware of just how saucy their daughter can get on camera—a photo of Kim posing just about naked. A lot of visible backside and a come-hither look. Her mother’s eyes widened and she pointed at Kiana “That’s you?” Her father straightened his jacket and cut his eyes but didn’t say a word.

Not everyone close to Rose has been thrilled about the love that Pete and Kiana share. When, for an episode of
Hits & Mrs
., the couple put together an engagement dinner near Kim’s home, none of the children from Rose’s previous marriages—not Fawn or Pete Jr., his kids with Karolyn, nor Cara and Tyler, his kids with Carol—showed up. (Neither was anyone on hand from Rose’s life as a ballplayer. The event felt somewhat depressing on camera although Pete did not seem troubled. “I don’t think about who wasn’t there,” he said.)

“Whatever he wants to do, well that’s fine,” Pete Jr. had said a few weeks earlier about the Kiana relationship.

In a later episode of
Hits & Mrs.,
Fawn and Cara met Kiana and explained that they hadn’t been able to get to the engagement party because Cara had been working late. “If he’s not happy we’ll kill ya,” Fawn joked to Kiana about her father. Afterward Cara took Pete to a tattoo parlor where he got a rendering of the Reds mascot, Mr. Redlegs, on his left shoulder. Cara says she has 16 tattoos herself.

Rose performs some fatherly tasks for Kiana’s kids during the show, including chaperoning a coed pool party, warning Cassie to guard against libidinous high school boys and trying to get Ashton to stop playing kill-’em-all video games and take a little BP. (The kid really does not go much for baseball.)

Hits & Mrs.
—panned by critics and bumped from its time slot after four episodes—was not nearly so tawdry as the Kardashian shows or
The Real Housewives
series, nor did it have the stealth wholesomeness of its pioneering forefather
The Osbournes
. There were some excruciatingly crude passages in the show, including one in which Pete recaps a sequence of scatological misadventures in such awful detail (he goes so far as to call himself the Shit King) that it engendered a certain wonder: if that is what the show’s editors saw fit to include, one could only imagine what horrors were left on the cutting room floor.

Still if you had even a slight interest in Rose, the short-lived
Hits & Mrs.
proved fairly watchable. Pete was engaging, frank and never grim. And of course there was a rich subplot, the theme that has come to define Rose’s life: his ban from baseball and exclusion from the Hall of Fame. During the 2012 induction weekend, cameras followed Pete as he took Kiana and the kids to the steps of the Hall of Fame then said he’d wait outside and, with an odd expression apparently meant to approximate wistfulness, watched them walk in. Hokey as a two-dollar bill.

Rose can walk into the Hall of Fame any time he wants, of course, and he is far more knowledgeable than most people as to the content of the exhibits and the roster of inductees. He is often asked his views on potential or recently elected Hall of Famers and he almost always provides a well-reasoned response. Rose was highly supportive of Ron Santo, for example, long before Santo was inducted in 2012. “He has more home runs and a much higher on-base percentage than Brooks Robinson, and Brooks is in,” Rose would say, comparing the third-base peers. Rose understands that Hall of Fame voting can be fickle and inexact, and also that it is definitive and singular in its authority—that whatever flaws the process might have, election by vote is the only way for a player to get in.

THE PROCEDURE for election to the Hall of Fame has been clear from the start and the rules remain largely unchanged. The founders’ vision was that players chosen for induction “should reflect the feelings of baseball fans in general,” as James A. Vlasich writes in his 1990 book
A Legend for the Legendary
. Vlasich drew from the papers of Alexander Cleland, the man who in the ’30s conceived of the creation of a museum in Cooperstown to honor baseball’s history, and from the writings of Ford Frick, who as president of the National League was enthusiastically involved in shaping the Hall of Fame’s purpose. Cleland, Frick and others felt that “the ultimate decision for enshrinement should rest with the Baseball Writers,” Vlasich continues. Such a method, they felt, would “allow the average fan some voice in the selection process.”

The Baseball Writers’ Association of America selected the first class of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner in 1936 (three years before the building itself officially opened) and its members have selected every class since. To vote, a writer must have belonged to the BBWAA for 10 years or more. He or she may continue to vote indefinitely, even long after having actively covered the sport, which means that the number of voters has grown over time. For the class of ’36, for example, 226 ballots were submitted. These days about 570 ballots come in each year. Each ballot contains space for the names of 10 players, although most voters don’t put down that many. In 2013 the average ballot listed 6.6 names.

To merit a place on the ballot a player must have appeared in at least 10 major league seasons and be five years removed from the season in which he played his final game (the wait period was waived only once, and worthily, for Roberto Clemente in 1973 after his death in an airplane crash).
¹
A player can stay on the ballot for as many as 15 years, provided that he continues to be named by at least 5% of voters.

While some in the game suggest that the pool of voters might either be expanded or refined—it could include television and radio broadcasters, perhaps, or some among the growing breed of researchers who use advanced statistical metrics to dispassionately evaluate player performance—the voting process in fact works quite well. It’s very democratic. Because a candidate must be named on 75% of ballots to achieve induction and because the writers, over the whole anyway, know their stuff and because the sample size is large, the voting usually gets it right. Who is and is not enshrined still tends to reflect the feeling of the baseball fan in general.

That does not mean there hasn’t been a lot of water-cooler debate. Another reason Cleland and Frick chose this method of induction was their belief that, as Vlasich conveys, it would “start a national controversy over who should be chosen” and thus generate publicity. And each year the clamoring begins anew. Writers, analysts, talk-show hosts and fans avidly parse and parry to determine which players, based on statistics and sometimes other less measurable factors “should” or “should not” be enshrined in Cooperstown. It leads to a lot of huffing and puffing.
²

One common instigator of complaints by Hall of Fame purists has been the Veterans Committee, an auxiliary voting body charged with inducting umpires, managers and front-office executives, as well as long-retired players who for one reason or another were bypassed by the BBWAA. Since the mid-1940s when the committee
³
elected a raft of old-time players, some with less than immediately obvious credentials, the group has been called to task for “watering down” the cream-of-the-crop standards of the Hall.

In 1946 the Veterans Committee elected Cubs’ infielder Joe Tinker, a .262 career hitter with high error totals who achieved his fame by way of his surname’s sonic and rhythmic value to the enduring 1910 poem,
Baseball’s Sad Lexicon
—“These are the saddest of possible words/‘Tinker to Evers to Chance’ ”—by Franklin Pierce Adams. (“I mean, Tinker didn’t even
write
the poem,” Bill Francis, the Hall of Fame researcher, says with a smile.) Fifty-five years later, in 2001, the committee elected the Pirates’ fine-fielding second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who had a career
on-base percentage
of just .299 (that is stunningly weak; no other Hall of Famer’s is so low) and never received even 43% of the BBWAA vote during his time on the regular ballot. There were other controversial choices in between, notably in the 1970s when Frankie Frisch sat on the Veterans Committee and used his influence to push through a handful of his former Cardinals and Giants teammates including underwhelming pitcher Jesse Haines and first baseman George Kelly. Frisch’s cronyism led to the committee’s powers being reevaluated and since then it has been repeatedly modified and monitored by the Hall’s board of directors.

It may be ever so slightly diluted, perhaps, but the plaque gallery in Cooperstown remains extraordinarily exclusive, home to only about 1% of players who have appeared in the major leagues. (In a given season there are about eight future Hall of Famers sprinkled among all 30 big league teams.) A far higher percentage than that receives consideration of course and each ballot includes around 30 names for voters to choose from, often more. That explains why players such as shortstop Royce Clayton (.258 batting average, one All-Star Game in 17 seasons) and righthander Woody Williams (4.19 ERA, one All-Star Game in 15 seasons) appeared on the 2013 ballot. (Neither got a vote.) Such inclusiveness obviates the need for write-in votes which are rarely entered and which, since 1945, have not been officially counted. In fact over the last six decades of Hall of Fame voting no player is known to have ever gotten more than two or three write-in votes in any election. No player, that is, except Pete Rose.

ON THE eve of the induction ceremony each year, Saturday night in Cooperstown, N.Y., the former players ride as conquering heroes down a Main Street thick with onlookers on each side. They sit and wave from the beds of slow-rolling pickups, on each truck a single Hall of Famer dressed in a jacket and tie. Fans jostle gently along the sidewalk and shopkeepers come and stand in their doorways to watch. Ice cream gets sold from outdoor stands and small children perch on their fathers’ shoulders. The Parade of Legends, the Hall of Fame calls it, and the pickup trucks, as any of the event’s organizers can tell you, are provided by Ford.