Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (14 page)

Reds games were an event in those years—in ’75 the team won 64 and lost just 17 at home. That’s 64 and 17. Before, during and after games fans packed into Sleep Out Louie’s on West Second Street, the hottest singles bar in town. Huge. Brick walls, cement floor. Live music most nights. Cowboy hats. A bartender might serve 5,000 drinks a night in that place, and the jocks were always showing up, some of the Reds and hockey players from the new WHA team, the Stingers. You could get in through the side entrance if you had a special pass or else you waited out front in a long line. “We get a lot of secretaries and attractive women here and they draw the men,” the manager explained.

Because this was Pete Rose’s town most everyone at a place like Sleep Out Louie’s knew who Dave Rose was, too. He never minded stopping in for a few. One night a couple of those pro hockey players started baiting Dave, saying stuff about how he didn’t measure up to his big brother Pete. That was the wrong thing to do. “I was coming down Second Street,” says Jim Luebbert, the old West Side friend of the Roses, “and saw this big crowd standing in front of the place and cops coming up—a real commotion. I said to myself, ‘Shit, I hope Dave hasn’t gotten into anything.’ ” Turns out he had. Dave’s response to the baiting was to beat the living hell out of those guys. Both of them. No hockey players ever had any tough talk for Dave after that.

Pete went to Sleep Out Louie’s more as a day shift guy, to get a bowl of chili with someone from an ad agency, maybe. Then he started coming by for orange juice early, 10:45 a.m., in order to inspect the rounded bottom (it had been highly recommended to him) of a certain new waitress, Carol Woliung. It never seemed to bother him that he might have been home with Karolyn and the kids at 10:45 in the morning rather than in a beer-slick barroom setting his sights on a woman a little better than half his age. (Rose at least proved committed in his efforts, given that years later Carol would become the second Mrs. Rose.)

There was plenty of money in those years and Pete still loved to gamble of course: off days at the local track—horses, dogs, either way—big bets on the Derby.
²
And football, too. Pete may have been the only ballplayer who was actually pleased that Game 2 of the 1976 World Series got scheduled for Sunday night rather than as a day game. A little autumn cold he didn’t mind—“I’d play in the snow,” he said—and the nighttime start, he reasoned, gave him more time to monitor the NFL games being played during the afternoon.

Rose had led the Reds to two of the four championships in their history, or you might say two of the three, as one of the World Series wins had been a gift from the favored White Sox who lay down in the game-fixing scandal of 1919. With Pete and the Big Red Machine, Cincinnati was on top fair and square. After the ’74 season Rose had mentioned to a reporter in passing that with 2,337 base hits after 12 seasons he was ahead of Ty Cobb’s pace. But don’t get any ideas, he added with his grin. Anybody ever actually reaching Cobb’s total was “impossible.”

So even if there had been a little back and forth between Rose and the team about his salary over the years—Pete seeing his value rise and the Reds, with Bench and Morgan also to be paid, having limits on their spending—there did not seem much ominous about it. If there was one thing that a Cincinnati baseball fan knew in his heart, it was that Pete Rose would never leave.

Chapter 9

Raising Philadelphia

I
T DOESN’T much matter to the romance or even the authenticity of the place that Cooperstown was not where baseball was first played, or that General Abner Doubleday was not the first to play it. It might just as well be true. The baseball narrative, like so many others, of our country and of ourselves, is embroidered from countless yarns, myth and embellishment weaving seamlessly with fact. In 1939 in Cooperstown, as the Hall of Fame opened on the (supposed) 100th anniversary of when young Abner (allegedly) first noodled out the parameters of the game, 44-year-old Babe Ruth, fresh from a local barber’s shave, really did step into the batter’s box at Doubleday Field, where a cow pasture had once been. Two years later Bob Feller, 22 years old—and with a curveball he could bend ’round a maypole, they said—pitched from the mound on the very same diamond. Ted Williams swung here and Stan Musial and Willie Mays. And each year new Hall of Fame inductees come and tread on the infield and see the trees encroaching upon the grandstands and the narrow church spire rising up out past the leftfield line. So Cooperstown serves as a worthy mecca where grown men wear baseball uniforms in the street, even if the game was not, in fact, first played on these meadows, even though the rules were most assuredly not devised by a local little Abner who had grown up to be a West Point man.

Maybe—and sure, yes, why not?—Myles Standish put his knee-high boot on Plymouth Rock, and young George Washington threw a silver dollar from one bank of the Potomac to another, and old John Henry died with a hammer in his hands, and Davy Crockett wrestled a bear. Maybe—why not?—Ruth raised his right arm and pointed out to centerfield during a World Series game in Chicago, then hit a home run right to where he called it. And, sure, Cool Papa Bell was so fast he could flip the light switch by the bedroom door and be beneath the sheets before the room went dark. And, yes, Mickey Mantle once hit the ball 565 feet.

The stories stir and please us and speak to admirable virtues— perseverance, strength, daring, skill—and so we want them to be true, or true enough. When it comes to Pete Rose, a player about whom tales have been told, a player given to self-aggrandizement to be sure, a player who himself represented an ethic that a citizen might admire, one might expect the famous baseball stories of his life to be embroidered thick with myth as well. Except that in the case of this particular ballplayer in this documented time, the legends, the best and the worst of them, are true. You can ask the people who were there when they happened. You can look them up.

The Phillies had not won a championship in the 76 years of the World Series and now here it was October of 1980, not quite 20 months since Rose had pulled on a Philadelphia uniform for the first time, and the team was playing Game 6 against the Royals. The Phillies, ahead three games to two, had a 4–1 lead with one out in the top of the ninth inning, right on the verge of winning it all. But the bases were loaded for Kansas City, and Frank White, a pesky little hitter, was at the plate. Philadelphia closer Tug McGraw had walked one guy and given up two singles in the inning and stomachs were now as pretzels in the Veterans Stadium stands. Every Phillies fan knew well that seeming success could in a single moment unravel. Rose was 39 years old and playing first base.

The popup that White hit on the first pitch from McGraw shot high and foul toward the first base dugout. Phillies catcher Bob Boone, already a two-time Gold Glove winner and on his way to five more, ran toward the ball’s landing spot, as did Rose. Boone arrived first. The crowd was very loud and the ball was descending from a great height. Boone had his glove turned slightly the wrong way and he reached a bit when he went for the ball, fearing, he later said, that he might collide with Rose. And though the baseball landed smack in the pocket of Boone’s glove, it popped out, that crucial out surely and portentously lost if not for the fact that Rose was right there glued to the play. When the ball came free Rose lunged and gloved it in midair—out!—then turned and charged toward the diamond, to keep the runners where they were. Then Rose spiked the ball into the turf, gleeful, caught it on the hop, tossed it underhand to McGraw, flashed the two-out sign, clapped his hand and glove together, and ran over to pick up his fallen cap.

“After that play,” says Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson, “we knew we had it.” McGraw struck out the next batter, Willie Wilson, and Philadelphia won its first World Series.

“Who does that?” Phillies third basemen Mike Schmidt would say of Rose’s catch, three decades later. “I mean who does that? You can say that that is where a first baseman is supposed to be on that play, that’s what he’s supposed to do, that you’re supposed to keep alert to the baseball and not turn away. But that ball was caught, in the catcher’s glove, and then it wasn’t. Really who does that? I played 20 years of professional baseball. I played with a lot of first baseman, and some very good first basemen and Pete is the only one of them who makes that play.”

HE HAD come to the Phillies after starring in a free-agent circus unlike any ever seen. Rose was leaving the Reds. Tony Perez had been traded in ’76 and after back-to-back second-place finishes behind the rival Dodgers the Reds general manager Dick Wagner had also let Sparky Anderson go. The Big Red Machine was being dismantled and there was, naturally, an enormous amount of public hand-wringing over Rose’s fate.
¹
But the way Wagner figured it, Reds attendance would hold steady even without Rose so long as the Reds fielded a winner. The way Pete figured it, he could make some serious cake out there in the open market. Before becoming a free agent Rose had said that Cincinnati only had to offer him $450,000 a year for four years for him to stay, but that was before he got a whiff of what was really in the offing and by the time the Reds offered $475,000 it was too late. Rose was in line to make much, much more than that and also to show that his brand of baseball traveled beyond his home city, that he could be a winner somewhere else.

Rose may have been at an age when many players go year-to-year (if they’re still going at all), but instead he seemed to be comfortably atop his crest. As his free agency began, he was coming off a 1978 season in which he’d led the league in plate appearances for the third straight year, smacked a league-best 51 doubles, hit above .300 for the 13th time in 14 seasons and reeled off a nation-stirring hit streak of 44 consecutive games. The streak was an improbable feat for any player—no one had even gotten to 38 straight since Joe DiMaggio’s 56 in 1941—but almost unfathomable for a 37-year-old. He bolted around the base paths all streak long and grinned to the cameras and quipped pricelessly and got himself a hit every single day, embracing the feat and embracing the game just as the game and the crowds embraced him.
²
Rose was showing the first strands of gray at his temples but each day he played like the youngest and most driven player on either team. Still, now, same as he ever was. He often reminded people that his father kept on playing semipro football past the age of 42.
³

“I know my face looks old,” he said, tossing the line out to potential suitors as the bidding began. “But if you’d slid headfirst for 16 years you’d be ugly too.”

Ted Turner, the Braves owner, offered to sign Pete for a million dollars a year for “three years, four years, five years, whatever you want.” Turner had seen 45,000 fans come out to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium the night that Rose ran his hitting streak to 44; and he had heard the crowd chanting “Pete, Pete, Pete,” the next night when the streak was stopped; and he had seen Rose go 4 for 5 with a home run in the same stadium on the night after that. Turner was ready to guarantee a scout’s job for Pete’s brother Dave as well.

In Kansas City, Royals owner Ewing Kauffman offered Rose (as lagniappe to a fat multiyear contract) a stake in a pharmaceutical company. The Cardinals’ presentation included the rights to a beer distributorship. Pirates owner John Galbreath was a thoroughbred guy (he’d had two horses win the Derby) and as part of a Pittsburgh package he said he would throw in a couple of broodmares—and schedule some stud sessions with his top stallions—so that Rose could get into the racing game. (“Very interesting,” said Rose of Galbreath’s suggestion. “I thought you had to be King Farouk or somebody to get into the breeding part of it.”) The Mets made a respectable offer too.

Rose flew with his agent on a Lear jet going from city to city, and everywhere the TV stations and the news stories followed each visit and every twist along what was fast becoming a grand and beguiling tour.

Bill Giles, the Phillies’ executive vice president then, saw all of this and judged the stakes. He knew that he wanted to get Rose to Philadelphia more than he wanted anything else in baseball. “When we played them in the 1976 playoffs, Rose just intimidated us from the start,” says Giles. “There was a sense that the guy on the other team wanted it more than we did and I didn’t like that. When you see a guy hit a clean single and turn it into a double that can be intimidating to a team. It had that effect on us.”

Rose batted .429 in the Reds’ three-game playoff sweep of Philadelphia in ’76 but he had gotten into the Phillies craw even earlier, during a late-August series at Riverfront. In one game Rose did indeed single to center and, noticing centerfielder Garry Maddox taking too wide an angle on the ball, continued hard into second base, safe on a headfirst slide. Two nights later, with the Reds trailing 4–3 in the ninth, Rose lit out on a passed ball and scored the tying run—from second base. Four innings later he beat out the back end of a double play to help secure the extrainning win. “I felt if we could get Rose it would change everything on this club,” said Giles. “I believed in him in a way I have not believed in any other player. Some of that, I know, came from my dad.”

When Warren Giles, Bill’s father, was National League president through the 1950s and ’60s, he’d lived in Cincinnati (he’d been G.M. of the Reds before taking over at the league) and he came out often to see the home team. Warren knew about the gambling stories, the talk about Rose and the bookmakers, but it did not diminish his appreciation for the way that Rose went about things on the ballfield. He impressed this point on Bill. Once near the late stages of Warren’s life—he would die of cancer in February of 1979, three months after Bill made Rose a Phillie— Bill asked his father, for posterity really, who was the greatest player he had ever seen. “I expected him to say Willie Mays or Stan Musial or Joe DiMaggio,” says Bill. “But he just looked at me, he was kind of weaker then, and said, ‘Pete Rose—for his determination.’ ”

Still, when Pete came into Philadelphia at the height of the free-agent chase, Giles could not get Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter to move above $600,000 a year. Against the other offers out there that was not going to do it. Rose’s visit to Philadelphia was done. He was going home. “They asked us to pay for the chartered jet back but we thought that was too much,” says Giles. “So I drove him and his agent, Reuven Katz, to the airport. I was wooing him like you would woo a woman. I gave him flowers for his wife and Phillie Phanatic dolls for his kids. I took out the National League record book and reminded Pete how close he was to all these league records, as a way to try to knock Kansas City out of there. I said, ‘And in Kansas City they might use you at DH.’ I knew he would never have wanted that. Then I asked Reuven Katz if I could have just a little more time, and that night I had the idea.”

Giles went to executives at the TV station that aired the Phillies games, WPHL, and asked them to help with the contract. This was an entirely novel suggestion; Giles was asking for an extra $200,000 a year to be added to the rights fee. The station manager asked around of the clients and found that sure enough WPHL would be able to charge advertisers more—a lot more—with Rose in the fold. This was partly because of the understanding that a Philadelphia team with Rose on it would attract more viewers than a team without him. But it was also about companies wanting to be part of something, that is, part of bringing Rose to Philadelphia. “Some things transcend numbers,” WPHL’s general manager, Gene McCurdy, explained. “And the value of Pete Rose to certain local advertisers is something more significant than numbers.”

So the station pledged the extra money and the Phillies offered a contract that would come to more than $3.2 million over four years. It still was not Ted Turner’s offer but Rose thought about it some: He had a ballpark friendship with some of the guys on the team—Schmidt, Larry Bowa, Maddox, Luzinski—and he liked the team colors, red and white. The Phillies, a one-round-and-out playoff team three years running, had a chance to win it all, Rose thought, if someone could show their stars how to loosen up and play harder at the same time. When he signed that contract with the Phillies, Rose became the highest paid athlete in team sports.

PHILLIES TICKET sales spiked after the Rose signing in early December, close to $2.5 million in added revenue by mid-January and still more after that. Rose had practically paid for his entire four-year contract before he swung a bat in spring training. Financially this may have been the best player acquisition the Phillies have ever made. Rose showed up to his first workout in Florida having flown in on the redeye from Las Vegas—he’d been booked for a speaking engagement there (his fee was up to $7,000) and Vegas was never a place he minded visiting. Hundreds of fans turned out to greet him in Clearwater, hollering and calling his name as he burst onto the field. Manager Danny Ozark was left a little slack-jawed, “Where’d they all come from?” he asked. The fans followed Rose all spring, watched him taking all that batting practice, saw him out early pushing gamely and finally smoothly through his first base drills (yes, the old dog was learning yet another new position, his fifth). They strung banners on the chain link fences around the spring training fields. When the Phillies drove over to play in another Florida town, a caravan followed. By this point, as more than one observer put it then, Rose had become, “an American folk hero.”