Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (16 page)

“I’m telling you,” Christenson continues, “playing with Pete could make you feel like a little kid. It could put that wonder into you. He was slower than he had been and he wasn’t especially fit. I don’t think he could have done a push-up. But he played baseball really well—hit and caught the ball, knew every situation. He made believers out of us. We had better talent in ’76 and ’77 but we were never a better team than when Pete was there. He was deeply part of us but even at that time he was also his own entity, and you never knew what you would see him do.”

They saw Pete, in a game against the Reds in 1980, draw a walk and steal second base. Then he stole third base. Then he stole home. He was one month past his 39th birthday. They saw that by then he had become—through practice and smarts—a far-above-average fielder at first base, limited in range but aggressive, intuitive and not given to mistakes. He not only had the best fielding percentage among National League first baseman in 1980, he had more assists than anyone else at the position as well. The fifth position of his career became the fifth at which he was named an All-Star.

They saw Rose lead the league with 42 doubles that year; and though his average was down (.282), after the season he ignited the Phillies against the Astros in the National League Championship Series, reaching base 15 of the 25 times he came to the plate. They saw his fierceness in the deciding Game 5, the way he narrowed his eyes, livid, at Christenson after the righthander came back to the dugout after giving up three runs in the seventh, and how he kept exhorting the team with extravagant and unforced confidence—shades of Game 7 against the Red Sox in 1975—to stay in the game and to win it. So what if they were down 5–2 on the road against Nolan Ryan in the eighth inning; Pete worked Ryan for a sevenpitch walk in the middle of the rally that put the Phillies back in front. Nine days later, against the Royals, Philadelphia won that World Series. “I’m going to be the first unanimously elected Hall of Famer,” Pete used to say in the Phillies locker room. Still, if you wanted him to sign a bat for a buddy of yours, all you had to do was ask.

His teammates did not see him on the trainer’s table often (if at all) but they saw him with bruises and scrapes and the limp in his gait that came from playing the way he played at his age—and they knew that he
had
been on the trainer’s table, before they’d arrived. They saw him in 1981, 40 years old now, lead the league in hits and bat .325 as the Phillies went to the playoffs again. That was the year of the two-month players strike and during that down time Rose kept sharp at a local batting cage. The machine threw a pitch every 10 seconds. Rose’s uninterrupted sessions typically went an hour and 15 minutes, sometimes an hour and a half.

In the first Phillies game after the strike, Rose’s teammates saw him do this: Slap a fastball from Cardinals reliever Mark Littell into leftfield for the 3,631st hit of his career, a National League record. Rose had come back to Philadelphia that same morning after traveling the 430 miles from the All-Star Game in Cleveland through the night in his Rolls-Royce. There were 60,000 flashbulb-popping fans at Veterans Stadium to see the record-breaking—the people embittered by the strike but there to see Rose nonetheless—and Stan Musial, the guy who had 3,630 National League hits, was among them. He came out onto the field after Rose’s single and congratulated him with a handshake at first base—Musial, who had played his first big league game in 1941, the year Rose was born, and who got his last hit on Sept. 29, 1963, a ground ball past the rookie Rose himself at second base. (Musial had signed a baseball for young Rose before that game in ’63.) With Musial now passed, Rose had only Hank Aaron and Ty Cobb on the hits list in front of him.

In the teeming postgame interview room the telephone kept ringing. It was a red phone, like a hot line, and it sat on a table next to where Rose was jabbering away into a bouquet of microphones. The word was that President Ronald Reagan wanted to extend congratulations to Rose but each time Pete picked up the receiver the operator couldn’t get the call through. “Hang up and we’ll try again,” the operator said. After the second time Pete said to all the media (there must have been 250 people in the room): “Good thing there ain’t a missile on the way.”

Then, on the fourth try, a connection.

“Hello,” said the President of the United States.

“Hello,” said Rose.

“Pete Rose?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is Ronald Reagan.”

“How ya doin?’ ”

Later he said to the President, referring back to the failed calls, “We were going to give you five more minutes and that was it.”

The Phillies saw Pete do a commercial for Grecian Formula, a cream to get the gray out of your hair, and they saw him slip to .271 (a soft .271) as the Phillies finished in second place in 1982—though even in that year Rose played in 162 games, was named captain of the All-Star team, ran off a 21-game hitting streak and did enough that the Phillies brought him back for one more season, at $1.2 million guaranteed. That money was in part to ensure that Rose did not go play in Japan, where he was coveted and beloved and where with his all-out All-American style he had created a true sensation during the Reds four-week visit there following the 1978 season. “The name Pete Rose is right up there with Sadaharu Oh in Japan,” said a major league spokesman.

Having struck equipment deals, Pete had begun using Japanese-made gloves and bats—including his custom Mizuno PR3631 as he bore down on Musial. That led to squawking and indignation: Pete Rose should stick to U.S.–made baseball gear! Would Huck Finn ride a Japanese raft? Here was another thing for fans to hurl at him. Rose pointed out that limiting his product choices or endorsement opportunities would not, in fact, be the American way. The people who were complaining, he said, “probably drove to the ballpark in their Toyotas.” Besides, Rose said of the Japanese bats and gloves, “People should be happy I use them because I pay taxes on them. Does that sound un-American to you?” It was a mystifying thing to say, inexplicable, and all the more because one of his favorite things about the idea of playing in Japan (and one of the things he liked about visiting over there) was the prospect of receiving a haul of cash that could go undeclared.

The Phillies teammates saw him slump to .245 in 1983 and finally get benched, manager Pat Corrales getting up the gumption to end Rose’s consecutive games streak after more than four and a half seasons. Philadelphia had also brought on Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, leading to the dubbing of the ’83 team as the Wheeze Kids, a play on the Phillies’ Whiz Kids team of 1950. Though the Phils reached the postseason and the World Series in ’83 and though Rose batted .344 over the nine postseason games, it was clear that with his slowed speed and diminished punch at the plate, he was a husk of what he had been. He was hanging on too long in the game, it seemed, and the Phillies would not be having him back. Rose went into the off-season looking for a new team and a new contract. Though people now said the faded Rose could never get there, Cobb’s record stood just 200 hits away, too close to quit. Rose stopped eating meat that off-season and began the first serious workout regimen of his career.

If you browsed back through the records and statistics of Rose’s time in Philadelphia, examining a Phillies team that went to three postseasons and two World Series in five years, you would say that Pete was hardly the crucial cog. Mike Schmidt was the driving offensive force—an exceptionally powerful run producer—and Boone, Bowa and the sterling Maddox took away more runs on defense than Rose did. Even before his fall-off in 1983 Rose was by some measures, and especially by the advanced and nuanced metrics of later days, not as valuable to the offense as even players such as Bake McBride or Gary Matthews. Yet it is Rose whom those Phillies point back to, Rose who goaded the Phillies and carried them and set every example and made nearly all of them wish that they too could play baseball just a little bit more the way he did.

No one has professed a greater debt to Rose than Schmidt, who was raised in Dayton, watching the Reds and idolizing Rose. Schmidt was 13 when Pete played his first big league game. Over Schmidt’s first six seasons in the majors he only once finished even among the top five for the National League MVP award and never hit 40 home runs in a season. Playing with Rose he won the MVP in 1980 and again in ’81. He hit 40 or more home runs three times in five years. He walked more often. He drove in more runs. He kept winning Gold Gloves. He became, almost indisputably, the best player in baseball, just as Rose was telling everyone.

When Schmidt went into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1995 he praised Rose during his induction speech. He credits him as being both a beacon and a support beam in his career. Over the years of Rose’s banishment, Schmidt has gone in person to commissioner Bud Selig to appeal for Rose’s reinstatement. Pete Rose has disappointed any number of people in his life, but Mike Schmidt is not one of them. Schmidt spoke with me about Rose on two occasions and then, after we talked briefly at an event in Cincinnati, he sent an e-mail. Here, verbatim, is what Schmidt wrote:

Chapter 10

Cincinnati, Forever

T
HE TV commercial struck just the nerve a Presidential candidate would want to strike. First there was a boat moving across a river, a city skyline twinkling in the background and a waterbird flying across a predawn sky. “It’s morning again in America,” a man’s voice said. “Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history.” The narrative continued in this way, the voice measured and soothing, and beneath the words came images: a farmer steering a tractor, a kid throwing a newspaper on his paper route, a man in a suit joining his office carpool. This was in the summer of 1984 and the ad was put out by the campaign to reelect President Ronald Reagan. The narrator spoke about the economy’s newfound health—inflation and interest rates were down, employment was up—as clips ran of a family moving into a new home and of a young couple getting married.

“It’s morning again in America,” the voice said once more and a man standing in his front yard hoisted a United States flag to the top of a flagpole as children watched.

The ad was brilliant, appealing to the value of good, hard work, and the idea that such work would pay off in the end. When election day arrived Reagan—not just on the strength of this commercial, of course, but riding exactly the spirit that both the ad and the man himself sought to project—won reelection with 525 electoral college votes, more than any candidate has ever received. He took 49 states. The truth of it on the ground was that a lot of folks in the U.S., including the kind of folks who had the inclination to go to ball games in Cincinnati, were feeling pretty good about themselves.

PETE WAS back! He had shucked a brief baseball exile to Montreal and been repatriated by the Reds as both player and manager—in short as the man asked to reinvigorate the franchise that had sagged and stumbled while he was gone. It was August of 1984 and who knew what Rose, 43 years and four months old, had left as a ballplayer? For three months after his ’83 season with Philadelphia he had been a free agent out of work and lightly courted. The specter of Cobb before him, Rose said he would play any position for anyone, but the interest around baseball (the Mariners considered him, as did the Angels) proved modest. When the Expos finally signed Rose, for half of what he’d earned the year before, they tabbed him for leftfield. In welcoming him, Montreal’s players spoke less of Rose’s skills and more about what he might do as an intelligent leader and motivator on a young team, the ethic he could provide. He was the oldest player in baseball and fan polls split on whether the Expos had been wise or foolish to sign him.
National Lampoon
magazine ran a cover illustration of Rose, gut bulging through his uniform, leaning on a walker to get down the first base line. “Pete Rose Hustles After Ty Cobb’s Record,” read the caption.

Not that Rose was daunted in the slightest, not that he—and this is unquestionable—gave a hairy crap what anyone else thought. His confidence in public and in the privacy of his batting cage at home had not dimmed. He could make up for the steps he had lost, he figured, with his smarts. “I’m going to win Comeback Player of the Year,” he said.

In the Expos’ 1984 home opener, standing in against the Phillies and Jerry Koosman, who as a Met had thrown too close to Pete back in ’73, Rose lined a double into the rightfield corner for the 4,000th hit of his career. When the ovation had died down and the game resumed, he scored on a pop fly single, a pure heads-up play made possible when Phillies centerfielder Von Hayes gathered the ball nonchalantly, assuming that Rose would stop at third.

He hit pretty well for a while, up around .320 and scoring some runs into the middle of May, but he injured his elbow and his heel, and it became clear that leftfield was not for him anymore. The Expos, contenders, needed a player with power at first base, which meant there was no room for Rose in the lineup even after he healed. In the clubhouse Rose got into a scuffle with a Montreal radio host who had chided him on air. (After 21 seasons such a confrontation was a first for Pete.) Another time he and catcher Gary Carter traded barbs over Rose’s playing time—Rose saw Carter acting selfishly, Carter saw Rose the same way. By the time August came around, Rose’s average was down into the .260s, he was serving only as an occasional pinch hitter and there was no way he was going to catch Cobb, still 130 hits away, if he stayed in Montreal.
¹

It was Pete himself who got on the phone late that summer with Reds president Bob Howsam—the same Bob Howsam of the Big Red Machine—and they spoke for nearly two hours. Dick Wagner had been let go as G.M., a good riddance as far as most Cincinnati fans were concerned, and Howsam wanted Rose to come home, to replace Vern Rapp as manager. The Reds had finished in last place two years running. Rose said he would do it—but only if he could return as a player too. He swore he could still hack it, swore they couldn’t blow the fastball by him, said he wouldn’t need to play every day. Pete could be convincing and Howsam knew what a game-changer it might be if he delivered Rose home to lead the team. Besides, with a record of 50–70, and attendance dropping year after disappointing year, what did the Reds have to lose? In the trade that brought Rose home from the Expos, Cincinnati gave up only Tom Lawless, a utility infielder.

“He’s as good a candidate to be a manager as any player ever was,” said Phillies reliever Tug McGraw after Rose took the job. In interviews, Rose talked about the managers who had influenced him—Sparky Anderson, Fred Hutchinson, Dave Bristol. Sparky, managing the Tigers, called from Detroit to wish Pete luck and give a few words of advice, fatherly in a way. Back when Harry Rose died in 1970, Sparky had been managing the Reds for about a year. He’d always felt a certain vested interest in the kid.

Rose heard the noise around him and the debates. Could a great player ever be a good manager? Could anyone be a player-manager in this day and age? Would he have the clarity to pinch-hit for himself when the situation arose? Rose declared that he had just two commandments, his golden rules of baseball and of his own life: Be on time and play hard. He wanted to instill enthusiasm in the Reds, he said, get the players excited to come to the park every day. The way Rapp had run things, stern and stuffy, was not for Pete. Before managing his first game, he had the TV put back into the clubhouse lounge. And sure, he said, it was fine for players to drink a beer or two on a team flight. He did not much care what his players did, Rose added, so long as they played the game right.

“He’s not like the rest of us,” said Sparky. “Nobody will ever know him completely. Can’t know him.” Anderson had been asked about Rose’s prospects as a manager. “He thinks about baseball day and night,” Anderson went on. “He can’t sit five minutes in a chair and talk to you about anything else. He’ll get up. Baseball is all he thinks about. He’ll never leave the game. He’d die first.”

HE LIVED up in Indian Hill then with Carol, who had in her belly a little Rose. They had been married in a small and private service, April of 1984, when Pete was an Expo and the team was in Cincinnati for three games against the Reds. They held the ceremony in an attorney’s office at 8 a.m. and a few hours later, Rose went out and played in the 12:30 business-man’s special at Riverfront. The honeymoon was basically Carol flying back to Montreal with Pete and the team, but even still it was just as well they got married when they did. Tyler Rose—that is, a baby Ty, named after you-know-who—was born on Oct. 1, not six months after the vows.

Indian Hill. This was not the West Side of Cincinnati; this was 21 miles northeast of Braddock Street, the other side of the Queen City’s great divide, and a world away. Pete bought a house with five fine acres, much of it fanning out flat and into woodlands out back, and set up a state-of-theart stable to keep a couple of horses. The house looked like a ski chalet, dark wood and skylights in the roof. Tall evergreens and stocky Japanese maples shaded the circular driveway out front and an awning extended over the front door. Pete would take out the black Porsche, or occasionally the white Rolls, and drive through the neighborhood on his way to the ballpark, passing the huge, sprawling lawns, the horse fences and the pastures. Fawn was at Franklin College in Indiana then and sometimes she’d come over and saddle up, canter on the trails back of the house.

The streets in Indian Hill had names that sounded rich and special— Redbird Hollow, Camargo Pines, Sugarun Lane—and the men and women around there had voices full of money, which to Pete’s ears provided an inexhaustible charm, a cymbals’ song. Not that he was out to mingle with that gilded class; they weren’t roguish enough, and he was not a canapés and cocktails type of guy. But still, Pete could chitchat at the stoplight with anyone—talk Simonizing, maybe—and the setting around him was sweet. You’d pass a Mercedes in one driveway, a Jaguar in the next. Men wore their golf clothes on Saturday mornings. To Pete the only real paradox of where he now lived lay in his address, top of the hill on Given Road.
As if
, he would say laughing with that self-assured swagger, as if he hadn’t busted his red-blooded ass to earn his way up here.
Given
was never part of the deal, he’d tell you. The kitchen in the house had an island at the center of it and the living-room couches were deep and plush, and Rose put in a satellite dish so he could keep an eye on the out-of-town-games.

When Dave came up from Florida to live in Blue Ash, another suburb north of Cincinnati, and work at the Gold Star Chili, he would do odd jobs for Pete around the house on Given Road. He would stop by when Pete was on the road and groom the horses, lead them out for a bit, make sure they were well watered. He’d check on the cars in the garage, go over to the house and see that it was O.K. It was worth being careful. Pete tended to have a lot of cash around, banded together in stacks sometimes or in brown paper bags.

Pete had arrived at Riverfront Stadium two days after leaving the Expos, and put himself right into the lineup, an Aug. 17 Friday night game against the Cubs and the first time Pete had pulled on a Reds uniform in nearly six years. He was batting second, back of Gary Redus, ahead of Dave Parker. The manager’s office was full of hastily mailed good wishes, gift trinkets and bouquets everywhere. Florists in Cincinnati had come up with the “Rose’s Dozen”—14 in every bunch—and Pete had a lot of friends who were buying. When he saw all the flowers, Rose cracked that maybe the manager’s office was actually the site of his own funeral.

President Reagan called to congratulate Rose on getting the player-manager’s job, and also, by the way, to see whether Pete might want to come to his campaign stop that week at Cincinnati’s Fountain Square—Johnny Bench would be there and an old Bengal, Bob Trumpy. But Rose declined. He didn’t think sports and politics should mix like that, he said. “Anytime you wanna call, though,” Pete told the President, “I’d be happy to talk to ya.”

Some of the players, not to mention coach Don Zimmer over in the Cubs dugout, wore T-shirts that read
PETE’S BACK
as did many among the Riverfront crowd of 35,038, about double the Reds’ norm. The game had to be delayed 10 minutes for the crush of walk-up sales, and once it started, Rose was getting ovations whatever he did, just for catching the ball at first base during the Cubs at bat. Then in the bottom of the first inning, after Redus singled to lead things off, Rose came to bat amid the roar at Riverfront. He took a strike, bluffing as if to bunt, to let Redus steal second base. He let a ball go by. And then on a 1–1 pitch from righthander Dick Ruthven, Rose lined a clean single into centerfield. When Bob Dernier had trouble with the baseball out there, letting it get away, the old man never slowed, rounding second, bullying ahead at his relevant pace toward third and then—would he? Yes!—launching himself airborne into a headfirst slide. Down in a spray of dirt. Safe!

The crowd shook and shook and shook, everyone feeling the years fall away, and in the press box there was an odd silence, reporters shaking their heads, even the cynics among them. Many of the team employees wore rosebuds in their lapels and wherever you looked around the stadium you could see some kind of banner hung out to welcome Pete Rose home. Catcher Brad Gulden was in his first season with the Reds and Davey Concepcíon was in his 15th and both of them later allowed that standing in the dugout in that first inning, seeing the way Rose went into third like that, they had in spite of themselves felt tears come to their eyes, and that looking around they knew they were not alone. It was morning again in Cincinnati.

Over the weeks that followed Rose would, at least temporarily, change the dialogue about himself. He batted a hard .365 in 26 games for the Reds and he seemed to be on base every time you looked up. The long listless team awoke to win 15 of its final 27 games, and 12 of the last 16 in which Rose played. There was no debate about whether Rose was finished. There was instead hope that he could make the team a contender again after so many lean years and there was the certain knowledge that with 94 hits to go to reach Ty Cobb—
just 94
—Rose would be back to play a 23rd major league season, for the Reds, in 1985.

THE MADNESS—that is, the marketing, the leveraging, the baseball hoopla that only a Rose could love—began immediately. Before the 1985 season, Mizuno sponsored a press conference at which Rose stood before a calendar and made guesses as to the date on which he would get the Ty-breaking hit (late August, he predicted). Rose met with the king of memorabilia dealers, Barry Halper, to see what he might wring out of the chase and, as a 44th birthday gift, Halper gave Pete an 80-pound bronze bust of Cobb. Pete kept it around the clubhouse and had it on the road (the bust became a talisman for an early season winning streak) and sometimes the guys would put a Reds cap on Cobb and dress him in Rose’s uniform, number 14.

The selling of Rose in this frenzied time was too much for Reuven Katz to handle on his own so he hired a firm—Taft Merchandising, with offices in Cincinnati and New York—to figure out the best ways to capitalize. Soon Rose’s face was on an array of T-shirts and mugs, matchbooks, key chains, posters, buttons, pennants. Official items and knockoffs. You could buy an autographed photo collage, sold through
The Sporting News
for $175. You could purchase Rose-engraved medallions of gold, silver or bronze. You could pay months ahead of time for a commemorative 4,192 coin. The price for Rose’s jersey went up at the Reds’ team store, and on the highways approaching the stadium, there he loomed, billboard beautiful, so much larger than life. “I’d like to have a statue of myself in front of the park,” said Rose, talking about the period after he retired. “I always get the chills when I see the Stan Musial statue outside Busch Stadium.”