Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (30 page)

Tom Powers of the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, also ticked by
Prison
, wrote, “I hope Pete Rose gets reinstated so he can finally be put on the Hall of Fame ballot. I am looking forward to having the pleasure of NOT voting for him. What a jerk.”

And Peter Gammons, a highly influential dean among baseball writers, wrote in an online column for ESPN that the book and Rose’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of its release “have made me rethink my initial decision to vote for him.” Gammons added, “Until Pete Rose proves to me that he cares about something other than Pete Rose, he does not have my vote.”

It is a galling position, strange and misguided: A voter’s preference turning on
this
? The real issue had been lost. Some baseball writers actually appeared willing to forgive, or at least to look past, Rose’s betting on baseball if only he were to come clean in a manner that suited them. But excuse Rose’s shameless me-first promotion? No. These voters had become interested in legislating a candidate’s behavior. The argument against Pete Rose’s being in the Hall of Fame, in other words, had devolved, now turning not upon his violation of a sacred baseball tenet, but rather on whether a voter
liked
the guy or not.

My Prison Without Bars
creates a strangely circular effect. Rose’s attempt to manipulate the reader is so crude and blatant that it can’t help but inspire a level of annoyance, maybe even contempt. But to absorb his efforts more fully, to understand Rose’s attempts, via the writer Hill, at humanizing himself, replaces some of that annoyance with a feeling of charity. Consider, for example, that Rose felt he needed to remind the public that he
did
in fact feel emotions. Or that in telling of LaVerne’s passing in 2000 he says: “A death in the family is always a shock—especially when it’s your mother.” It is not at all comfortable to watch someone trying so hard to portray himself as something he’s not.

What hits home by the end of the book, and what is reinforced by years of watching his public life, is the depth of Rose’s limitations, how ill-equipped he is to answer the demands for humility, contrition and self-awareness that society asks of him. It is indeed enough to make you feel, if not empathy, sympathy after all. There remains something heartbreaking about the way Rose revealed himself at the time of his public confession—a man trapped like many men by his own pathology, trapped by his own delusions and denials. Indeed, a prison without bars.

Chapter 21

The Importance of Being Earnest

I
N THE spring of 2012, a few weeks before the start of his 20th season in the majors, and about a month short of his 40th birthday, Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones announced that he would retire at season’s end. Although he went on to have a solid year, eventually knocking in 62 runs in 387 at bats and helping the Braves reach the playoffs, he did not waver in his decision. His career, a flat-out marvelous career in which he batted .303, hit 468 home runs, made eight All-Star Games, won an MVP and a batting championship and brought late-inning crowds to their feet time and time again, was ending.

Jones’s final weeks were marked by warm tributes, even on the road. The Marlins gave Jones a fishing rod before a game in mid-September. The Astros presented him with a Stetson hat. The Brewers gave him a gas grill and a year’s supply of sausage. Jones received a Stan Musial jersey from the Cardinals, a surfboard from the Padres and an actual third base from both the Yankees and the Reds. The Phillies and the Mets—who were particularly victimized by Jones’s heroics over the years—gave him pieces of artwork.

In Atlanta, where he had spent his entire major league career, the affection was naturally deeper and far more pronounced. During Chipper’s final homestand, groups of fans arrived in buses from outlying areas—including towns such as Bristol, W.Va., and Chattanooga—to see him play one last time. Georgia governor Nathan Deal declared Sept. 28, 2012 to be “Chipper Jones Day” throughout the state. For days on end, fans at the ballpark cheered him with standing ovations each time he came up, calling out in adoration and holding aloft banners reading things like:
CHIPPER, ONCE YOU
’
RE GONE WHO
’
S GOING TO BE MY HERO?
The last of these ovations came in Chipper’s final game, the National League’s do-or-die wild-card playoff game against the Cardinals in Atlanta.

The Braves trailed 6–3 with two outs and no one on base in the bottom of the ninth inning when Jones came up to face St. Louis closer Jason Motte. Even with the outlook bleak for their team, the fans rose and thundered once more for Jones. This now was the true farewell. Children held placards emblazoned with his number 10 and there were again homemade signs (
CHIPPER THANK YOU FOR ALWAYS BEING AN ATLANTA BRAVE
) and choruses of people calling his name. Before stepping into the batter’s box, Jones raised his helmet high in acknowledgment. Even some of the Cardinals on the field applauded into their gloves. Then Jones said out loud “Let’s go, baby!” and got into his stance.

On the sixth pitch from Motte, on a 2-and-2 count, Jones sent a soft line drive toward the middle of the diamond, breaking his bat on the hit. He came sharply out of the box as Cardinals second baseman Daniel Descalso moved to his right, backhanded the ball on a high hop and made a leaping throw to first base.

By this point Chipper Jones—40 years old and playing through some pain in his legs—had slowed to a halfhearted jog, giving in. This explains why he was well shy of first base when Descalso’s throw pulled Cardinals first baseman Allen Craig off the bag. Craig fell to the ground as he caught the ball, but he still had time, from his backside, to kick at the base before Jones reached it. Umpire Mike Winters ruled, however, that Craig’s foot didn’t hit the bag in time; Jones was called safe and awarded an infield single. An Associated Press account later described him as “hustling until the end,” but that’s inaccurate. The only reason the play at first base was close at all was because Jones did not go hard down the line. Had he been running full-out he would have been safe the moment Craig got pulled off the bag.

A ground-rule double followed Jones’s single, but the Braves’ rally ended there and St. Louis won the game. That Jones got a hit in his final at bat will go down as a bit of happy trivia attached to an exceptional career. But what may be more notable, and more telling of a larger base-ball truth, is that in the very last of his 11,031 plate appearances in the major leagues, before a devoted and paying crowd of 52,631, the majority of whom had risen to their feet to see him perform, and with his at bat potentially representing Atlanta’s last chance in an elimination playoff game, Chipper Jones, a certain Hall of Famer, did not find it incumbent upon himself, nor did he betray any inner desire, to run as hard as he could run to first base. Also notable is that no one observing the event seemed to find this striking or even unusual. None of the game’s television announcers said a thing about it.

VERY FEW major league players, even among respected gamers like Jones, run as hard as they can on every play. It’s just not done. “Guys do care and they play hard,” says Keith Hernandez, a big league first baseman from 1974 through ’90 who is now a color commentator for the Mets. “But 162 games is a long time. You play through injuries and you play through times when your legs are dead, and you have games when you just don’t feel so well. The reality is that sometimes over the course of the season you have got to save yourself for the long haul. That’s why it’s so rare to find a player, anyone, who truly hustles on every play.”

“Hustle” doesn’t simply mean running out close plays. (That’s called “playing baseball.”) Rather, it implies a player giving maximum effort even when the chance for reward is slim: Bolting hard out of the batter’s box and not slowing, even when you’ve hit a ball—a routine fly to centerfield, say—that 99 of 100 times will result in an out. “Because that way,” says the Reds MVP first baseman Joey Votto, “the one time that something strange does happen or the fielder messes up, you will get the most that you can get out of the play. It can be hard to do all the time, though.”

It’s also difficult to measure or quantify; hustling stories live primarily in anecdotes, not statistics, and that’s also true of
nonhustling
stories, which tend to take on an even longer life given the way they irk fans and managers. In May of 2000, the Mets released outfielder Rickey Henderson, who was nearing the end of his 25-year career as the greatest base stealer and leadoff hitter in baseball history. For the second time in less than a year, Rickey had failed to run hard after hitting a ball that he thought would be a home run but instead landed in the park, forcing him to settle for a single when he should have had a double or more. (The first time he had reached second when he should have been at third.) “It’s basically what everything is built on,” then Mets manager Bobby Valentine said, explaining why Rickey’s lack of hustle so troubled him. Rickey’s otherwise glorious, first-ballot Hall of Fame career was pocked throughout by such lapses on the bases and in the field.

The Phillies’ outstanding shortstop Jimmy Rollins and the Tigers’ great hitter Miguel Cabrera are among numerous stars who have riled their team’s faithful by not hustling, but this is a tendency that inflicts players of many talent levels and career-stages. A very small and randomly collected sample of incidents from the past few years include the Red Sox rookie Will Middlebrooks failing to run out a ball he hit that he thought was going foul but landed fair (he wound up with a single instead of a double); Yankees’ veteran Andruw Jones leisurely approaching a ground ball in leftfield and perhaps costing the team a base (the Twins’ batter reached second easily when he could have been thrown out) and a similarly nonchalant play by Rockies’ centerfielder Dexter Fowler that allowed a Mets runner to go from first to third in extra innings. These things happen all across baseball, and often.

“My frustration grows anytime I see anybody not hustle,” said Phillies manager Charlie Manuel after benching Rollins for having twice jogged to first base. “It grows [even] if I see the
other
team not hustle.” When, in 2009, Mets rookie Fernando Martinez did not run out a pop fly that was dropped in fair ground by the Nationals catcher (Martinez was thrown out at first base) manager Jerry Manuel chose not to take Martinez out of the game but rather, as punishment, sent him back out to play rightfield so that he could feel the displeasure of the fans—who indeed peppered him with loud and angry boos.

An implicit contract exists between the fans and the players. A base-ball game, like all sporting events, is naturally unpredictable. Whereas the Metropolitan Opera can pretty much guarantee that its diva will deliver a beautiful, buckle-bending aria, and the producers of a Broadway play can promise the same dialogue and plotline each night, a sports consumer receives far fewer assurances. A baseball team can’t guarantee it will win on a given night. It can’t promise that one of its players will hit a home run or make a great fielding play or pitch a great game. It can’t guarantee the rain will stay away. So what
can
a team and its players promise to the people who have bought tickets or paid their cable premium to watch them play? What does the fan have the right to expect? “Effort,” says Giants manager Bruce Bochy. “It has to be that. Players hustling should be the baseline minimum.”

ROSE’S APPROACH to the game elevated not only his career, of course, but also the careers of many players around him, Hall of Famers as well as legions of less accomplished players. Rose’s sprinting to first base after a walk was a piece of showmanship, a splash of needless panache. But there was nothing superfluous in the way he went after it when the ball was live. “If playing with Pete Rose did not inspire you to play the right way I don’t know what did,” says Doug Flynn, who was a parttime infielder for the Reds in the mid-1970s. “He ran out everything. I mean everything. Comebacker to the pitcher in the ninth inning of a lopsided game, Pete is busting it down the line.”

On the summer day in 2005 that third baseman Wade Boggs went into the Hall of Fame, one of his postinduction interviewers steered him toward the notion of hustle—what it meant, and whether it was an aspect of the game that mattered to him. Yes, said Boggs, it did.

“When you watch a major league baseball game and when you see a guy not run out a ball or loaf after a ball and not go first to third or second to home because he’s just trotting or something like that, it’s disturbing,” Boggs said. “I played the game one way. I gave it everything I had. It doesn’t take any ability to hustle. I learned how to play the game by watching Pete Rose. Watching him play all those games and watching him on TV and do the things he did, inspired me to play the game at that level.

“I felt that if I disrespected the game by not hustling and not giving everything I had to give, it was a circumstance of cheating the fans. You’re cheating the fans, you’re cheating your teammates, and you’re disrespecting the name on the front of your jersey.”

Hustle traces to deeply rooted values in American life, the values of effort and sacrifice from which the country’s narrative has so consciously sprung. It’s not lip service. It’s not irrelevant. It is part of how we see ourselves. The almost unimaginable perseverance required of pilgrims on the frigid shorelines of New England is echoed by that required of the pioneers who crossed into the feral regions of the West: a kind of primal hustle as a force propelling the American Dream. John Henry used two hammers when that was what it took. Baseball players are not settlers or steelworkers—survival is not at stake on the diamond—yet the game provides an open landscape onto which an ethos can be projected, represented, honored or not.

And so it is that a reverence for hustle constitutes a big portion of the affection that today’s Yankees fans feel toward the team’s aging captain, Derek Jeter; that Red Sox fans feel toward second baseman Dustin Pedroia and that fans in Washington, D.C., feel toward Bryce Harper, the balls-out Nationals outfielder. Harper was born in 1992— seven years after hit number 4,192, three years after the banishment— and he often talks about how he has modeled his approach to the game after Rose’s.

We remember Babe Ruth for his prodigious power and his performance, Willie Mays for the thrill of his movement, Cal Ripken Jr. for his steadiness. We think of Sandy Koufax for his dominance, Mickey Mantle for his raw athletic talent. But there is only one player among the game’s elite whom we remember primarily for his effort, for his unstinting commitment to playing the game the way that it seems meant to be played. Pete Rose, even with all those base hits and all those major league records (he holds 17 of them, and he can name them all), is known first for that devotion on the ball field, for day after day fulfilling his contract to the baseball-watching public, for adhering with an almost religious conviction to the core value upon which, as Bobby Valentine put it, “everything is built.”