Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (4 page)

Each summer, in the slapdash tangle of trees and thickly coiled brush around in back of Braddock and in the cornstalks there, Pete and Dave and the other boys would make their own little ballfields, cutting through the stalks or getting someone to drive a car over the growth, flatten it out. They played Wiffle ball and argued over fair and foul and found wooded places to hide together and plot whatever needed plotting after dark. If these boys were not exactly pricking their fingers and swearing blood oaths to Tom Sawyer’s gang of robbers, still they were making their own way on their own river banks. It was later on, during Pete’s first years in the big leagues, that a Reds p.r. man took a good look at him and started calling him “Huck Finn’s long lost brother.”

Even though he didn’t get drafted out of Western Hills (still just too small, not enough glove, not enough power), and even if for a while it looked as though his days on the Bentley Post Legion team, playing with guys like Brinkman and Flender, might be the last and the best of it (and that he would not follow Don Zimmer, 11 years before him, out of the West Side and into major leagues), Pete did then get his break with a minor league contract from the Reds, procured for him by uncle Buddy who had been doing some scouting for the team. Pete took the contract and went to Class D Geneva that first summer and when he came back after hitting .277 he had grown to near 6-foot and added 25 pounds. Then he was sent for a season a level up to Tampa, and there he busted his way into 30 triples, most in the Florida State League. “And this was a guy who was maybe 10th fastest on the team,” says Dan Neville, a pitcher on that Tampa club. “If that. He made those triples happen. Some of them didn’t even look like sure doubles off the bat, but Pete went after it. He’d be turning at first base by the time you looked up. I have never seen anything more amazing in baseball than the way he hustled that year.”

Pete came home in the off-seasons and lived at the house on Braddock Street and worked some odd jobs, at the ferry or packing up boxcars for the UPS or any other work he could find. And then, on account of all those triples and that .331 batting average at Tampa and after a season at Macon in the Sally League during which he hit .330 and showed plenty more of that drive, Pete got called up to the big leagues.

He still lived in his boyhood room that rookie season of 1963 and Dave, now 15 years old, still slept in that same room with him too. Pete owned a car then, and a better one than the cramped and ancient ’37 Plymouth he’d bought cheap off Ed Blum a couple of years before. This was a ’57 Corvette, plenty of wear on it, and with the Rochester fuel injection that gave the car some giddyup but that also meant Pete could never start the damn thing if the morning was even a little cold.

He’d wake up Dave, who was still bleary and remembering that it had been just a couple of hours earlier that he’d opened his eyes for a moment and seen Pete standing in their dimlit bedroom, stripped down before the mirror and once again swinging and swinging the lead-weighted bat uncle Buddy had given him. They’d rouse Staaby and maybe another kid on the block, and they’d all maneuver that Corvette, the Green Bean they called it, down the hill onto flat River Road. The teenage boys would push as Pete, in the driver’s seat, popped the clutch and gave some gas until finally the engine caught and with a thanks-buddies beep-beep-beep Pete was off, past the traffic light at the Anderson Ferry Road, and on his way the seven miles or so to Crosley Field, to park in the players’ lot and to play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds.

Chapter 4

Cooperstown, 2012

O
N THE Friday morning of induction weekend, 2012, word got out in Cooperstown that Rose, along with his girlfriend Kiana Kim and her two children, would be having a midmorning breakfast at TJs Place on Main Street. TJs, a diner, opened in 1990 and was itself a pioneer in Cooperstown’s rapidly expanding memorabilia trade, selling from its adjoining retail space autographed baseball cards, vintage ballcaps and other items of the ilk. The green dining tables all have sugar and jam caddies on them, and the walls around the eating areas are hung with old-time baseball photographs, as well as colorful Grandma Moses–style paintings depicting what is ostensibly a sunny Saturday scene near Cooperstown: wide rolling lawns in front of clapboard houses, a man pushing a wheelbarrow, fruit trees, kids jumping rope.

At TJs’ front register, where you can settle up for your eggs and also buy a baseball signed by, say, Bert Blyleven, you were likely (until March 2013 when he sold the place) to find the owner, Ted Hargrove, a large gregarious man in later middle age whose typical outfit includes a tall gray top hat, suspenders and loafers without socks. He knew all the regulars—the locals as well as many of the patrons who come back in on one weekend, induction weekend, each year—and he set a mood with his general joviality.

Rose would often stop in at TJs for breakfast or lunch when he was in town—“Pete and I have known each other for almost 20 years,” Hargrove says—yet this weekend was different. Normally Rose would just show up. But on this day his table was reserved in an area off to one side and when he and Kim entered the restaurant they were preceded and trailed by a small phalanx of cameramen, directors and assistants, a crew filming an episode for Rose and Kim’s then forthcoming reality series on the TLC cable network. From the start, one of Pete’s set lines about the show was, “We’re just like your family, only we have more base hits.”

Reality in the case of this television show is a relative expression, a term of art—that is, things are realistic but not necessarily real. When Pete and Kiana first came in through TJs front door the camera people did not get the shot they were hoping for. “Can you go back out and come back in,” asked Mark Scheibal, one of the show’s producers. Rose said he got a lot of those sorts of requests throughout the filming: “Take it one more time please, tape one more time please. I went to sleep last night saying ‘tape it one more time please,’ ” Rose groused goodnaturedly during induction weekend. He added that he was encouraged by the prospects for the show’s success because, “We got a pretty funny and pretty interesting life.”

TJs sits on the northern side of Main Street, across from the Safe At Home memorabilia shop, and about 200 yards down from the Cooperstown post office, outside of which on this Friday morning, festivities were being goosed by the unveiling of a line of four first-class postal stamps depicting, respectively, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Larry Doby and Willie Stargell. At about 10 a.m., sheets of these “Baseball All-Stars” stamps were revealed in a brief ceremony. In the parking lot, tables were set up selling all manner of postal-related, baseball-related collectibles. “This is a great day for the post office and a great day for baseball,” said Maureen Marion, a communications manager for the U.S. Postal Service.

The post office provides an important part of the landscape and the lifeblood in Cooperstown—it’s directly across from the Hall of Fame and a block west of the village offices and unlike many places in town it stays open year-round. Locals linger and swap jokes at the package counter, and the mail itself plays a crucial, connective part for a small and out-of-the-way community set among mountain foothills. Even in the Internet age, there remains an anticipation about the daily letters and parcels arriving into Cooperstown and it is easy to imagine how it was in the early 1800s, when the state road from Albany was still new and the twice- or thrice-weekly arrival of mail was heralded from a mile out by a postman sounding his horn. The townspeople would hear as well the beating hooves of four galloping horses and by the time the postal wagon pulled in, an excited crowd had invariably gathered. Letters were distributed and torn open in a local tavern, where Cooperstown’s first postmaster moonlighted as a barkeep.

The 2012 stamp ceremony, with all the tourists milling around, was not dissimilar to a stamp ceremony at the initial Hall of Fame induction event in 1939, when the post office unveiled a commemorative stamp honoring what was billed as the 100th anniversary of baseball. The very first of these three-cent stamps, depicting a town scene of boys playing baseball, was sold directly by Postmaster General James Farley to baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as a crush of people in town to see Cobb, the Babe, Honus Wagner and the rest looked on. The low brick post-office building remains largely unchanged since then (construction was completed in 1936), and the happy, ongoing union of these social bedrocks—baseball and the U.S. mail—lends to the sense of Cooperstown as a real and quaint American place.

The town occupies the southern shore of Otsego Lake, a clear, spring-fed glacial remnant that runs eight miles long and never more than about a mile wide. In the good weather you can look down Pioneer Street or off Stagecoach Lane from the center of town and see the water sparkling brilliantly, occasionally cleaved by sailboats. The lake is home to brown trout, walleye and smallmouth bass and serves as the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, which was made navigable in 1779 by James Clinton, a Revolutionary War army general sent to the region by George Washington to beat back both the British and the Iroquois who had sided with them. Clinton had the river mouth dammed and then broke the dam apart so that the lake waters spilled into the channel. That summer, as a weathered brick marker by the shore there recounts, “2000 men and 200 batteaux” sailed southward down the Susquehanna.

Clinton’s damming is a seminal moment in Cooperstown history and is recounted by James Fenimore Cooper in his 1823 novel
The Pioneers
. The son of the town’s founder, William Cooper, Fenimore Cooper remains Cooperstown’s most famous citizen—
The Last of the Mohicans
is also among his books—and he’s buried along with other members of the Cooper family in a small church graveyard on a shaded street, just off Cooper Park and the outer grounds of the Hall of Fame. The Coopers lived for a while in a log cabin on this site, a flat, tamed piece of land they found rich with fruitful apple trees planted and then abandoned by the routed Iroquois. Tourists now stroll into the park to look at a bronze statue of James Fenimore Cooper seated in thought, as well as at the neighboring statues of Dodgers lefthander Johnny Podres letting fly a pitch to catcher Roy Campanella in a rendering of Game 7 of the 1955 World Series. The baseball statues stand in an open-ended courtyard of the Hall of Fame and the Fenimore Cooper statue is 80 feet away on a grassy island. On the driveway between them members of the Hall of Fame’s staff park their cars for the day.

Throughout his
Leatherstocking Tales
, Fenimore Cooper refers to Otsego Lake as the Glimmerglass, a name that stuck. Visitors camp in Glimmerglass State Park and picnic on Glimmerglass beach. The Glimmerglass opera has become one of America’s premier opera companies, attracting to its summer festival enthusiasts from all over the world—among them Charles Parsons, a music critic and reviewer for the
American Record Guide
, a bimonthly music publication with its office on the same dead-end street in Cincinnati, Braddock Street, where Pete Rose grew up. Parsons was raised nearby, off River Road, and he attended the Sayler Park School, where from first through fourth grade he was a classmate of Rose’s. Parsons is no baseball fan but on his trips to the Glimmerglass opera festival, he might engage with baseball-mad families at the bed-and-breakfast where he stays. When he reveals that he went to elementary school with Pete Rose, noisy excitement follows and “everybody all of a sudden wants to talk to me.”

“I was a kind of an intellectual as a child and kids picked on me a lot,” Parsons recalls. “But not when Pete was around. He wouldn’t let anyone bully me. I don’t know why he took a liking to me. Maybe he saw I was vulnerable. I just know that nobody wanted to mess with Pete and so no one bothered me when he was there.” This is the kind of thing, both the childhood humiliation and the gallantry of a classroom savior, that a man will remember his entire life. Parsons is 72.

Pete and Charlie were not close friends, though, and after elementary school they hardly saw each other at all. Many years passed. Yet when they ran into each other as adults around Cincinnati—at Frisch’s restaurant or at River Downs racetrack, Rose, by then a major league star, recognized his old classmate immediately. As Parsons recalls: “On at least two occasions I was suddenly surprised by Pete with a hearty ‘Hey Charlie! Charlie Parsons!’ across the crowded room. Peter then barreled over to say hello.”

Another time, in the 1980s, Parsons was working at the public library in downtown Cincinnati when he took his evening break and went to the nearby Cricket Lounge for dinner. There in a booth was Rose, sitting with two Cincinnati Bengals, quarterback Ken Anderson and offensive tackle Anthony Muñoz. “Pete hailed me over,” says Parsons, “and invited me to join them and I agreed.”

For Rose, the notion of asking a local librarian to sit and join a bull session with himself and two NFL superstars seemed completely natural. He was happy to talk with all of them; it would never occur to him that anyone might feel uneasy. Said Parsons, “Sitting in that booth, Pete treated all of us just the same.”

Though he has never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame, nor even to a major league game, and though he could tell you little about Rose’s baseball career, and even less about Rose’s willful violation of the game’s prohibition against gambling and the danger that it might violate the integrity of the sport, Parsons view of the matter is, not surprisingly, clear. “And, YES!” he wrote in an e-mail, answering a question that had not, in fact, been asked. “I do think Peter should be in the Hall of Fame.”

ROSE MAY have been the only one at TJs Place that morning having a reality series breakfast; but there were plenty of ex-ballplayers around making appearances for Hargrove. At 10:30 Yogi Berra walked in. In his late 80s, and thinned markedly in recent years, Berra had made it a priority to get to Cooperstown for induction weekend. He was accompanied by his wife and one of his sons, and though he moved haltingly, he appeared in high, clear spirits as he settled in near the front of TJs to greet people and exchange a few words. When Hargrove had advertised his weekend lineup in the weeks leading up to induction, the copy read, “Come say hello to a few familiar faces, get an autograph and shake hands with a legend.” Berra was the legend.

Among those signing on Friday morning were Hall of Famers Juan Marichal and Rollie Fingers, along with former Black Yankee Bob Scott, and Art Shamsky, who may be best known as a member of the 1969 World Series Mets, but who was also, in ’60, a promising 18-year-old outfielder for the Class D Redlegs in Geneva, N.Y., where he spent a couple of months living with Pete Rose. They rented rooms in a family home on a quiet residential street. Both players earned $400 a month and Shamsky, with some speed and good power, was regarded as much the better prospect. At TJs, he and Rose greeted each other warmly and talked for a while.

“There was no way that in Geneva you could have seen the player that Pete would become; just no possible way,” said Shamsky shortly after chatting with Rose. “He could hit a little and he ran hard, and he got to the park in the early morning when some of the rest of us were sleeping. That’s what you could have said about him. But he was small and very raw on defense and you would not have pegged him for a future big leaguer. The next time I played on a team with him”—two years later at Class A Macon (Ga.), where Rose hit .330 and scored 136 runs in 139 games—“that had changed. He was bigger and stronger and just much, much better. By then there was no doubting him.”

Upon first being signed by the Reds and assigned to Geneva, Rose had literally run around Braddock Street shouting, “I’m leaving! I’m leaving! I got a contract to play ball!” But he soon found himself homesick in the small, remote Eastern college town. LaVerne came out and stayed nearby for a couple of weeks to help ease him in. Uncle Buddy visited as well. Harry drove out and met the team when it played a series in Erie. While some of the other players enjoyed the freedom of being on their own and the opportunity to drink beer together in local bars—“I had come from Missouri where the drinking age was 21,” says Shamsky. “In Geneva it was 18, so there was that”—Pete did not drink alcohol or go out or do much of anything except get to the park early and stay late. A letter written to him that summer from a Reds scout who knew Pete’s father Harry (a letter, incidentally, that Rose included in his 2004 memoir) described Pete as being “down in the dumps” and encouraged him to buck up. There were apple and pear trees in the hills around Geneva and some people grew grapes for wine. On damp summer evenings, mosquitoes dispersed around the Redlegs’ Shuron Park, dining on the several hundred fans or more who attended each game.

One Redlegs teammate, the pitcher Dan Neville, whose career faded before he hit the big leagues, said that the homesickness of Rose and a few other teammates was so profound—and this now is a remarkable claim, unique in the long span of Rose’s career—that it sapped Rose’s determination to win.

“We were lousy [the Redlegs finished 54–75 and last in their six-team league] but four teams made the playoffs and it looked for a while like we might have a chance. Only some guys didn’t want any part of that, of having to stay around and play more games,” Neville recalls. “There was a
let’s get the heck out of Geneva
mentality, and Pete was one of the guys leading that. The idea was not to win at all costs, but instead to make sure we didn’t make the playoffs so that we could get home. Pete was an incredibly hard-nosed player when I played with him in Tampa the next season and whenever I saw him before and afterward. But that one year, for maybe two or three weeks, he was not one hundred and ten percent all the time.”