Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (5 page)

In Geneva, Rose committed 36 errors in 85 games, primarily as a second baseman. Manager Reno DeBenedetti complained about the rough, sometimes costly aspects of Pete’s game. All in all, the scouting reports on Pete Rose out of Geneva were not strong. Still, he always slid headfirst at a time when no one was sliding headfirst, and he was a conspicuous competitor. At season’s end the fans voted Rose the team’s most popular player. Still, Geneva had slipped from fifth place to sixth as the summer wore on, and Neville (who would appear in a Reds uniform on the same Topps rookie card as Shamsky in 1965) says, “It was very surprising to me that some other players did not want to win at all costs. And so I have never forgotten it.”

AFTER HIS chat with Shamsky at TJs, Rose sat down for the breakfast with Kim and her children. They were joined by Vilacky—Pete’s guy from the Safe At Home memorabilia store—and Hargrove. An assistant on the reality show filming crew asked a waitress to remove all the ketchup bottles from the surrounding tables so that the labels would not appear on camera. Pete began telling Kiana and the kids about Yogi Berra, choosing as his touchstone Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. “Yogi is the guy who ran out and hugged Larsen after the last out,” he said. “Yogi was short but solid, 185 pounds, and Larsen was holding Yogi off the ground like it was nothing. Usually if anyone picks anyone up it’s the catcher picking up the pitcher. It tells you Larsen was a big, strong guy.”
¹

Scrambled eggs and sausage arrived on thick white plates, and pancakes for the kids. Various people came by to talk with Pete and at one visitor’s request he spelled the names of Kiana’s children, Ashton and Cassie, at which he made a point of saying with a snicker, “that is Cassie with an a-s-s!” She was 14 years old at the time.

Pete, wearing that fedora and loose aqua T-shirt, laughed a lot, pitching forward slightly in his chair when he did. He said how Ashton, who was then 10 years old, was not really a baseball player yet. “He’s a karate guy so far,” said Pete, tousling the boy’s hair. “I am not!” said Ashton, and Pete chuckled and shrugged. “I’m just their prop,” he said, gesturing to Kiana and the kids. Then Rose and Hargrove talked for a while about Pete’s prospects for ever getting into the Hall of Fame, winding toward Pete’s conclusion: “If I ever get in,” he said, “it will be when I’m dead.”

There was a pause in the conversation—at the table everyone had turned to their food—and Pete, not eating yet, quickly grew restless, batting the plastic salt-and-pepper shakers back and forth between his forefingers. He looked around and saw at a nearby table a white-haired man wearing a Mets cap. A look of recognition flashed over Rose’s face. “Hey, how’ve you been?” he called out. “You still working?”

The white-haired man looked surprised (“I have never met Pete Rose,” he would say later. “I think he thought I was someone else.”) but he responded, “No, I’m not working anymore. But it looks like you are.”

To which Pete cackled, “Hah. This ain’t work! Loading boxcars, that’s work.”

Rose’s talk—which is, in some ways, the essence of the man—is an eternal spatter of language, a ragtime of quips, anecdotes, jokes and memories ever unfolding. Baseball, horse racing, Cincinnati, his wife, his son, a remembrance of running out of gasoline 50 years before, the Los Angeles Lakers, the idiosyncrasies of some small American town, dugouts, clubhouses, breasts, Mike Schmidt, Bud Selig, infield dirt. He has a great talent for humorous detail so that even in rendering one of his stock stories, and by this point in Pete’s life there are many, he projects the sense of newness. In banter, Rose has a bright face with bright things in it: a joker’s mouth and a rascal’s eyes.

For all the goings on, Pete does not ramble, but rather pauses at the end of an observation, takes a cue, and then is off again on a new verbal jaunt tethered loosely to the topic at hand, his salted words rendered in the same yip-and-yap fashion with which he left his mark upon ballplayer after ballplayer from the start of his baseball career to the end. The entire weekend in Cooperstown, indeed the entirety, more or less, of Rose’s public life, might be defined as one streaming, bouncing, never-ending, ever-entertaining, rarely filtered conversation—a conversation that Rose has been having here there and everywhere, in some form or another, with those around him and with the world at large, for as long as anyone can remember.

Chapter 5

Black and White and Red All Over

S
OON THERE would be baseball again in Cincinnati. The frigid winter had given way to a warm March and now, sweet springtime, the date that Cincinnatians from West-wood to East End, from Sayler Park to Indian Hill, had long since circled on their calendars was nearly at hand: Opening Day, April 8, 1963, a Monday, the first game of the major league season, a tradition there since 1876. As the Reds’ yearbook of the previous season had crowed, “Many cities are famed for their particular celebrations—New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Inauguration in Washington, Philadel phia’s Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day, etc. But none is more universally accepted than Cincinnati’s Opening Day.” The yearbook’s cover was a design in three colors: red, white and blue.

Down in Florida, manager Fred Hutchinson, in his 11th year running a big league club, looked around him and said, just as the Reds prepared to come north, “This is the best team I’ve ever managed. Yes, even better than 1961.” Those ’61 Reds had won their first National League pennant in 21 years before losing in the World Series to the Yankees. So if Hutch thought this ’63 team was better, fans reasoned, there was only one way to go. The Vegas oddsmakers had the Yankees (and really, who else?) as the 1–3 favorite to win the American League and the Dodgers at 2–1 in the National League, but the Reds were right there at 4–1, and among the baseball writers they were a popular choice.

The newspapers ran diagrams of the newly finished parking lot at Crosley Field—room for 2,600 more cars—and ruminated, with sketches and analyses, about the traffic that would jam the streets on Opening Day. The city had put up 41 temporary new road signs to help guide folks around. A neighborhood group close to the ballpark, composed of folks living on Sherman, Liberty, Wade and Wilstach, petitioned the City Council to reroute the game-day buses that unloaded and later loaded scores of giddy passengers in front of their homes. For two years running, and this was something that was measured at the time, Crosley Field had led the majors in attendance per capita. Baseball fan per geographical inch was another way to look at it.

“I thought about Opening Day like it was the biggest start of the year, and that’s how I prepared,” recalled pitcher Jim O’Toole half a century later. He was the lefty who would take the ball for Cincinnati on April 8. “You could feel the buildup and the hoopla and then the game itself came and it felt like such a big deal, so much energy. Especially when it was a nice enough day like we had in ’63. Days like that, Opening Day felt like the World Series.”

The Reds were coming up from Tampa now, playing the last of their spring training games along the way, traveling through the South and all its seething righteousness from all sides in the Civil Rights struggle. James Meredith had been in school at Ole Miss for just half a year, and still fresh for the country were the images of the federal marshals who escorted him there, and the riots surrounding his enrollment. A determined unrest was gathering strength in Birmingham. John F. Kennedy was 26 months into his term, and the national intelligence agencies were preparing for him a report entitled
Prospects in South Vietnam
. You could make long-distance calls direct, now, from your own home, and you could take your Polaroid pictures in color. People had begun to hear on the radio the breakthrough songs of Bob Dylan.

There had been professional baseball in Cincinnati for 94 years, longer than anywhere else. This was the greatest baseball town in the world.

And if Hutchinson was predicting first place for his team, buoyed to optimism by the pitching and the power (Frank Robinson!), and the 98 games the Reds had won the year before, he was inspired too by another player, an unpolished rookie playing second base. Hutch talked about the kid all spring, about how even with only a few years in the low minors behind him he already had some serious big league sass about him. The kid played baseball harder than anyone Hutch had ever seen. And he could really hit. Reds’ owner William DeWitt came down and after watching the kid on the field for a couple of days, he had no uncertainty: “When he makes it, fans from all over the country will want to come out and see him play,” he said. “He loves to play baseball and the best part about it is his ability. A fellow like this can spark an entire ballclub.”

Some of the fans in Cincinnati already knew about the kid, of course, and some knew him as one of their own, a mulish scrapper out of Western Hills High, raised down around Delhi Township, hard by the Ohio. West Siders knew who the kid’s father was too, a tough and square-jawed semi-pro footballer, a star of renown in the tavern leagues. By the time the Reds broke camp the kid already had a nickname, “Charlie Hustle,” pinned on him with an air of derision by—and how’s this for a stamp upon a player?—a couple of Yankees named Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.

Still, he was only 21 years old, and he had plenty of rough edges to his game. The Cincinnati batting coach, Dick Sisler, didn’t like the hitch in the kid’s swing or the way he held the bat so close to his ear. Maybe he needed another year down in the minors somewhere—in San Diego, say, or Rocky Mount. No. Not on Hutch’s watch. A few days into April word went out that the Reds had made their final roster cuts for the season. And the kid was on the team. As it said so plainly in the morning
Cincinnati Post
: “The 28 players, the limit for Opening Day, include Pete Rose.”

NINETEEN-SIXTY-THREE WAS by no reckoning an ordinary year in the history and progress of America, neither ordinary in hindsight, nor in the days in which it unfolded—a fact that was clear long before the sudden blow and deep darkness of Nov. 22 when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. During April of ’63, as Rose made his way through his first month in the major leagues, slumping and then rebounding at the plate, and with his conspicuous moxie inspiring already much ardor among the fans (and some distaste among the players), the nation shook, reverberating out from Birmingham, where the civil rights movement was rumbling in earth-changing ways.

A daily campaign of demonstrations and marches had begun in Birmingham, peaceable but pointed, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. On the eve of the start of the baseball season, as it so happened, a prayer march made its way through the streets to Birmingham’s City Hall, so that the next morning’s newspapers in Cincinnati were at once draped in optimism across the front page (
WE
’
LL WIN 1963 FLAG, REDS DECLARE
ran the six-column banner across the
Post
) and then blunted by another too familiar story:
DOGS, POLICE STOP NEGRO PRAYER MARCH
.

Dozens had been arrested in Birmingham that day—most of those taken away as they knelt in prayer, refusing to move on a city street—and dozens more in the days that followed, and then in mid-April, King himself was taken in. From the cot in his cell, starting off on paper scraps, he handwrote his
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
, appealing to the need for persistence and determination in the fight against injustice, the need to barrel ahead through and over those who said “No!” There would not be violence, he vowed as ever, but there needed to be tension to effect change. King’s writing, and this was invariably his way, proved precise in its facts and philosophical in its message. Invoking Socrates along the way, he talked about the need for an enlightenment that would indeed pull the masses from the metaphorical cave, that would “help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

King’s words resounded as righteous and defiant, stoic and tide-turning, his drive for integration unbowed in a state, Alabama, where three months earlier, governor George Wallace had pledged as he took office to awful cheers: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”

And if Cincinnati, 460 miles to the north, was no Birmingham (and really, that was the most segregated city of all, as Dr. King said) it was a place with its own set of tensions, its own ways and temperaments, a Northern city peopled by Southerners. It was true that blacks and whites would convene in the same setting, might sit side-by-side in a hospital emergency room or stand in line to get a driver’s license, might mingle loosely at a public parade. Still, the black man and the white man went home in different directions, to all-black or all-white neighborhoods defined by something deeper and harder than custom. One could have asked Frank Robinson about that. He may have been the Reds’ finest player, a Rookie of the Year in 1956, the National League MVP in ’61. He may have had them standing at Crosley Field with his long home runs and his hard-nosed play, but when it came time for him and his wife to buy a home in Cincinnati, to try to raise their children in the neighborhood of their choosing, at a level and scale that Robinson had by rights earned, well, that was not possible. That the Robinsons had money and means didn’t matter; in some neighborhoods, and there were more than a few, no one would sell them a house, the reason as plain as the skin on their faces. “We knew, or we quickly found out, where we could live and where we could not,” says Robinson.

In 1963 a man Rose’s age could remember how when he was a boy going to the Sayler Park swimming pool, the water on most days was as pure white as the streets around the Anderson Ferry. Black children were allowed to swim there on just one designated day each week. On the other days they would sometimes pass by and peer over, hot and sullen in the summer sun—until sometime in the late ’40s the black families around Sayler Park staged their own small and focused protest and quietly got that swimming pool open to all. Those who lived there might say Jackie Robinson had something to do with that protest; Cincinnati was such a baseball town and all. When Jackie first came to Crosley Field as a Dodger, in May and June of 1947, he was winning over all kinds of fans with the way he played, and he’d made a conspicuous ally in Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a white man, Kentucky-born and bred, and a Cincinnati favorite. If you were a black family down around Sayler Park you could take courage from what Jackie Robinson was doing. You could become determined to make change even if your numbers were few.

Right across the river in Covington, Ky.—where at age 13 a boy could drink a pitcher of beer in the front of the barroom while his dad laid down a little something on the game with the bookie in the back—the train depot water fountains were still labeled with those blistering signs: “White” for one of them, “Negro” for the other. So maybe Cincinnati wasn’t so far away from Birmingham as all that, in place and in time. The demonstrations went on down there in Alabama each day in the spring of 1963—the sight of the firehoses being turned on to the backs of black kids barely 10 years old—and were seen and felt all over the country. “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states,” King wrote from his cell. “We [in America] are tied in a single garment of destiny.”

The hate was neither new nor a surprise to the Reds ballplayers who had seen it clearly while playing in the South, at the team’s spring training in Florida, or in the minor leagues when black ballplayers couldn’t eat in the same restaurants or use the same restrooms, or were forced to find a family to put them up in this town or the other because no hotel would have them. In 1961, when Rose was a Tampa Tarpon, the team traveled from game to game in big red station wagons. One of the wagons would invariably be driven by the manager Johnny Vander Meer—“Mr. No-no, No-no” they called the former big league lefty for his indelible 1938 achievement of leaving a team hitless for two straight games—and when Vander Meer was not falling asleep at the wheel, as he was given to do, he was always one to stop and get something to eat.

They would pull in to a roadside restaurant and when everyone else piled out, the black guys knew it was better for everyone that they stay in the car. (Lee May, 18 years old and four seasons shy of the first at bat of his 18-year, 354-home run major league career, was on that team.) And even though a carload of hungry ballplayers had now appeared in his damned and sweaty little diner, all of them with appetites and money to spend, the guy who ran the place, aware and attuned, might come away from his grill, toweling off his grease-spattered hands and peer out from the restaurant doorway and say, “Get those niggers out of my parking lot.”

Rose could not have cared less what color a guy was. He bounded into the big leagues like a golf ball on hot concrete and if the Reds veterans didn’t much like him for all that zip and brashness—oh Lord, the way he could carry on with the cheapest of groupies, with that pliable stripper on the team’s trip in Mexico—well, they especially didn’t like him taking a job away from Don Blasingame that spring of 1963. Blazer was a former All-Star second baseman, a guy who’d batted a decent .281 in ’62, who’d come down and worked as hard as he should have in the preseason, who was a steady guy with his pretty wife Sara (a Miss Missouri no less) and their little girl Dawn. Now, Rose, spraying hits everywhere, busting out of the batter’s box like sprung from hell, was just going to knock Blasingame aside. For the decision by manager Hutchinson and the front office, the veterans mused, it didn’t hurt that Blazer was making $23,000 a year, Rose only $7,500. If Blasingame could get pushed away like that, they figured, how soon before it happened to them?

“He made us uncomfortable,” recalls O’Toole. “We hadn’t seen Pete’s kind before and a lot of people didn’t much like it. He could get under your skin with the way he just went and went. We were not inclined to welcome him in so fast or to make it easy on him. A lot of guys on the team just started to freeze him out.”

Pete found friends in the black players: Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Tommy Harper—men who knew what it was like to be shunted aside by teammates, to be ignored and derided. “The way Pete was being treated was not something we were going to go for,” said Pinson. So when Pinson and Robinson went out to eat on the road, Pete went right along with them. They dressed sharp and never drank a glass of booze, early dinner and back to the room for a little TV: just Pete’s style.