Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (6 page)

In the clubhouse too often that season it was white guys one way, black guys another. Dick Young, writing about the Reds in New York’s
Daily News
that summer would describe the friction around the Reds’ locker room this way: “The Negro players think they are being picked on, and the white players think the Negro players are getting away with murder, and that is the climate of our time.”

It was in that climate—16 years after Jackie Robinson, sure, but “if you think baseball has licked that [race] problem, you’re nuts,” Young wrote— that Rose ignored Reds management when he was called upstairs and told to stop spending so much time with the black guys. It was in that climate that Rose would sidle over to where Frank Robinson and Pinson lockered and start chattering away, laughing and joking and talking baseball (“Talkin’
jive
!” Pete said gleefully) and figuring out how they could win the game that day. Sometimes Rose would plop down on the floor of the clubhouse and start shining Robinson’s shoes. “Another thing that guys didn’t like,” says O’Toole.

Rose adored Robinson for the way he played, for the very aggressiveness that irked so many around the league. In a game against the Milwaukee Braves a couple of years before Rose arrived, Robinson had come in hard to third base, setting off a fight with third baseman Eddie Mathews. (“He always tries to kick and slap at you when he’s sliding in,” Mathews grumbled later.) Hearing the story, it didn’t matter to Rose that Robinson had wound up battered by Mathews in the brawl. What mattered was that even with his bloodied nose and black eye, with his thumb jammed and swollen, Robinson had come out for the second game of that doubleheader and hit a double and a home run and taken a hit away from Mathews with a catch in leftfield, and the Reds had beaten the Braves 4–0. “The way I look at it, I won the fight,” Robinson would say. Rose could not have agreed more. Some old-timers called Robinson the black Ty Cobb, not for the players’ similarity of skills—Robinson rode largely on power, Cobb conspicuously on speed—but for their ornery style on the field. (It was an irony scarcely noted that Cobb had been known as a racist.) Rose understood what that analogy meant as well as any player in the game. “Pass the salt, Ty,” he’d say to Robinson, grinning across the dinner table.
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Rose was no civil rights activist, no high-minded advocate. He would make racial jokes quick as anyone, just as he’d make a crack about a “Kraut” or a “Polack,” or tell some off-color story at his own expense, whatever might keep the energy purring around him. He was Pete being Pete. It was he who would come up and put his arm around Harper as the players were toweling off in the locker room, fresh out of the shower, and say loud enough for everyone to hear: “Damn, Tommy, you know you are just a big dick with man hanging on the end of it.” At such moments any tightness in the room fell right away: There were no black guys or white guys; just a room full of ballplayers cackling together and shaking their heads at what young, smart-ass Pete Rose had said.

“Pete was always my good friend,” says Harper. “Not my white friend, my friend. Those first years in the major leagues he was always chirping on me, encouraging me: ‘C’mon Harp, c’mon Harp.’ He would say we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that, they’re not going to be able to send us back down. It was always ‘we, we, we’ with Pete. It wasn’t ‘I’.

“Our wives were friends too,” Harper says. “We just liked spending time together. We’d get some stares when we went out to eat together, but stares were not ever going to bother Pete.”

In Tampa some years later, spring training of 1967, Pete and his wife Karolyn would often invite Tommy and Bonnie to have dinner with them at a place that remained whites only by custom if not, of course, by law. If Tommy and Bonnie arrived first they took a table in the corner, quiet and to themselves. Then suddenly through the restaurant would come a small but heavy bellow, “Unka Tommy! Unka Tommy!” This being the excited cries of two-year-old Fawn Rose, her voice like a barrel-echo even then, calling out to a man who, in Karolyn’s words, “she absolutely loved. She could have played with her uncle Tommy all day.” The Harpers would put their heads down and hide their smiles and with the attention now upon them from the other diners, wish they could somehow slip beneath their table and disappear.

IF THOSE restaurant customers frowned at the noisy intrusion— “Here we come, Unka Tommy!” Fawn boomed. “Here we come!”—and if the waiters and waitresses cast a tsking glare at the young black couple that the little girl was calling out for, those frowns turned to forgiving grins when they saw that trailing the girl, bouncing in with his broad face and gap-toothed grin, was Pete Rose himself. Not a superstar yet but by then, the late 1960s, a beloved fixture on the Reds, the heart of the team, a .300 hitter and a gamboling, bristle-topped player—his teammmate Tommy Helms had taken to calling him HH for hedgehead—who, as
Time
magazine wrote in the summer of ’68, had with his “flip tongue and frenetic brand of baseball injected fresh breath into an increasingly stale game.”

He was a man in his late 20s known for headlong slides and tumbling catches and who never wanted to spend even an inning out of the lineup lest he miss a chance to put his bat on the ball. On the second day of the 1968 season Rose, chasing and then leaping in vain after a ball hit to rightfield, tore open his hand on Crosley’s fence. The next day, his hand bandaged, he singled and doubled and started a 22-game hitting streak. “If I had eight Pete Roses we would run all over the league,” the manager Dave Bristol said. Bristol, on the Reds job since ’66, was a baseball guy who spit tobacco juice through his teeth, often for emphasis. “He hates to be wrong,” Bristol said of Rose. “He hates to be beaten.”

That was the impression that Rose left with everything he did. As a second baseman his first four years he attacked every ball he could get to (as well as some that he could not) and the aggressiveness led to errors, balls bouncing off his glove and body. He could look like a wreck out there. Although he spent a winter season playing in Venezuela, where on each off day he took hundreds of ground balls, made hundreds of throws and worked for hours, literally hours, on catching the ball at second base and turning to throw to first, he continued to play the position with a profound inelegance. “Technically, Rose was the worst I’ve ever seen at turning the double play,” says O’Toole.

Yet he was indefatigable and unbowed. Along with the errors, he often made improbable diving stops. Rose always seemed to be where the ball was, and always backing up the play, going straight to where he was meant to be. He would run clear across the diamond to pursue a pop-up. On a double-play pivot at second, Rose stayed right at the bag even with the runner from first base bearing directly down upon him. “He is completely fearless,” Robinson said.

In leftfield, where he moved in 1967, Rose had little grace and moderate range and no throwing arm to speak of. Yet it wasn’t long before Leo Durocher, the Cubs manager, looked out from the dugout and said, “Rose looks like he was born out there.”
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When he led the National League in outfield assists in ’68 he did so not with majestic throws from the deep corners but by positioning, savvy and hustle. He anticipated. He charged in hard to field base hits. He found ways to get an out when he had no business getting one. Rose’s crashes into the sidewall in pursuit of foul fly balls—during one otherwise unremarkable 6–3 win over the Pirates at Crosley Field, May of ’67, he toppled into the stands twice, both times being bruised on the face and both times making the catch—became so frequent that someone in the Reds bullpen down the leftfield line had the designated assignment to keep an eye on Rose, to try to get over and break his fall so that he didn’t get hurt. Rose later changed positions again, moving from left to right. He played some centerfield as well when the need arose. In ’69 he won a Gold Glove.

Many around the league groused at Pete for his flash and his bubbling confidence. “If you didn’t know him you would think he was cocky,” said Henry Aaron, greatly understating. Rose strutted on the field, more so after making a good play, and he chirped noisily as he took his lead off first base. When he drew a walk, he took off racing down the first base line. (He had gotten the idea from Enos Slaughter, the Cardinals spikes-up igniter and an All-Star during Pete’s youth.) “Let’s stick it in Rose’s ear, then see how fast he goes to first on a walk,” Phillies’ manager Gene Mauch called out angrily during Rose’s rookie season.

Soon, though, it became clear that beneath Rose’s bluster whirred the real deal, an exceptional and deeply committed talent. It was Mauch himself who, after Rose had led the Reds in batting for a second straight season in 1966, declared that given the way Rose elevated the Reds on the field, he had become a perennial MVP contender. “Rose is now being recognized for what he does, not how he does it,” Mauch said with an air of resignation and even surprise. As Rose himself observed: “I sneaked up on ’em. They were so busy calling me Charlie Hustle and Hollywood they weren’t looking at the statistics.”

He created the most compelling statistics, of course, with his bat, leading the league in base hits in 1965 (209) and again in ’68 (210), earning regard as baseball’s best switch-hitter even in the years when Maury Wills and Tom Tresh and, yes, the aging Mantle were still making their marks. “Never mind the switch-hitting,” said Mets manager Wes Westrum. “This guy is one of baseball’s best hitters period.” Rose had vowed to become the game’s “first $100,000 player who isn’t a home run hitter. I gotta. I just gotta.” Some labeled him a singles hitter but the singles were just the half of it. He was good for 35 to 40 doubles a year, right near the top of the league, stroking line drives from foul line to foul line and into the gaps. He hit about a dozen home runs each season and invariably finished among the top 10 in triples. Rose stated his goals of 200 hits and 100 runs scored each year. He made the first of his 17 All-Star Games in ’65.

Rose was rarely a stolen base threat—raw speed being another in the long list of natural skills he did not possess—but he was unquestionably the best base runner on the Reds, and one of the very best in either league. He carved his way around the diamond with a sense of mission and by smarts as much as intuition. He judged the outfielders before he came to bat, noting who was playing too far off the foul line, or a few strides too deep. He knew every fielder’s arm strength and he knew when to put it to the test. It was nothing for Rose to go first to third on a single to leftfield.

“I played with Pete for four years [1963 through ’66],” says O’Toole, “and I don’t think I ever saw him get thrown out trying to take an extra base. Not once. It must have happened. Of course it must have. But I remember many things and I don’t remember that. A lot of close plays, a lot of dirt flying everywhere as he slid in headfirst, but when that dirt settled, Pete was safe.”

Rose coveted statistics not least because he knew what statistics could bring. He had a keen affection for money and he delighted openly at how his salary, which began at the major league minimum, steadily grew. After making the All-Star Game, Rose asked around until he had enough information to figure out the average salary of all the other All-Stars—a cast of veteran and well-paid players—and then trumpeted the figure to Reds assistant G.M. Phil Seghi, as a means of bargaining. He earned $25,000 in 1966, $46,000 in ’67 and $55,000 in ’68, when his .335 batting average led the National League. “I’m one of the two most exciting white guys in baseball, me and Carl Yastrzemski,” said Rose. The next season his salary jumped to $85,000, nearly 3½ times the league average and more money than a Cincinnati Reds player had ever earned in a season. After winning the batting title again, in ’69, Rose vaulted past $100,000 a year.

“You hear a lot of guys say you can’t make any money playing ball in Cincinnati,” Rose said in those years. “I don’t believe it. All you have to do is play every day and do your job.”

To Rose that job included being a kind of cheerleader—for himself, certainly, but also for the Reds and for all of baseball. The press found him accommodating, often solicitous, and he amused them with his frankness and his humor. He was not frugal with his time and once sat for a long game-day interview with an ice dancer who was serving as a celebrity journalist for her hometown paper—in Vienna, Austria. “When someone wants to interview me I’ve usually got something to say,” Rose observed.
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Most of Rose’s teammates embraced his publicity seeking, considering that he spent much of his time with reporters talking not just about himself, but telling people why a baseball ticket was the best deal in town and extolling Tony Perez or Helms or any number of other Reds. When the Cincinnati ace Jim Maloney said “I’m just glad we have Pete on our side,” it was not simply because of all the hits Rose got and all the runs he scored. Rose delivered to the team an unflagging intensity. “He could bring a lesser player up to a higher caliber,” is how Reds pitcher Mel Queen put it. “Looking at him running out ground balls and walks and hustling all over the field [a teammate] had to say, ‘How can I do anything less than that?’ ”

He arrived first to the ballpark and he stayed to the last and he did not slow down in between. That teammates never saw him on the trainer’s table was not because he never got hurt—diving attempts in the field had caused Rose a broken thumb and a badly bruised shoulder in those seasons; his style of play inevitably produced numerous nagging pains—but because he got to the trainer early and took care of any ailments or rehab work before most of the players had even arrived at the park. He didn’t want to miss a thing out on the field. He worked extra in the batting cage, and during the pregame he often fielded balls at several positions. Sometimes Rose volunteered to put on the catcher’s gear and warm up a pitcher. All the while his inimitable banter spouted forth. One teammate called Rose “Basil”, a play on basal metabolism. “You get tired just being around him,” said Helms, Pete’s roommate on the road. It was not unusual for Helms to be roused in the first light of day, just as Pete’s brother Dave had been roused years before, and to see Pete standing in front of the hotel-room mirror, completely nude, working on his swing.