His National Hall of Fame dream over, Pete Rose comes home

He moved carefully, thoughtfully, this man I took to be in his late 80s or 90s. You wouldn’t measure his movement in steps, but more accurately in inches. The steps were excruciatingly slow, but purposeful, not plodding. He worked his body like a man summoning all his limited resources for the task ahead. As he came up the aisle, the standing room crowd behind the seats three deep parted to let him pass. A younger man, a friend or perhaps a son, shepherded him through the throng. The game was minutes away from beginning, but he appeared to be leaving, having already accomplished what he had come here to do.

On June 25th, I too, came to Cincinnati to do my part, to see Peter Edward Rose inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame. In today’s current climate, I almost feel the need to apologize.

But screw that.

If you say The Pete Rose Story has jumped the shark, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. I wouldn’t begin to defend his offenses against the game of Baseball. There will be no all caps cri de coeur here. I’m not here to litigate his transgressions or insist he’s paid a sufficient price for his sins. He is, by all accounts, a deeply flawed man. He’s been punished by Major League Baseball, and continues to be punished by the guardians of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, who will never allow the Hit King into their inner sanctum—at least not while he draws breath. Pete Rose knows this.

No, I’m just here to share.

In 2012, when Barry Larkin was inducted, I wrote a piece about my journey to Cooperstown, one that began as a story about the Reds’ HOF shortstop, but evolved—much to my surprise—into a story about the Reds’ prodigal son. Shocked by all the Rose memorabilia on display, not to mention an exhibit dedicated solely to hit 4192, it was clear the Hall coveted Rose’s accomplishments even as they wanted to hold the man himself at arm’s length. Cleaving the deeds from the man himself tears at the logic of it all. It’s like Starsky without Hutch. Mulder without Scully. Cain without Abel.

Whenever I think of Rose, my mind wanders back to a play that actor and playwright Jason Miller wrote in the early ‘70s. In this one-act, Miller’s characters are lost souls, eking out a painful day-to-day existence, their dreams always just out of reach. The middle-aged protagonist revisits a memory of going to Yankee Stadium with his father to see Lou Gehrig, a man his father “loved like a son.” Against all odds, Gehrig proceeds to hit a home run, the ball falling out of the sky into his father’s lap. Father and son wait in the darkness after the game to meet Gehrig:

“Finally, he came out and my father went over and spoke to him in Italian. Then, he did the most incredible thing, Lou Gehrig did the most amazing thing, he hugged my father and then they were laughing together and I remember I started to cry, standing there watching Lou Gehrig hug my father.

“And when Lou Gehrig died, a few years later, the day Lou Gehrig died, my father cried. And that was the first and last time I ever saw my father cry. Even when they lowered my mother into the ground, his face was dry. Even when the scouts came to see me play, even when the big league scouts came to see me play and I struck out three times and they wanted nothing to do with me, he said nothing. But, the day Lou Gehrig died, when he heard the news, he said one thing, “Lou Gehrig did not die of cancer, he died of a broken heart.” Those are the exact and only words he said on that day … isn’t it incredible, that my father could be hurt so much by the death of a stranger? Someone he never even …”

There’s wonder and emotion packed into Miller’s story. It’s that wonder, inextricably bound to an equal measure of sorrow, that resonates with me and colors in the outlines of my memory of Rose; a heartbreaking duality: the player whose star in the firmament seemed permanently affixed; and Rose, the man who fell to earth.

We think we know Pete Rose because he’s so accessible, so plain-speaking and seemingly uncomplicated. He’s a lout to many, lowbrow and even a laughingstock to some, the way he dresses and carries himself well into the seventh decade of his life.

I have found the chalk line that separates Rose devotees from the Rose deniers—those that see the fair and those that see the foul—to be less a matter of geography and more a difference of generation. Without fail, those who label Rose a pariah never saw him play, or only caught the tail end of the Countdown to Cobb. Many young baseball writers and bloggers I read and respect show little for the only Rose they know, wilted with shame, faded by lies, beset with a thorny hubris. Still, those of us who grew up watching Rose in his prime cannot so easily commit the man to the compost heap of hoary history.

To watch him play was to watch both joy and ferocity in cleats. His love for the game resonated all the way to the loge seats atop Riverfront Stadium. He played the way you would if you, gentle reader, somehow had the talent and the drive. Because he was incorrectly viewed as an Everyman who got the most of his perceived limited talent, he made our cheap seat dreams of putting down that hot dog, picking up that glove and stepping onto the field seem slightly less ridiculous that they truly were.

.   .   .

Few remember now just how close the Big Red Machine came to being remembered as the Big Red Disappointment. They had reached the World Series twice in three years, losing for a second time when a journeyman catcher named Gene Tenace clubbed four home runs before being named series MVP. In 1973, George “Sparky” Anderson’s team again surrendered to an inferior Mets club that had finished the regular season a mere three games over .500. Add in a losing season in 1971 and a second place finish in 1974 — and the 1975 World Series would become a watershed moment for the players who would go on to be known as the Great Eight. Trailing 3-0 in the sixth inning of Game 7 of the 1975 World Series, Rose’s Reds stood at the brink of another profound disappointment in front of a national audience.

But Rose would not let his team go gentle into that good Fenway night. As Kostya Kennedy chronicled in his book, Pete Rose—An American Dilemma, Rose’s exhortations to his teammates on the bench, his rage and fury in the face of defeat, and yes, his play on the field—breaking up a sure double play that kept the inning alive for Tony Perez’s heroics moments later—would be the difference between memorable and immortality. To be sure, Rose was not the best player on his team. He just drove the Machine. He knew where the ignition switch was and how to put it into another gear.

Would that team have been broken up had they lost Game 7 to the Red Sox? Quite possibly. Would Sparky Anderson have been fired? Entirely possible. Would Tony Perez have found himself on the outside of the Hall of Fame, looking in had the Cincinnati Reds not prevailed? I’m guessing yes.

.   .   .

I recently attended a book signing for Brian Kenny’s Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution. I happened to be carrying a copy of Kennedy’s exhaustive account of the troubled ballplayer. Kenny glanced at the book and asked if I had seen what he’d had to say about Rose a few days earlier during his Digging Into The Data segment on his show, MLB NOW:

“It would be easy to think Pete Rose was overrated as a player. He led the National League in batting average three times. He also played on great teams in the pre-cable TV and pre-At Bat era, when making the playoffs on network TV was THE way to get famous, to get into the national spotlight.