Backstory: The Boy of Summer

This is a story that ran in our July 1985 issue. Small updates to align with AP style have been made to this version of the article.

We’re always closer to history than we are aware. The late Sixties, for instance, will be one of the most renowned times of the century, far more socially significant than Prohibition or the postwar years, and so many of us let them pass by — even those of us in the colleges then, going to classes like good kids and planning dates instead of demonstrations — without even getting a whiff of what it was all about.

We’re blinded by history when it happens, aware later that we should have stepped back and squinted. It’s the same with eternity’s people. Has anyone shaken the hand of John Glenn or Neil Armstrong? They will endure in the encyclopedias to the same extent that Charles Lindbergh and Wiley Post have, or greater. Can you imagine your father or grandfather having hobnobbed with Lindbergh? We all have the chance in our time.

We have a chance this very summer. In the rollicking, beer-stained archive reserved for baseball, we can take in Pete Rose.

History is serving us a hanging curve ball this time. We have the opportunity this summer — have had for the last twenty-three — to be party to a piece and character of lore that our kids and grandkids will only be able to imagine; and then not sharply, legend distorting as it does. Once more, we can see Pete Rose at the ballpark. If it were 1921, we could see Cobb, whose all-time hit-record Rose ought to break sometime before fall, or Ruth, who a half-century from now will be the only player with a larger legacy than Pete Rose.

What holds Rose apart from the other record-breakers of the last six decades is not his staggering statistical accomplishments, but the tens of millions who have seen him make his legend — more than 70 million seats have been sold to the games he has played in, which is only one of his countless unwritten records — and the singular way that he has made us aware of what he was watching.

 Rose, for all of his longevity, was not sneaked up on anybody, except perhaps himself. (After all, the 1978 season, in which he achieved his 3,000th hit and later broke the modern National League record with a 44-game hitting streak, he told one author, “I won’t be able to catch Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record. . . .”)

He has always worn his number 14 like a fire-red brand, romping as a colt and coming through like a quality quarter horse. When Bench was running out from under his mask to make the plays and Morgan was scurrying about the bases pell-mell, when Perez had the club on his shoulders, it was always Rose whose image remained for Cincinnati and those who admired or resented Cincinnati.

Pete Rose isn’t a ballplayer, he is a phenomenon; and not just your ordinary phenomenon, either, that flees no sooner than it lights. The Reds first let Rose go after that 1978 season, and it wasn’t until they signed him again last year, as player and manager this time, that Cincinnati forgave the ball club. The Reds’ attendance had boomed for the Seventies through ’78, but decreased every year thereafter until last season, when, with Rose on hand for the last six weeks, it rallied to exceed 1983.

This year’s was the first Opening Day sellout in three seasons. For six years prior, baseball had been the city’s estranged lover. The fans were at first outraged and ultimately dispirited that Rose was allowed to leave. A lady on the east side of town hung the general manager, Dick Wagner, in effigy. Half a decade later he was gone, the lost son was still the talk of the radio public.

Rose is more than a regional phenomenon — his baseball cards hold values two to twenty times those of other superstar players nationally — but one must understand something of Cincinnati to comprehend the hold that Rose has on it. Cincinnati is a town that is difficult to impress. For instance, it seemed to understand that Bench was the equal of any catcher who ever played the game but accepted this fact quite unwillingly until he prematurely retired; it has failed three hockey teams in the last decade. But once a fellow wiggles under its embrace, the city hugs and holds on like a starch-fed aunt. For all Cincinnati’s old-country, family ways, it’s blessed Rose through a divorce, paternity suits and other mischievous wonts it wouldn’t tolerate domestically, dismissing them as if a favored boy will be a boy.

To a traditional family, Rose represents the kind of man that is the drifting-thought adventure of women and the weak-moment envy of men. He is the man that fathers wish their sons to be and their daughters never to meet. He is “Son, I want you to watch Number 14. That’s Pete Rose.” And maybe later a poke in the ribs, if you know what I mean.”

Pete Rose drives a Rolls Royce and touches second base with his teeth. He doesn’t smoke or drink, but he would if it made him play better. He isn’t particularly good to his mother. For the last dozen years, she has lived in a trailer not far from the Reds’ training camp in Florida, and she comes to nearly every game he plays in the spring, but he has never been to the trailer. He gets her and her friends tickets and gives her money every Christmas. He gave her a poster of himself and signed it “Pete Rose.” He looks like her. But he isn’t the come-to-mama kind of German Jack Armstrong son that one would expect to be Cincinnati’s special strudel.

He’s a baseball player, and for that he owes not his mother but his father, who was built like Pete, played games the same way and was still on a semipro football team in his forties. Pete is papa’s boy. When Rose’s father walked through the front door of their house one day and suddenly died, Rose refused to step into the house again for months afterwards. It was his father, after all, who had made a switch-hitter of Rose, biting the knothole coach with the promise that the family would not take a vacation during the season if the coach made Pete switch-hit. It was his father who gave Pete Rose baseball; gave him everything. He was his dad’s, and in the same way his boys are his. Rose has a daughter, but she is not often in his company. His best friend is his son Petey. Petey’s batting is baseball. Now Rose has a baby son from his second and present wife, Carol, an arresting blonde woman who was a cheerleader for the Philadelphia Eagles. The baby’s name is Ty, as in Cobb.

The scope of Rose’s identity beyond baseball would seem to offer little of a redeeming nature, but this matters neither to Rose nor to those who swear by him. Other athletes and performers have not been granted such a general pardon. Carl Lewis won four gold medals at the Olympics, and fans wouldn’t forgive him for passing a turn in the long jump. Rose has, ironically, carved a mass appeal with a narrow blade, championing nothing but the disciplines of a baseball player and winning a fat chunk of the world.

Rose is not one of those landmark athletes who redefines a game; he only reaffirms it. Rose is baseball because he’s what we always thought baseball should be — a guy damning the circumstances and soiling his shirt. Any kid could not be Mickey Mantle in the subdivision’s vacant lot, hitting 500-foot home runs, but any kid could dive into a base and lose his hat and pretend to be Pete Rose, who was only a skinny little kid himself and who now holds baseball’s record for holding the most records. Rose is baseball because he embodies it shamelessly, and shamelessly is how he is admired.

There is a family man of crystalline convictions of Cincinnati’s west side who ranks Rose with Franklin Roosevelt and Woody Hayes. He has a framed picture of Rose tanning with his daughter when she was captain of the Western Hills High School cheerleaders. Recently, he was with his family at one of those sing-along dinner spots when the organist broke out with “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” The Cincinnatian didn’t sing along; instead, he shouted at the top of his voice, “Pete Rose! Pete Rose! Where he comes from, those two words are all the lyrics that baseball requires.”

Likewise, baseball is all that Rose requires. He has said he wishes his epitaph to read: “Pete Rose: All He Ever Wanted Was Base Hits. He Wanted To Hit Forever.” It’s what he always wanted and what he determined to do long before he signed with his uncle and two other Reds’ scouts for $5,000. He determined how to do it, as well. He would will it with all the muscles of his spirit. In the Western Hills High School yearbook of 1959, Pete Rose, who would not go to college and major in English, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

In the ensuing years, Rose has never wavered from that premise. He is known, of course, for sprinting to first base when he walks and diving headfirst into second, third and home — Mickey Mantle is allegedly the one who first called him “Charlie Hustle”—but Rose’s flexed effort is more elemental than that. He is the only player in baseball history who can hustle when he lets a pitch go by. In the field, he signals every out and celebrates the ending of every inning.

Rose’s legion, consequently, has postulated that unbridled enthusiasm should be received with same. In this, the fans are only following their hero-player’s lead. If Rose wasn’t a baseball player, he would respond to a guy like him the same way his fans do. As a player, he earns the adoration that it attends him. He demands it. And he wants it. He is aware that singles hitters don’t ordinarily make millions of dollars, and he has sagely, albeit sincerely, made himself the item that he is. While other players lord their status over the press, Rose talks baseball. When longtime baseball writer retired last year, Rose gave him a solid gold watch: It wasn’t Rose’s gratitude that was so extraordinary, but that he recognized what the man had done for him. He has instinctively understood baseball life-system between player and public.

There has never been a great player who could talk baseball like Pete Rose. Other players have been envied for what it is they do, even as a rookie in 1963, he was resented by the establishment players on the Reds and turned to his black teammates for companionship. But he never quit talking baseball, and talking it with astounding conviction and detail. It’s as if he has mentally videotaped every pitch and play from all of the 3,400-and-something games that he has been in (a Major League record, of course).

Rose may have been a scholastic deadbeat at Western Hills High, but at the stadium, he is da Vinci, applying his instincts to the study of everything in sight. As a player, he always eyed the game like a manager, from the top step, holding a towel all the while in the event of a wild pitch, so he could wave it at his teammate base runners. As he watched, he saw the shortstop cheat to the left on a curve ball; he noticed how fast the right fielder switched to his throwing hand. Pitchers were his thesis. His strike zone was a computer bank.

The data reflects the very intelligence of Rose’s hitting. He hits as he learns pitchers and is consequently able to anticipate. He has not done well in All-Star games, where he is frequently seeing a pitcher from the other league for the first time. He has hit poorly in early games of the World Series, but his average rises for each later game as the opponents become familiar. He is a terror in the National League playoffs, facing veteran pitchers that he has seen all season. But, it was a rookie, Larry McWilliams of Atlanta, who started the game that ended Rose’s hitting streak in ’78.

They say — in fact, Rose himself says — that his will and mental application have made a Hall of Famer out of a player with little natural ability, but that argument turns on the definition chosen for natural ability. It can’t be disputed that other players have superior strength, speed and coordination — there was more than one prospect on his high school team — but Rose, as did Cobb, has native assets that others can’t duplicate. Cobb was driven by a Georgia background that he was fiercely determined to outstrip. Rose, too, was an other-side-of-the-tracks kid, but his motivation isn’t an angry one. He was introduced early to a game and a way of playing it, and he possesses the insight and energy to carry through without halting. The enthusiasm and mental might are Rose’s special skills, his munificent natural abilities.

It is too early to determine, of course, but in his few months of Major League managing, it seems that his same instinctive acumen will make him exceptional in that end of the game as well. When he came on the scene last August, Reds veterans Dave Concepcion and Cesar Cedeno swiftly regained their youths. At the same time, Rose turned to rookie pitchers who proceeded to win for him. He hired a pitching coach, Jim Kaat, who, in the course of a spring, made new men of beleaguered big-leaguers. He hired a hitting coach, Billy DeMars, who began to make Nick Esasky into the power hitter the Reds desperately needed. And he managed to get to the effort-nerve of every player on the squad. It was simple for him, really. He said what he believed, with the force of how much he believed it, and then he spoke to each man individually, the way he wished to be spoken to. He had to cut players who didn’t deserve to be cut, but he told them why, and they bought it. Nobody had ever told them why before.

By the end of his first spring training as manager, Rose had the team and the town in such a pitch as they hadn’t been since he left. Opening Day was delayed twice for snow, and though it all, the city was full of what a splendid spring afternoon it was. Rose was two for three with three RBIs.

In the exhibition season, he batted an incredible .611, but the man was 44 in April, and nobody expects him to be the batting star anymore. That is, unless the situation calls for it — such as the one on Opening Day. The game was scoreless in the bottom of the fifth inning, with the sky threatening and the Reds needing a run to win if the game was going to be called. With two outs, Eric Davis doubled to put runners on second and third. The next batter, naturally, was Rose. He took a couple of pitches first, the drama building, and then drilled a double down the line in left.

There hadn’t been any reasonable doubt about what he would do. It was as if the moment — the whole game — existed only for the purpose of Pete Rose’s legend. The snow whooshed in as soon as Rose did his thing, and the game was stopped for a while. It did resume later, in order that Rose deliver another run-scoring single in the seventh and then remove himself for a pinch-runner as the crowd stood.

It was one of those custom-made moments in which Pete Rose reminds us that we are watching one of the ballplayers of history. He isn’t the greatest player who ever lived, although he deserves to be, but just then — as he stood safe at first, a run in and the home crowd on its feet — it looked as though Rose might pass Cobb by the Fourth of July and go on to hit forever.

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