Pete Rose in Repose
Pete Rose’s career-defining moment did not come at the 1970 All-Star Game when he barreled over Ray Fosse at home plate to win the contest for the National League. Rather, it involved another catcher ten seasons later. In the deciding game six of the World Series, Bob Boone dropped a Frank White foul ball only to see Pete Rose, backing him up from first base, catch it to make the crucial out. It helped the Philadelphia Phillies defeat the Kansas City Royals to win their first World Series in nearly a century of play.
“I attacked my job no differently than my father attacked his job at the bank,” he told an interviewer in 1985.
A Little Leaguer first baseman backs up his catcher as Rose did. In the majors, many first basemen might yield to the catcher and just assume he makes the out. Rose relied on the fundamentals on every play. He could not be sure a former Gold Glove winner would catch a somewhat routine fly ball. So, he backed him up.
Yes, one best understands a man with 4,256 hits not through any at-bat but through this play in the field in which he demonstrated a commitment to baseball fundamentals and hustle. And Rose displayed such qualities at numerous positions, playing more than three full seasons at first, second, third, right field, and left field. He could not pitch or hit for power. He pretty much did everything else.
And he did it the way coaches teach players and not the way athletes perform after big contracts erode the basics. Rose competed the way the blue-collar people watching him from the stands would if given the chance. This explains their commitment to him after banishment from the game, jail, and now death.
Pete Rose died, tellingly, in Las Vegas earlier this week. His last public appearance came, tellingly, at a card show a day earlier in Nashville. Rose’s signature, approaching John Hancock’s in its ubiquity, ranks low in value because he kept wielding the pen at such shows. And Las Vegas seems the one American city surely to embrace a notorious gambler.
Well, another city holds Pete Rose in a tighter embrace than Las Vegas.
“Pete was about twelve years old when he got hired to work on the boat,” Keith O’Brien writes in the 2024 biography Charlie Hustle of his subject’s work on the Ohio River. “The ferry operator, Mr. Kottmyer, paid Pete a menial wage to dart amid cars and collect the crossing fares — thirty-five cents for automobiles, five cents for passengers.”
Rose signed into the Reds system for a measly $7,000, worked for $2.83 an hour loading and unloading freight cars in the offseason, and hit 30 triples — the ultimate hustle hit — during his 1961 stint in the Florida State League. From such a CV, Reds minor league manager Johnny Vander Meer jotted down of the prospect: “Excellent habits.”
Vander Meer’s observations presumably concerned the baseball diamond. Off of it, Rose characteristically first set eyes on his wife at Cincinnati’s River Downs, often played a Tampa triple header (horses, dogs, jai alai) after a morning spring training session, and parlayed his gambling prowess to serve as the fill-in on The NFL Today for Jimmy the Greek when the handicapper fell ill.
Unfortunately, that degenerate gambler Pete Rose — the guy frantically calling his bookie at five minutes to one on a Sunday afternoon to get his bets in — we remembered in his passing. Even Big Red Machine teammate Johnny Bench spoke at length on the gambling.
Did anyone discuss Frank White’s eighth-inning popout to the first baseman in the 1980 World Series? It came about for the same reason the later ignominy did: the competitor, for better and worse, embraced a lot of the same habits as the guys in the stands.
Baseball’s hit king described himself as his father living in the succeeding generation with bigger and better opportunities.
“I attacked my job no differently than my father attacked his job at the bank,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “He never missed a day at work. He went on Saturdays. He wouldn’t leave until something was completed, he wouldn’t leave at 5 o’clock.”
Pete Rose wouldn’t leave the game after more than a quarter century in it. It took a Major League Baseball investigation to force him to go home. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the game’s greatest ambassador while he played acted as its greatest cautionary tale in repose.
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