Pete Rose: A Baseball Icon With Feet of Clay
I have been marooned without electricity for almost a week (thank you – not! – Helene) and yet somehow the word reached me that Pete Rose, professional baseball’s all-time hits leader, passed away on September 30 at age 83. Rose’s passing triggered a ton of memories from this longtime baseball fan.
Never during his playing career was Rose’s intense competitive nature more pronounced than in the 1970 All-Star game.
I recall finding his rookie baseball card in a package of bubblegum in 1963. Pete won the National League Rookie of the Year Award that year, so there was already a buzz around him. Alas, the shoebox stuffed full with my baseball card collection was thrown out while I was away at college.
I saw Rose play dozens of times on television — All-star games, playoffs, World Series — and finally saw him play in person in 1979 when I was teaching in St. Louis and Pete was playing with the Phillies. He was mesmerizing to watch. If there was one definitive characteristic to the way Pete Rose played baseball, it was his intensity. If he drew a walk, he ran, not trotted, to first base. Baseball fans dubbed him “Charlie Hustle.”
Every time he went to the plate, his enthusiasm and concentration were palpable. You could tell that he relished the one-on-one battle between pitcher and batter, and he was going to do his utmost to win that competition: 4,256 times, Pete won that competition by getting a base hit.
The immortal Ty Cobb was the only other major league baseball player to exceed 4,000 hits. Cobb has 4,191 hits, which he was able to accumulate while batting 2,787 times fewer than Rose. Cobb, of course, holds the record for highest career batting average — .367. That is a truly incredible feat, for there have been only 117 individual single season records of .367 or higher (14 of them by Cobb himself) in the last 124 seasons, and yet Cobb averaged .367 over a span of 24 seasons.
The highest batting average Pete ever had in a single season was .348, and his career average was .303. That was excellent for the era in which he played, and he won three batting titles during his career. He also had a 44-consecutive game hitting streak in 1978 — a streak so unusual that it was getting headlines in newspapers in Mexico City, where I happened to be at the time.
Pete Rose’s 4,256 hits is a staggering achievement when you put it in perspective. Getting at least 200 hits in a season is considered a great achievement. Babe Ruth did it three times, Willie Mays once, and the great Ted Williams never. Cobb did it nine times, and Pete Rose and Ichiro Suzuki share the record of ten such seasons. Ringing up 4,256 hits is the equivalent of hitting at least 200 hits in a season 21 times. That’s mind-boggling. It surely was made possible only by Rose’s tenacity and intensity. He simply loved baseball and loved to compete, and he excelled at it for more than two decades.
Rose the Competitor
Never during his playing career was Rose’s intense competitive nature more pronounced than in the 1970 All-Star game. Pete scored the winning run for the National League in extra innings by barreling into catcher Ray Fosse so hard that Fosse never hit for power again and ended up retiring young a couple of years later. On the one hand, it seemed like such a waste — after all, an All-Star game is an exhibition game — but to Pete Rose, a game is a game, and the only way to play it is to go all-out to win.
Rose, by the way, was elected to be a starter in the All-Star game at five different positions — first, second, and third bases, and left and right fields. And it wasn’t because Rose was a weak fielder and his manager had to find a place to put him in the field so that he could get Pete’s bat into the lineup. Rose won a couple of Gold Gloves for fielding excellence during his career. No other major leaguer has shown such masterful versatility to be named an All-Star at five positions.
Rose’s competitive nature had a darker aspect. There may be a variety of opinions about the psychology of a compulsive gambler, but my theory is that Pete was so obsessed with competition that he gambled on baseball games to find another way to beat the person on the other side.
It was his gambling habit, of course, that got Pete banned from baseball for life, and that explains why major league baseball’s all-time hits leader is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
Now it is time to bid farewell to an American sports legend. Pete Rose will forever occupy a special spot in this history of baseball as a tragic hero — a man whose competitive nature both propelled him to the top and then brought him down. RIP, Pete.
READ MORE from Mark W. Hendrickson:
Shohei Ohtani: Major League Baseball’s Supernova
The post Pete Rose: A Baseball Icon With Feet of Clay appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.