Rose, Pete 1942-

American Decades | Date: 2001

ROSE, PETE 1942-

Fallen baseball superstar

"Charlie Hustle."

Pete Rose was named Player of the Decade for his exceptional and inspiring play in the 1970s, when he collected more hits (2,045) and scored more runs (1,068) than anyone else in the major leagues. As an integral cog in the famous Cincinnati Big Red Machine, Rose played baseball with unbridled passion and intensity. He ran to first base on walks and slid into bases headfirst. He stretched singles into doubles and challenged his teammates to do likewise. Though the name "Charlie Hustle" was intended to be derisive, Rose embraced it. According to Ron Fimrite of Sports Illustrated, "He seemed to have come from an earlier time when professionals always played hard, and out of joy, not greed." Appearances, however, can be deceptive. Columnist George Will described Rose as "a man utterly defined by his vocation—perhaps too much so. The melancholy example of Rose shows that people with particularly narrow tunnel vision have no peripheral vision for adult responsibilities." By the beginning of the 1980s, advancing age had not significantly diminished Rose's skills, and he continued to play aggressive, intelligent baseball. In 1980, his second season with the Philadelphia Phillies after sixteen with the Reds, the thirty-nine-year-old Rose paced the National League (NL) in doubles (42) and helped the Phillies win their first World Series. The following strike-shortened year Rose rapped his 3,631st hit to pass Stan Musial as the NL's all-time hit leader, led the NL in hits (140)—the oldest player ever to do so—and batted .325. Two years later Rose again helped the Phillies reach the World Series. The oldest starting player in Series history, Rose hit .313 in the fall classic. In 1984, playing for the Montreal Expos, Rose tallied hit number 4,000 and collected 100 hits for the twenty-second straight year, a major league record. Before the end of the 1984 season Rose would find himself back in Cincinnati, his hometown, as the Reds' player-manager. The next year he would finally chase down an improbable dream.

4,192

The 1985 season was Rose's twenty-third year in the majors. Despite his many records, the single most impressive accomplishment still lay in front of him. After a five-month nationwide hit watch, on 11 September, before a hometown crowd at Riverfront Stadium, Rose stroked a first-inning single to left center. His 4,192nd major-league career hit, it broke Ty Cobb's career record of 4,191, which had stood since 1928. It was a monumental feat, a testament to consistency, endurance, and desire. Reds fans cheered him for seven minutes. Rose cried on first base. After the game Rose said, "I'm not smart enough to really have the words to describe my feelings." When he finished his career the next year, he had collected more hits (4,256), played in more games (3,562), been to bat more times (14,053), amassed more singles (3,215), and had more 200-hit seasons (10) than anyone else in major-league history. He set thirty-four major-league and NL records. "But it wasn't so much the record-busting that made Rose such an appealing national icon," wrote Fimrite, "it was the sheer gusto with which he played the game, the belly-sliding, glove-banging intensity he brought to the ballpark every day."

Disgrace

After retiring as a player Rose continued to manage the Reds. Early in 1988 in a game against the New York Mets Rose twice shoved umpire Dave Pallone during an argument over a close play at home plate. Pallone tossed Rose from the game, and Reds fans bombarded the field with debris for fifteen minutes. For his own safety Pallone was forced to leave the game. The next day NL president A. Bartlett Giamatti suspended Rose for thirty days and fined him $10,000. It was the most severe penalty for an on-field transgression in baseball history, and it foreshadowed things to come. When gambling allegations hounded Rose in the spring of 1989, he quickly became an object of national ridicule. For many the name Charlie Hustle took on new meaning. After a lengthy—and some said inconclusive—investigation, first-year baseball commissioner Giamatti was convinced that Rose had bet on baseball and thus had damaged the integrity of the game. "Certainly Rose may have bet on baseball. His lawyers are slick and his denial skill is most ornate," wrote writer Roger Kahn. "It is impossible, of course, to prove the negative, that Rose did not bet [on] baseball, but it seems important here for both sides to go beyond assurances and pleas of 'trust me.'" Late in the season the issue came to a head. Rose accepted Giamatti's lifetime suspension from baseball with the right to apply for reinstatement in a year. Said Giamatti; "The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode. One of the game's greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. It will come as no surprise that like any institution composed of human beings, this institution will not always fulfill its highest aspirations. I know of no earthly institution that does. But this one, because it is so much a part of our history as a people, and because it has such a purchase on our national soul, has an obligation to the people for whom it's played." Eight days later the fifty-one-year-old Giamatti died of a heart attack, which many argued was at least partially the result of the strain from the Rose controversy. "Pete Rose hardly seemed the stuff of Aristotelian poetics," Fimrite noted. "Ordinary in appearance and demeanor, sometimes crude, occasionally even vulgar, he certainly didn't reflect the Greek ideal of the Great Man. But through a combination of unabashed enthusiasm, sly intelligence and unshakable self-confidence, he did, in fact, achieve a form of greatness. And he had within him the Aristotelian 'fatal flaw' that led inevitably to his tragic fall."

Sources:

Ron Fimrite, "Pete Rose," Sports Illustrated, 81 (19 September 1994): 62-63;

Roger Kahn, Games We Used to Play: A Lover's Quarrel With the World of Sport (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992);

James Reston Jr., Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.