Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (10 page)

Fosse and McDowell had of course hoped to stay and talk baseball for awhile—young Fosse might have had a few more questions to ask Pete about Bench, the catcher to whom Fosse was often compared—but instead they traded glances with one another and with their wives, the whole setup suddenly awkward now, and one of the players piped up, “Um, Karolyn maybe we’d better get going too.”

Now it was the next night at Riverfront and there were two outs in the 12th inning and the game appeared destined to stretch longer still, into the morning hours. Clyde Wright, in his second inning on the mound, had set down five straight batters, four on ground balls. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Rose told Grabarkewitz just before going up to bat. “I’m going to hit a double and you’re going to knock me in.”

“For chrissakes, can I get somethin’ good to hit this time?” he joked to Fosse behind the plate as he stepped in. Rose did not double, but on a 2–0 count delivered a single to centerfield. Then Grabarkewitz pulled a single to left—he said he hit a slider, Wright swore it was the heat—and Rose advanced to second. That set things up for Hickman, the Cubs out-fielder having the season of his life. “I had never been so nervous before a game,” he would say later.

Wright threw a pitch belt high, outer half of the plate, and Hickman lashed it on a hard line drive into the outfield. The ball skipped on the new artificial turf toward Amos Otis in center. Now Rose was churning hard, approaching third base and then turning for home, sprinting down the line. He began to pitch forward, about to dive headfirst into home plate, a play few other players, fearing injury, would dare, but which for Rose was part of his job, a signature play. Except there was not any place for Rose to slide. Fosse stood straddling the base path, blocking off home plate, waiting for the throw from Otis. The ball had been hit so hard that they had a decent chance, Fosse figured, to get Rose out.

There is a story bright in the annals of Harry Rose that during his years as a semipro football star he was invited onto a local TV station to be
in-terviewed and to demonstrate the art of tackling. A wooden chair had been set up in the studio and the thought was that Harry, who showed up to the interview in full uniform and gear, would approach the chair from this angle and that, reveal some technique and explain certain nuances, like when it is better to hit a man high or low, perhaps. Instead, when his cue came Harry took a running start and hit the chair as if it were trying to score, shattering it completely. Wood pieces everywhere. The staff at the station agog.

Now much of the crowd at Riverfront was standing as Rose hurtled toward home. Harry leaned forward. Karolyn whistled and stomped at her seat and in both dugouts players were rapt. Rose was all mission coming down the line. Five feet, 11 inches, 194 pounds, muscular through the shoulders and chest, thick through the hips and thighs: He had a body capable of enormous leverage, a cruel body. Fosse, at 6' 2", was crouched only slightly and looking toward the outfield for the throw from Otis, about to arrive. “There was never any doubt that there would be a collision,” says Claude Osteen, the National League pitcher who watched from the dugout. “That was the play in front of us. We all saw it.”

Rose, his head down—he had stumbled slightly after realizing a slide wouldn’t work—drove straight into Fosse, left shoulder to left shoulder, left knee to left knee, just before the baseball came in. Fosse never got his mitt on it, being hit so hard that he tumbled, literally, head over heels. Rose, as he tumbled himself, reached out and touched home plate with his right hand as he landed. The winning run was in. He stood quickly, scooping up his helmet, and leaned down immediately to ask Fosse whether he was O.K. The catcher was on his knees, badly dazed. Dietz, who had been beyond the plate waving Rose in, embraced Pete, helped him limp away, and then others came to congratulate him—Clemente and Willie McCovey. Leo Durocher, the Cubs’ manager who was coaching third base, had been clapping and whooping nonstop, ecstatic like the rest.

In the National League locker room the celebration continued with everyone especially lauding Pete. (“There were so many great players in there,” Grabarkewitz recalls. “It just felt like a really special team and a really big win.”) Pete was thrilled with how the game had gone and although he said, “I didn’t want to hurt Fosse,” he was unapologetic about the collision, as were all of those around him. “If anyone had expected Rose to come into the plate any other way than he did they’ve never seen him play,” said Mets and National League coach Joe Pignatano.

“Well, that’s football,” said Fosse over on the American League side, his left shoulder stiff and throbbing. “Some guys on the bench thought he could have gone around me. I don’t know. It’s the way he runs. He’s got to score it anyway he can, I guess.”

Fosse was hurt—a fractured shoulder as it turned out—although he was being widely hailed for the play. The way Fosse had blocked the plate and had “done all he could,” as some accounts read, to prevent the winning run, had won the Cleveland catcher immediate and considerable renown. “Now,” wrote
Sports Illustrated
of Fosse a couple of weeks after the collision, “his constituency [is] nationwide.”

Three decades after that play at the plate, the most iconic single play in the history of the Major League All-Star Game, you still find people— American League fans invariably, fans from Boston and Cleveland especially—who say they haven’t forgiven Rose for what he did to Fosse, their memories perhaps worn or their view selective or their willingness to be guided by logic and reason overcome by certain feelings in their gut. These are invariably people who also hold other views on Rose.
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The case that Rose should not have crashed into Fosse usually devolves into two specious points: first, that because of the shoulder injury Fosse was never the same player. And although he batted .297 the rest of that year, and made the All-Star Game again the next season and appeared in an average of more than 135 games a year from 1971 through ’73, it may well be true that the collision, along with what Fosse relates as a lack of proper medical attention afterward, helped derail a potentially excellent career. Fosse continued playing despite being hurt (he also suffered several other significant injuries over the years) and his production fell markedly after ’70. He was part of two World Series championships with the A’s and appeared in his last big league games in ’79, with the Brewers. Since ’86 Fosse has worked as a commentator on A’s radio and television broadcasts. “My career completely changed once I was hit [by Rose],” he said recently.

More common is the argument, and this one could be categorized as inane, that Rose should have approached the play differently because this was an “exhibition game,” that is, a game that did not count for his team’s position in the standings. It’s a narrow way to define a game. The Reds won the National League West by 14½ games in 1970. The Indians finished 32 games out of first place in the American League East. For neither team that season was any single regular season game “more important” than the All-Star Game.

In fact that All-Star Game was for some players (and both Rose and Fosse then fell into this category) the most exciting and meaningful game of their careers at that point. There were long, stand-alone special sections in newspapers across the country dedicated to the game. More people watched it than any game that year. You might well argue that the game-winning single was the biggest hit that Jim Hickman got in his 13 years as a major leaguer. “It didn’t feel like any exhibition game that I’ve ever played in,” says Joe Morgan.

In terms of money spent and money earned and in terms of attention paid and most relevantly in terms of its value to the participants themselves, that All-Star Game was extremely more “important” than, say, the regular-season Dodgers-Reds game three weeks earlier at Crosley Field. In that one Maury Wills bowled over Bench at the plate to score. That was the way baseball was (and still often is) played, and certainly the way Pete Rose played it. In an actual exhibition game earlier in 1970, against the Mets in Tampa, he had slid home headfirst to score the winning run. Had Fosse not been blocking the plate in the All-Star Game—his doing so without having the ball in his possession, incidentally, may have been illegal
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—Rose would have slid in head-first then too. No collision, no real injury risk to anyone but himself.

Fosse’s stature was lifted by the collision and it remains the incident that he is most closely associated with, far more so than any of his accomplishments as a player. Decades later during autograph sessions in Cooperstown or Las Vegas, Rose would comment on this, saying, “All I did was make Ray Fosse famous.” And although Rose is rightly mystified by criticism of the play, there is a certain smugness in saying a thing like that, an unseemliness given the way that Fosse’s career slipped. “No one would have hardly heard of him if it wasn’t for me,” Rose adds. Whatever measure of truth that statement contains, it seems a thoughtless thing to say.

The collision elevated Pete as well. The stories that so many casual fans across the nation had heard about the hunger with which Cincinnati’s Charlie Hustle played the game were true! He really was all that, really was about laying himself on the line and trying to win at any cost. He showed it. “When we got back to Los Angeles, all anyone wanted to talk about was Pete,” said Osteen. Rose was given an ovation by his teammates when the Reds reassembled two days after the game. He wound up missing a few days with a badly bruised left knee, his kneecap full of blood and grotesquely swollen by that winning play.

THE STORY of how Bold Face Park, the field down by the Anderson Ferry where Rose often played baseball as a boy, got its name, is as follows: For many years the area was controlled by a Mohawk Indian tribe led by a chief named Bold Face. In the autumn of 1790 a white settler named Jacob Wetzel came to this park, which was then a clearing in the woods, and sat resting upon a log. It was hunting season, which meant that Wetzel was armed and also that the Mohawks were especially protective of their land, upon which wild turkeys roamed.

As Wetzel sat, Chief Bold Face emerged from the trees and a confrontation ensued. The two traded missed rifle shots and then engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand battle. Each man drew a long hunting knife. Chief Bold Face began to get the better of the struggle, and he landed on top of Wetzel as they rolled to the ground—poised for the kill until Wetzel’s dog suddenly flew into the fray, closing its teeth on Chief Bold Face’s neck. With the reprieve, Wetzel plunged his knife into Chief Bold Face, wounding him fatally. Before any tribe members could descend upon him, Wetzel fled, escaping in a canoe down a creek and into a protected cove. He would hear the mournful wails of the Mohawks as they stood over their fallen leader. And he would live to tell the tale. It’s the kind of legend that sticks.

For 180 years, more or less, that area—later cleared and groomed and later still outfitted with picnic tables and ball fields and playground equipment—was known and labeled as Bold Face Park. Late in that August of 1970, about six weeks after Rose had won the All-Star Game for the National League in Cincinnati, the city’s recreation commission held a ceremony announcing the renaming of the park: It would be called Pete Rose Field, the earth there now being assigned to a new American legend, himself a native. Tourists coming to Cincinnati sometimes drove down to have a look.

Rose would captain the Reds to the World Series in 1970, the first of the Big Red Machine era. He led the National League with 205 hits, 15 of them home runs. In Cincinnati, Rose was a uniting figure in fractious times. Hippies would gather in those days at Fountain Square downtown, the anti-Vietnam feelings and the anti-establishment feelings rife and explicit. They gathered in tasseled vests and old jeans, and let their hair hang down and smoked pot and kissed one another.

Baseball may have been the establishment game, but Cincinnati was a baseball town no matter how long you wore your hair. At the fountain one could hear the hippies talking about the Reds in the pennant race and talking as well in the most glowing and appreciative terms about Pete Rose. It did not matter that Rose had what Reds manager Sparky Anderson called the last crew cut in America, nor that he played with an aggressiveness no peacenik could truly countenance. He was real and authentic and he stood for something. A reporter in from San Francisco late that season heard one shaggy kid suggest that Rose had made a societal impact on a level with one of their counter-culture goddesses, Janis Joplin. The way that Pete Rose played baseball could blow a hippie’s mind.

On the eve of the postseason—Cincinnati would sweep the Pirates in the National League Championship Series, then lose the World Series to the Orioles in five—an article written by that same reporter, Wells Twombly, appeared in
The Sporting News
under the headline
IS THERE REALLY A PETE ROSE?
Twombly wondered whether Pete was really just “a mass of wires and transistors underneath that life-like skin, just like Abraham Lincoln at the New York World’s Fair.” Who else but a robot after all could go, go, go all the time the way Pete did, never slowing and all the time producing 200 hits a season, a figure who would “run right through catchers [and] never say a bad word about the sport.”

“A player like Rose comes along only once in a lifetime,” is the way Anderson framed it. Maybe, Twombly’s joke continued, Anderson was being literal when he said that Rose, with his attitude, was “absolutely unreal.”

Rose was then a little more than 1,500 hits into his career. He had put together just six of his eventual 15 seasons of batting better than .300. He had not yet won an MVP award, or a World Series. He would still play in 12 more All-Star Games. Yet there was already an acknowledgment, inside of the game and outside of it, that Rose was a player for the ages.

“Tests ought to be made,” Twombly wrote approaching the conclusion of his droll piece. “If he’s human, he ought to be shipped right to Cooperstown.”