Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (12 page)

The parade runs maybe two-tenths of a mile heading east from near Doubleday Field to the doors of the Hall of Fame itself. Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the Hall’s board—as well as the most powerful person in Cooperstown—and Jeff Idelson, the Hall’s president, ride in the lead truck. They were followed in 2012 by a pickup carrying Tim McCarver and Bob Elliott, media members who shortly before had been honored with lifetime achievement awards. Then came the players themselves, traveling in the order in which they were inducted. It was about 6:30 in the evening and the bronze sun cast its light on each player’s face. Here was Whitey Ford, age 83, and Ozzie Smith who’d turned 57, and Robbie Alomar at 44. Some players had their wives beside them.

“Hey Eck, we got to ya in 1990!” a man in a Reds cap bellowed to Dennis Eckersley, whose Oakland A’s were beaten by Cincinnati in that World Series. Eckersley smiled, nodded and saluted. “Hang in there, Tony,” a woman called to Tony Gwynn, the revered Padre who has battled cancer of the mouth. “We’re with you.” There were 43 pickups in the procession, the last two of which carried the Santos and then the Larkins, the newest inductees, who throughout the route were engulfed in cheers.

At the parade’s end a reception followed inside the Hall of Fame, held for the players and their families and friends, as well as for people connected with the Hall of Fame or with Major League Baseball, along with other guests who had some kind of in. Waiters held trays of champagne and bubbly water, and there was a bar set up at the far end of the plaque gallery. Everyone was very well-dressed. Plates of hors d’oeuvres soon started coming around.

Space was tight—it was awfully crowded—and some of the players looked for ways to find a bit of room. They mingled in the gift shop, they mingled upon the stairs. Bob Gibson and Phil Niekro exchanged greetings on a rampway. Red Schoendienst stood in a corner beside Lou Brock. Nearby someone chatted with the umpire Doug Harvey, whose hair appeared as thick and paper-white as it had been during his final seasons of ordaining pitches as balls or strikes. All the ballplayers still call Harvey God.

An area of the Hall of Fame had been set aside for Larkin and the Santos, so that they could sit and could be easily found by well-wishers hoping to share a few words. Later that night there would be another, separate gathering in Larkin’s honor, a private party on Pioneer Street hosted by the Reds.

“You should come,” Bob Castellini Jr., a son of Reds CEO Bob Castellini, had said to Pete Rose that afternoon. But Rose declined. “That’s a circus we don’t need, me being there,” he said. “It’ll take away from Barry.” Anyway, Rose added, he had gotten up early that morning and flown up to Buffalo to sign autographs at a sports card and merchandise store—his appearance there had sold out—then come back to do the afternoon session at Safe At Home. (As long as there is money to be made Rose would work every day if he could.) His all-important bedtime was beckoning. “I might just be goin’ upstairs after this,” Rose said. Castellini nodded. “O.K., yes. Thanks, Pete.”

So Rose didn’t go to any of the parties that weekend, but several players he knew well did. That included three men who for many years in the prime of their respective lives spent every day of the baseball season together, and with Rose, making history. Being in Cooperstown provided a chance for another reunion of sorts for Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, each a Hall of Famer and each a member of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine.

Chapter 8

Rose in the Machine

T
HE TRUE Reds historians, the connoisseurs, say that of all the memorable plays and dramatic sequences that elevated the Big Red Machine, that incomparable team of the 1970s, the single most important play originated not in the batter’s box but on the base paths and resulted not in a run being scored but rather in the Reds making an out. For all the crucial playoff home runs hit by Johnny Bench (the ninthinning clouts against the Pirates, the Mets, the Phillies and the Yanks) and for all the outlandish production provided by Joe Morgan, who over the course of back-to-back MVP seasons reached base an astonishing 45.6% of the time, scored 220 runs, drove in 205, stole 127 bases and, for good measure, won two Gold Gloves at second base—for all of that the play that defined the Reds in the way those ballplayers, and certainly their fans, liked being defined was an aggressive, fundamentally sound, game-turning, straight-on hustling slide into second base in the sixth inning of the deciding game of the 1975 World Series.

“A lot of people agree that Tony Perez’s home run in that game was the most important home run in Reds history,” says Chris Eckes, the chief curator of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum. “And Perez would never have gotten the chance to hit that home run if not for Pete Rose breaking up a double play.”

It was Oct. 22, 1975, Game 7 against the Red Sox at Fenway Park and one day after Game 6, the classic 12-inning game about which paeans have been sung and books written, as famous a World Series game as any ever played, a game that was tied for Boston by Bernie Carbo’s three-run homer with two outs in the eighth inning, then won for Boston by Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 12th, a ball that soared toward Fenway’s leftfield foul pole—high enough, far enough…and waved finally and forever fair by Fisk’s gyrating body 310 feet away. The inning before, game tied 6–6, Rose had been hit by a pitch and upon arriving at first base said to the Red Sox’s Carl Yastrzemski, “This is the greatest game I ever played in!”

Rose said that same thing again and again during Game 6, to whoever on either team would hear it, and even in the postgame clubhouse, where his joy at being involved in those spellbinding 12 innings proved undiminished by the loss. The Reds would simply win the next day, Rose was sure, and wasn’t it wonderful that the 1975 season would now provide a Game 7 and one more day to play the sport he loved. “You’d want the World Series to go on for 30 games if it could,” he said.

Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson was somewhat less exuberant in the aftermath of Game Six, and thus unsettled by Rose’s glee. “Big Red Machine my ass!” Sparky used to snarl after a loss, glowering at his stable of stars. “We ain’t done nothing yet.” As far as Sparky was concerned the Reds had let Game 6 and surely the Series slip away. There was nothing “great” about it. In Game 7, when Boston took a 3–0 lead in the third inning and held that lead into the sixth, Sparky kept shuffling uneasily around the dugout, his hands jammed into the pockets of his warmup jacket. He grimaced and looked down and exhaled through puffed cheeks. He took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. The Reds could easily lose this deciding game, and then what? Would all of the success, all the fanfare around his team be for naught?

Lose this one and suddenly Sparky’s résumé might look, well, a little empty at the top. Four winning seasons in the minors had brought him to the Reds in 1970 at age 36, the youngest manager in the big leagues. Now he was 41, his hair white as foul-line chalk. He presided over one of the great offensive teams in history, a team laden with high-priced players and, through 1975, a team that had won more than 60% of its regular-season games under him. Yet these Reds were still title-less. Cincinnati lost in the World Series in ’70 and again in ’72, got beaten in the first round by the underdog Mets in ’73 and missed the playoffs altogether in ’74. Now it was ’75 and after going 108–54 in the regular season and sweeping the Pirates in the National League playoffs, the measure of this team had come down to this single Game 7. Lose it and maybe Bob Howsam, the powerful team president newly staked to a contract extension, would see fit to make changes. Maybe Sparky gets let go. Maybe the legacy of the Big Red Machine becomes something different entirely. Five innings complete and the Reds had yet to score a run in the game, and Bill Lee was still sharp on the hill for the Sox. Rose led off the sixth inning with a hard ground ball single through the right side.

YOU COULD say, and you would be right, that Rose wasn’t even the best player on the best of those Cincinnati teams. The Greatest Red of All Time—sure, by the mid 1970s Rose had that nailed—but in the peak years Morgan was more dynamic and Bench more powerful and both were far more conspicuous in their athleticism. Truth is, Rose could look kind of dumpy out there.

There was no question however that Rose, Captain Pete, winner of the 1973 National League MVP award, was the team’s most indispensable player. Not just for his exceptional consistency—the 200-plus hits, the 110 runs scored, the on-base percentage around .400 year after year after year—but also for his boundlessness, his commitment, his yea-saying way. He goaded and prodded, he heeded every nuance of the game. “He rubs off on you,” said Morgan, a borderline All-Star over six full seasons with Houston who became a Hall of Fame player after joining the Reds in ’72. Years later Morgan would add this: “Every day I got to have my locker next to Pete Rose and that meant that every day was a good day. You could not help but feed off the excitement he had, and off the way he approached, or really attacked, every game. He made me better. He made me a much, much better baseball player. If I hit .320 he would be so happy for me. Of course if I hit .320 he wanted to hit .330.”

Reds of every age and skill level sought to follow Rose’s lead, tried to abide by his work ethic as best they could. (Nobody could truly keep up.) Rose won their loyalty with the way he played and with the things he said. His self-referential chatter to the press, his blurting out that he was hitting .450 for the month so far, or his reminder to everyone that he had yet another 17-game hitting streak going, rarely passed without his also saying something complimentary about a teammate. Something generous and smart. Rose talked about ballplayers in a manner that made others appreciate them: There were not 10 guys in baseball history he would rather have up to bat with the game on the line than Tony Perez, Rose said. And he was happy to drop down in the batting order to make room for a young man who could run as well as Ken Griffey. He praised pitchers Clay Carroll and Don Gullett for their moxie when behind in the count. He lauded utility infielder Denis Menke for his steady glove. One thing he really appreciated about that Oklahoma farm boy Johnny Bench, Rose announced, was that “he moved to Cincinnati year-round, right away.” Rose knew Cincinnatians would like that about Bench too, of course, and that they would like that Rose had pointed it out. Most of all, though, what the citizenry liked best about those marvelous Reds teams was Pete Rose’s bustling blue-collar style. This was in the mid-1970s and some Cincinnatians were given to boast of the city’s heritage as, “the machine tool capital of the world.”

If Rose seemed to be in perpetual motion at the ballpark there was, at least, one situation in which he would invariably pause: When a new pitcher came into the game for the opposing team. Rose quieted himself and from the top of the dugout or with one knee on the grass, he watched the pitcher warm up, watched each pitch he threw and all the movements in between. Rose would keep watching intently—absorbing, digesting, plotting—as the pitcher faced his first Reds batter. He stared at the pitcher like Kant at his church steeple, you might say, assuming, that is, that Kant was staring so as to note every chip or toehold and, rather than ruminating upon the vagaries of life, was more pointedly assessing how best to climb the damn thing.

The 1975 World Series came at the end of a season that began like all the others for Rose: swinging the bat. When the Reds batting practice pitchers in spring training begged off after a while, fatigued, Rose would go hit in the cage. After a time his blistered hands would begin to bleed and then, as pitcher Ross Grimsley, a Red from ’71 to ’73, later remembered, “he would go inside, wrap them up with some tape, and go back out and hit some more. I never saw anyone else do it quite like that.”

HE COULD be a son of a bitch to play against, though. Unrelenting. “When you were playing in a game against Pete Rose you knew that you were playing in a game against Pete Rose,” is how the former Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey describes it. Says former Padre Kurt Bevacqua, “Frankly, it could be a pain in the ass.”

Rose would take an extra base on you if you ever let up. He’d kick the baseball from your glove if he got the chance. He would yell at pitchers from the batter’s box (to the feather-tossing Randy Jones: “Whyn’t you go warm up and then come back and throw a real pitch”) and after making an out he would cross in front of the mound screaming: “You’ve got nothin’! Nothin’!” Could have been a rookie out there pitching or Tom Seaver or Moses himself. “You got nothin’!” Rose would scream. He had nine uniforms at the start of the season and by June they’d all been stitched.

To his edge Pete brought a grin rather than a snarl. Thing was, if you were a baseball player, no matter who you played for, you were pretty much O.K. by him. He took an interest in you, knew not just your batting average but also how many doubles you had, and whether things were going well lately, hitting-wise. He’d tell you to keep your head up if you were slumping and if he had ever met your kid at the ballpark, he would ask about him later. He watched young players and gave them advice. Just as he did with Bud Harrelson when the shortstop stuck with the Mets in ’67. Pete came over and introduced himself, said he knew Harrelson could really pick it out there, but that maybe he should think about working with a slightly smaller glove, that it would help him get rid of the ball quicker. There was an intimacy to the suggestion, and it made sense, and Harrelson never forgot it.

The unshakable part of Rose was that he would angle to win in any way he could, even if the Reds were losing 9–2. That was the score in the third game of the National League playoffs against the Mets, Shea Stadium, 1973. Cincinnati had taken the opener at home when Rose’s home run off Seaver in the eighth tied the game 1–1, and Bench then hit one to win it in the ninth. The next day New York’s Jon Matlack shut the Reds down 5–0, and afterward Harrelson—a guy who hit about .235 most years—cracked to reporters that against Matlack the mighty Reds had “looked like
me
hitting.”

“Pete didn’t like that,” Morgan said to Harrelson on the field before Game 3 at Shea. “He’s going to use it to fire up the team.”

Fifth inning, Game 3, and the Reds were down by that 9–2 score to lefthander Jerry Koosman. For the Mets, Rusty Staub had hit one home run and then another and when he came up the third time Dave Tomlin, the Reds lefty, threw inside at him, just missed. “Then I flew out,” Staub recalls, “and afterward I went straight to Koosman and said, ‘Don’t hit anybody, don’t do it. We’re up big in this game. Don’t wake them up.’ But Koozy is Koozy, so the next inning he went after Pete. Didn’t hit him, just sent back a message with a close pitch.”

Rose did not much like being thrown at—“He doesn’t walk a guy all night but he’s in tight on me?” he groused—so he glared at Koosman and singled to centerfield. Now he was on first base with one out in the fifth, hating the score of the game, when Morgan hit a ground ball to John Milner at first base. Milner threw to Harrelson for one out and Harrelson threw back to Milner for another, and while the ball was in the air Rose came hard into second base, clipping Harrelson’s right leg and bowling him over. When Rose popped up he got his elbow higher than he needed to and into Harrelson’s cheek. Though the momentum from the play drove the two players several feet apart, Harrelson turned and cursed at Rose and Rose, the heavier of the two by more than 40 pounds, came back at him with an angry push, neck high. Harrelson grappled back and then, says Harrelson, “he just kind of lifted me up and laid me down to sleep.”

Suddenly they were down on the infield dirt rolling around “in this crazy cloud of dust” as Staub says. Players from both teams rushed out and joined the brawl. Everyone was out there, flailing and grabbing and yelling, the scene teetering on madness or perhaps already there. This was the event during which the Reds’ screw-loose pitcher Pedro Borbon took a bite—an actual, visible bite—out of the Mets cap belonging to Buzz Capra.

Mets fans, even with their team up handily on the favored Reds, were now in a heightened and ugly mood, and when the brawl had subsided and the Reds players came out to their positions, those fans threw things at Rose out in leftfield—eggs, apples, rubber balls, a lightbulb. Why the people had some of these items at the ballpark anyway was a puzzle. Then a full beer can sailed onto the field and a whiskey bottle landed too close. Pete started jogging in toward the dugout and Sparky stepped forward and waved his whole nine off the field. “You know,” Sparky said later, “Rose has given too much to the game for him to die in leftfield at Shea Stadium.”

To get the game started again the Mets had to send out a committee led by baseball royalty—Willie Mays, Yogi Berra and Seaver, with Staub and outfielder Cleon Jones as well—to tell the fans out there: “Look at the scoreboard will you? Keep this up and we’ll have to forfeit.”

Later on after the game (the 9–2 score held up) the players talked about why and how the fight happened. Harrelson started off saying, “I like the way Rose plays, just not the way he came into second base.” Then he suggested that he himself may have overreacted a bit. Harrelson allowed that had been a little spooked out there to begin with in light of the collisions he’d had already that season—one, with Cincinnati’s Bill Plummer, broke a bone in Harrelson’s hand; another, with Pittsburgh’s Rennie Stennett, fractured Harrelson’s breastbone. “I’ve had trouble at second base, and that added to the situation,” he said.