Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (17 page)

In July the Cincinnati Art Museum commissioned Andy Warhol, for a reported fee of $25,000, to create a portrait of Rose. He had in the past done Elvis and John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali. When Warhol was approached about this one, he asked “Who’s Pete Rose?” The cluelessness had a certain symmetry about it because when Rose was told by Katz of the impending portrait he had two questions himself: the first being, “How much money do I make on this?” and the second being, “Who’s Andy Warhol?”

The idea had been that Pete would pose for Andy at his studio when the Reds came to New York to play the Mets in late July. But Rose never made it over there so the museum instead sent photographs and baseball cards for Warhol to work from. After looking at them for a while he called in to Cincinnati and said he was confused. “In some photos he has the bat on his left shoulder and in some photos he has the bat on his right shoulder, and I am wondering why that is,” Warhol said.

“It’s because he is a switch-hitter,” Warhol was told.

At this, Andy Warhol, then 56 years into his unique and bohemian life, burst into uncontrollable laughter for minutes on end, dropping the phone, being as he was well acquainted with the term, of course, though he had not until that moment known its origins. Pete Rose a switch-hitter! Imagine that.

Along with the master portrait—which would hang not only in Cincinnati but, decades later, in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.—Warhol produced 50 additional silkscreen prints, available for $2,500 (to museum members) or $3,000. Forty-five of the prints sold almost overnight, long before they were even finished. The other five were set aside for Pete to keep or sell as he wished.

At times during the season there were new grumbles, by sports columnists mainly, that Rose was putting himself in the lineup too often, that the Reds would be better with a younger, stronger bat in there more regularly. Yet no change was about to come. Rose played himself against righthanded pitching and sat down against lefties.
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Any number of bench players might have provided more punch on a given night (Pete rarely drove the ball anymore) yet he was still contributing in ways seen—a hot stretch brought his batting average above .300 in early June, and Pete remained tough to strike out—and unseen. With his chatter and intensity and his unceasing attention to detail Rose had the Reds playing better than they had in years, comfortably over .500 and contending in the NL West, just as he had vowed. Exactly how often Pete played, and the fact that he had a lousy slugging percentage, was a matter of inside baseball. To the country, Pete shone bright. He was always on TV somewhere, the
CBS Morning News
or
Face the Nation
or doing a spot for Ted Turner on TBS. When the Reds played in Los Angeles, Frank Sinatra came out to a game and called Rose over to chat.

He was always moving—hustling still. He met with players about their roles on the team and worked the phones to talk trades. He took his early batting practice and his extra infield. He went to the racetrack home and away. (When the Reds played in Philadelphia, Pete had a losing night at the Garden State Park track over in Cherry Hill.) He fed the media before and after games and he stayed up late to watch the West Coast teams. He ate steak and salad and drank iced tea. He was endlessly fiddling with his bats—his stable of black Mizunos, model PR4192— sanding them and scuffing them, taping the handles and writing 14 on the knob (and occasionally on the head) and invariably keeping his gamer by his side.

Whatever criticism Pete took, no one suggested anymore that being both manager and player was too much of a job for one man, not for this man anyway. If anything, it seemed, Rose had appetite to spare. Through all the nonstop energy and thrill of 1985, of the chase, of the new job, of being a Red again, there could sometimes be an edginess to Rose, a kind of shifting restlessness as his teammates recall it. It was not that he seemed put upon by all the demands in his life, but rather the opposite, that he still, somehow, seemed unsatisfied. That even in this heightened time he wanted, or needed, something more.

By September, with Cobb fewer than 10 hits away, the media assigned to the Rose Watch, those following his every game, had swollen to a cast of more than 100. Most were in Chicago on Sunday, Sept. 8, a day that began with Rose at 4,189 career hits and scheduled to ride the bench against the Cubs and their lefthanded starter Steve Trout. This was the last of six games on the road and while Pete Jr. stayed with the Reds working as a batboy, others in Rose’s personal entourage—Carol and Tyler, Fawn, Reuven Katz—had headed back to Cincinnati. The most that Pete could do, everyone assumed, would be to get a pinch hit and close within one. Reds’ owner Marge Schott was preparing for some serious turnstile revenue when the team got home.

On the morning of the game at Wrigley Field, however, Rose learned that Trout would not be pitching—the story was that he had injured himself when he fell off his bicycle while out riding with his family— and righthander Reggie Patterson, a sometimes reliever whom Pete had singled off of two days before, would get the start. So Rose put himself into the game, batting second as usual, two hits away from Cobb in a ballpark where crowds had pelted him with abuse, and cups of beer and once, even, with a crutch hurled down from the high seats. Pete singled his first time up, hit number 4,190, and the baseball went straight into the vault. All season long in ’85, the Reds saved the ball from every hit Pete got.

Word reached Schott that Rose was playing in the game at Wrigley and she became so agitated she got up and left her seat at the Bengals game, needing to find a place to pace and stew. She tried to call Pete to tell him to sit his butt down and save the record for home, but she never got through. There were 28,000 fans in Wrigley Field and hundreds more peering from the rooftops on Sheffield and Waveland, and everyone was standing when Pete came up in the fifth inning. He ran the count to 3–2 and then Patterson threw a screwball and Rose lined a hard single into rightfield, sending the crowd into a chant of “Pete! Pete! Pete!,” and an ovation that lasted for more than three minutes, never mind the animosity that Cubs fans had shown him in the past. Out in rightfield Chicago’s Keith Moreland applauded into his glove. Pete was at 4,191, dead even with Ty Cobb.

Rose’s pursuit that summer unfolded against a hard backdrop in baseball: the drug trials in Pittsburgh. A cocaine dealer named Curtis Strong was among seven men being prosecuted, and many of Strong’s clients had been major leaguers. Twelve players were summoned to testify in front of a grand jury and by the end it was clear that cocaine was far more prevalent in baseball than anyone outside the game had known. In early September former Pirate John Milner, whose cousin Eddie Milner, coincidentally, was playing centerfield and leading off for the Reds in ’85, said he had bought cocaine in the bathroom of the Pirates’ locker room. Outfielder Lonnie Smith testified that he had snorted coke with his Cardinals teammates. Several players implied that they had been high on cocaine during games. A few days after Rose tied Cobb at Wrigley Field, Cincinnati’s star rightfielder Dave Parker flew to Pittsburgh to testify about his own cocaine usage during his seasons with the Pirates.

Rose’s wholehearted chase seemed unspoiled by such seaminess and served as an antidote to the Pittsburgh mess, baseball fans agreed—and so what if Rose, hitting in the high .260s, was hanging on a little longer than he might have? Hadn’t Mays? Hadn’t Musial? Didn’t Rose, after all that he had given to the game for all those years, deserve that anyway? The fact that Rose had played himself against the Cubs because they were pitching a righthander, not altering his strategy in deference to the record, not being swayed, that is, by the appeal and the potential fruits of breaking the record at home, was seen as a sign of unbending integrity. In his final two at bats at Wrigley after the Ty-tying hit, the crowd up and screaming each time, Rose grounded out hard to shortstop, then struck out. Marge Schott had her reprieve.

Along with all the gewgaws being peddled that season, there were audio and video highlight tapes of Rose on sale, and books by and about him were either out on the shelves or in the works.
Pete Rose on Hitting
, an instructional manual of sorts, appeared in early May, and throughout the season Rose collaborated with writer Hal Bodley and
The Sporting News
on a collection of daily diary entries that would be packaged into a paperback called
Countdown to Cobb
. Meanwhile,
The Cincinnati Enquirer
had decided to do a bookazine and the newspaper dispatched a young metro reporter, John Erardi, to write it.

“My very first day covering the team, Pete waved me over and asked who I was and what I was doing,” recalls Erardi. “When I told him about the project and asked for some time with him, he said to me, ‘What do I get paid?’ ”

“I told him, ‘Nothing, as far as I know.’ And he said, ‘You better make a phone call.’

“Well, we didn’t pay him, and he was under contract to do that book with
The Sporting News
anyway, but as the season went on anytime I went into Pete’s office to talk baseball he talked with me like I was his best friend. He never shut me out.”

During his research, Erardi interviewed LaVerne. She was LaVerne Noeth by then, having remarried after Harry’s death, and she had recently been widowed for the second time. She lived in Thonotosassa, Fla., not far from Tampa and she had an autographed—not personalized, but autographed—poster of Pete hung up on her wall. LaVerne and Erardi were “shooting the breeze,” as Erardi recalls it when LaVerne suddenly volunteered something he will never forget, “You know,” she said, “Pete lost a bundle on the Series last year.”

She was talking about the 1984 World Series between San Diego and Detroit, won by the Tigers in five games. Pete, LaVerne was saying, had bet on the Padres.

“I had just come over to sports from metro so I wasn’t 100 percent clear on the rules,” says Erardi. “But I was pretty sure that he wasn’t supposed to be betting on baseball, even if it wasn’t his own team.

“I was pretty taken aback, but I sort of danced around it. After she said it, I just said ‘Oh yeah?’ and Pete’s mom said ‘Yeah.’ ”
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THE EVENING of Sept. 11, 1985, was unseasonably cool in Cincinnati, chilly even, and some fans wore sweaters in the stands. They’d come out to the game the night before as well, more than 50,000 strong, only to see Pete go 0 for 4 against San Diego, an event that disappointed everyone except Marge Schott. With Rose still at 4,191, Riverfront Stadium would be full up for at least another day.

Despite the hitless game, which could sometimes wreck him even still, Pete got a pretty good night’s sleep. Carol made him French toast for breakfast, and he read the sports pages while he ate. He kootchycooed Tyler for a bit and then he left for the ballpark. “Since the moment he woke up,” Carol would say later, in the aftermath, “I knew it would be the night he got the hit.”

From their hotel in Fountain Square many of the Padres players walked to the stadium. The sun was out. “It was like a playoff atmosphere soon as you stepped out the door,“ says Padres second baseman Jerry Royster. “The whole day there was a buzz and people were milling around. It was the middle of the week [a Wednesday] but it felt like a holiday. It didn’t matter that it was a little cold, there was already a crowd around the stadium when we got there.”

Ticket scalpers outside Riverfront, including those lined up along the stretch of road that would soon be renamed Pete Rose Way, were commanding as much as $100 for an $8 seat.

“What I remember is the sky,” recalls first base umpire Ed Montague. “It was a gorgeous pink, just perfect, like something you would see in a movie—a still, golden-pink sky and the Goodyear blimp was up there floating in it.”

“I took my son Mickey to the game,” says Mike Shannon, a fine baseball writer and editor who lives in Cincinnati. He also has children named Babe, Casey and Nolan Ryan. “Mickey was six months old and I took him with me even though I knew there would be a crazy, noisy crowd and I knew he of course wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything or remember any of it. I just wanted him to be there. This was once in a lifetime, you know? I was only glad the Reds didn’t charge me to have him sitting on my lap—they were so cheap then under Marge Schott you didn’t know what they’d do.

“Sometimes now Mickey will be talking baseball with someone and he’ll say, ‘Oh yeah I was at that game,’ and you’ll see the other person look surprised and start figuring in their head—is he old enough? Yes, he’s old enough. He doesn’t have that game in his mind like the rest of us who were in the crowd do. We’ll never forget it as long as we live. But Mickey was there. He can always say that.”

Pitching for the Padres was Eric Show, a slim 29-year-old righthander with decent stuff. Show was not popular among his teammates. He was intelligent but also distant and he would sometimes go out into the hotel stairwell and play his guitar by himself. He belonged to an extreme rightwing organization called the John Birch Society, and in the clubhouse he would start talking, to no one in particular, about the role of government and what he thought it should be. “He was not a bad guy,” says Kurt Bevacqua, who was the Padres’ third baseman. “But he was a very strange duck.” Some San Diego players were also unhappy that Show had a tendency to hang his head and point fingers at others when things were not going well during a game.

As far as being the pitcher facing Rose on this potentially historic night, Show said that he believed the excitement over passing Cobb was a “media creation.” It was possible that he might be the one to give up the hit, but he said that that was neither here nor there. He did not care. “In the eternal scope of things,” Show said, “how much does this matter?”
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The crowd was already on its feet the moment Rose walked out of the on-deck circle in the bottom of the first inning. There was no score in the game and the bases were empty with one out. Bruce Bochy was catching for the Padres and Lee Weyer, a well-respected veteran umpire who had for more than three years been forecasting for Pete that “the night you get past Cobb I am going to be behind the plate,” was indeed, by coincidence, behind the plate.