Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (37 page)

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Notes

Chapter 1

¹
Jackson, himself not one to begrudge controversy, nor, for that matter, to object to a surfeit of attention, said, “I would have loved to have him there. I would have gone over to say hello.” And Bill Guilfoile, then the associate director at the Hall, suggested, somewhat wryly: “If he is here in town, he’s more than welcome to visit the Hall of Fame. We have enough of his artifacts here.”

Chapter 3

¹
Look today at the rows of headshots in the 1960 Western Hills yearbook, to the right of Evelyn Root (pep club, senior choir, French club) and to the left of Virginia Lee Rosen-berry (business club, Red Cross): Peter Edward Rose isn’t there. His name’s on a short list in the back, under “seniors not pictured.”

Chapter 4

¹
Rose’s baseball talk is invariably elevated by observations like this. He is a student of baseball history and holds many of the players who came before and after him in great regard. It’s one reason—along with the more central fact that there is money to be made—that he likes coming to Cooperstown. When he interacted with Berra at TJs Place, Rose became briefly and uncharacteristically quiet, leaning in close to hear what Yogi said, then nodding; he seemed delighted at the exchange. Rose likes to tell of how a few years earlier an elderly woman came through the crowd as he was signing autographs in Cooperstown and said: “My father would have liked the way you played.” “Who’s your father?” Rose asked. The woman, it turned out, was Julia Ruth Stevens, Babe’s daughter. Pete stood and shook her hand, then pulled over a chair and asked her to stay beside him. And so it happened that the daughter of Babe Ruth sat and talked a little baseball with Pete Rose, a bonus sight for the fans queued up to get Rose’s autograph.

Chapter 5

¹
Rose’s affinity for baseball’s past and for Cobb in particular was clear from the start. On team flights as a rookie in 1963 Rose would often sit beside Waite Hoyt, a 63-year-old Reds broadcaster who had pitched in the big leagues from 1918 to ’38. “He’d ask me to talk about Cobb and the others I played with and against,” recalled Hoyt years later. “I said to him that now is the time for a player with the similar kind of makeup and ability as Cobb to project himself out front.” Hoyt, in this bit of advising, was referring to Rose himself.

²
Durocher also said at that time, “I’ve got about six players I’d give the Reds for that guy.” Charlie Hustle was unmistakably Leo the Lip’s type of guy.

³
Rose also understood that having the reporters on his side never hurt at contract time. He was especially close to the Reds beat writer Earl Lawson; if Pete wanted to get an idea out there in the public, he just told Earl.

⁴
Never mind that a white player, Deron Johnson, had spent much of the previous season in leftfield. Pete wasn’t one to let facts get in the way of a good joke.

Chapter 6

¹
Harry and LaVerne never really went for Karolyn and that was partly on account of how she dressed. At that 1970 All-Star Game, Riverfront Stadium security was on the lookout for the spectacularly buxom stripper, Morganna, who was then in the early stages of her illicit career as a self-styled kissing bandit, a career that had begun, incidentally, when she hopped the railing during a Reds game and ran out to plant one on Rose’s mouth. (Pete cursed at her then, but the next night brought roses to her pole at work as a means of apology.) Now an All-Star Game security officer, on duty before the game, saw Karolyn arrive in a tight pink top stretched over her own colossal cleavage, along with her eye makeup and a skirt that stopped at the thigh, and he watched the way she strutted into the stadium calling out to folks she knew; the officer pulled her aside to detain her, having confused her with Morganna. Karolyn was only mildly put out by the mistake and observers were quick to empathize with the officer. Said one reporter of Karolyn: “There’s no question she looks like a stripper.” (The real Morganna, by the way, did indeed crash the field that night, getting quickly apprehended and brought down to District 1.)

²
Dave’s unsatisfactory reasoning for this marked difference in drive: “Pete had that one off-season loading boxcars and he realized he didn’t want to be working a regular job. Me, I don’t mind doing work.” And Pete’s: “Maybe because he was bigger and faster he didn’t feel like he had to do much. I always knew I had to work for it.”

³
John Dowd, who would so ably lead the investigation and prosecution of Rose’s gambling case, and who grew up a baseball fan in Boston, says of the rumble into Fosse: “I didn’t like it, Rose didn’t have to do that.” When it was suggested that Fosse was blocking the plate, leaving scant alternative to a man hoping to score the winning run, Dowd bristled, “I just didn’t like it.”

⁴
A note under the rule book’s section 7.06 (b) reads: “The catcher, without the ball in his possession, has no right to block the pathway of the runner attempting to score. The base line belongs to the runner and the catcher should be there only when he is fielding a ball or when he already has the ball in his hand.” By that rule, Fosse, as many catchers before and since, was clearly in an illegal position. Elsewhere in the rule book, however, a definition of obstruction allows that a fielder awaiting a thrown ball “may be considered ‘in the act of fielding’ ” and so allowed to be in a runner’s path—that determination falls to the umpire’s judgment. Had Fosse, without the ball all the way, prevented Rose from scoring, he may or may not have been called for obstruction.

Chapter 7

¹
The five-year wait period first went into effect in 1954. At the time that the Yankees’ Lou Gehrig was inducted by special election in ’39, the same year in which he stopped playing due to the ravages of ALS, all players who were no longer active were eligible for the Hall.

²
I can be guilty of huffing and puffing myself, and continue, for example, to be baffled at the lack of voter support that was given to former Cardinals and Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez, an 11-time Gold Glove winner and the only first baseman of his time or since who could transform a game defensively. (Teams would not bunt against him.) He had an on-base percentage of .384 (about the same as Tony Gwynn’s) and an OPS of .821 (better than Rickey Henderson’s, better than Johnny Bench’s) and…well, huff, puff, you see what I mean.

³
In the ’40s it was better known as the Old-Timers Committee, and the group has had other names and various membership structures over the years. Currently it’s divided into subgroups: the Expansion Era Committee, the Golden Era Committee and the Pre-Integration Era Committee. For these purposes, Veterans Committee works as a catchall.

Chapter 8

¹
Rivers’s life philosophy is perhaps the most valuable ever suggested by a major leaguer. “I don’t worry about things that I have no control over because I have no control over them,” Rivers has said. “And I don’t worry about things that I have control over because I have control over them.”

²
A breeder over at Keeneland in Kentucky paid homage by naming one of his thoroughbreds “Pete Rose.” The two-legged Pete received a pair of horseshoes as a gift when the horse was retired to stud.

Chapter 9

¹
After the Reds allowed Rose to get away bumper stickers appeared around Cincinnati: “For Pete’s Sake Boycott Opening Day.”

²
The time and tenor of Rose’s streak is covered in detail in the chapter on Rose in the book,
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports
by Kostya Kennedy.

³
Rose had also in 1978 stroked his 3,000th career hit, a single against Montreal on May 5. As he stood at first base, his name went on the scoreboard as the latest member of the 3,000 hit club, joining a group of baseball saints, and sinners. The names of unstained icons glittered on the scoreboard—Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Roberto Clemente—and there were also Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker (both implicated, though cleared, for betting on baseball), and Willie Mays (banned from baseball in the 1970s for working for a casino), as well as Cap Anson (who played in the late 1800s as a chest-beating racist, intolerant and vicious even by the often ignoble standards of his time). All told, that 3,000-hit club—now, with Rose, 13 players deep—represented an odd kind of baseball melting pot.

⁴
Close to two decades later, in 1996, Morgan Rubio filed her own suit against Rose, seeking that he officially acknowledge her as his daughter, which he did.

⁵
Rose liked giving things to coaches, including, in 1978, Jeeps to nine Reds coaches and trainers, a gift with a value of more than $50,000 that he wrote off on his tax return, saying they were fees for “services rendered.” When the deduction was denied, Rose sued the IRS, claiming that the coaches were necessary to his success. He testified in court that given his approach to the game, he in particular required coaches and trainers to work long and off hours (early morning treatments, off-day batting practice etc.). He won the case mainly because the jury, as Rose’s lawyer Robert Pitcairn put it, regarded Rose as a “unique athlete.” Rose was delighted that the deduction was restored and made a point of saying publicly that he felt coaches and trainers were too often undervalued and underpaid.

⁶
It is a source of high irony among professional athletes that Philadelphia translates from the Greek as “brotherly love” and that the city has adopted that phrase as its slogan. The fans are vicious and singularly so. Phillies fans rode Jackie Robinson horrifically. Eagles fans have cheered serious injuries to opposing players. Nor have fans in Philadelphia ever been afraid to eat their young. Even Rose was not immune.

Chapter 10

¹
In 1981 a historian at
The Sporting News
, Pete Palmer, had discovered that Cobb’s career hit total was actually 4,189. (A two-hit game in 1910 had been mistakenly double counted.) Though most statistics houses agreed with the finding and adjusted Cobb’s total two hits down, Major League Baseball, and commissioner Bowie Kuhn, said it was too late to change the number seven decades after the fact. So Cobb’s total remained 4,191—just as it remains today—according to baseball’s official tally.

²
The other half of the platoon was Tony Perez, also brought back to the Reds for 1984 and, at 43, the second oldest player in the league after Rose.

³
Any wager on San Diego was an underdog play. The powerful Tigers, Sparky Anderson at the helm, had won 104 games during the regular season and swept the Royals in the playoffs. Detroit’s deep roster included a rookie utility player named Barbaro Garbey, who was intriguing for reasons beyond his potential at the plate. In 1980 he had come over from Fidel Castro’s Cuba; though he had been a rising star there, playing on the national team, Garbey had fallen into disgrace over his participation in a game-fixing operation: He and two dozen other players faced a ban for life from Cuban athletics. In the U.S., Garbey rose through the minor leagues and, while playing for the Tigers’ Triple A team in 1983, he acknowledged to
The Miami Herald
that years earlier in Cuba he had indeed taken money in exchange for trying to keep his team from scoring too many runs. Major League Baseball investigated and responded by placing Garbey on probation. He was not suspended, and in 1984 he made it to the Tigers where, in 327 at bats, he hit .287 and knocked in 52 runs. Garbey went hitless in 12 at bats during Detroit’s Series win over the Padres and he wound up playing in just two more major league seasons. He later became a hitting instructor, working for a number of years in the Cubs’ minor league system.

⁴
Less than a decade later, Show’s story took a tragic turn. Shortly into his retirement it became known that, along with his erratic behavior, he had a heavy addiction to drugs. In 1994, three years after pitching his final major league game, Show was found dead at the age of 37, in a rehabilitation center on a morning after a night in which he had ingested cocaine and heroin.

Chapter 11

¹
The store owners at Paterno Brothers bear no blood relation to the late Penn State foot-ball coach Joe Paterno.

²
The many by-products of the NFL’s allegiance to the betting world include the league’s strict demands on each team to divulge the precise nature and severity of its players’ injuries each week. Although this puts those players at risk—in football, of course, a weakened body part is open to legal attack—the league is not about to put player safety ahead of being on the up-and-up with bettors. “[Disclosing injuries] eliminates an opportunity for someone to benefit from inside information, as it might relate to gambling activities,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello once told me. This is in distinct contrast to hockey, the other major North American sport in which violent body contact is routine and encouraged. There’s not nearly as much betting on the NHL and there is no kowtowing to it. NHL injury lists, especially in the playoffs, allow teams to be vague and noncommittal. “Pulled groin” might mean “injured ankle” or “sprained shoulder.” The players love the camouflage (it keeps them less vulnerable on the ice) but it introduces uncertainty into a wager.

³
A U.S. senator from Arkansas, John Little McClellan, led a federal investigation of the case but, satisfied with Rozelle’s punishment, did not prosecute.

⁴
Another banned White Sock, infielder Buck Weaver, sometimes gets mentioned as a Hall of Fame candidate, but he’s really not. Solid and even excellent in many ways, Weaver played just nine seasons, producing a meager .307 on-base percentage and high error totals. Aside from those White Sox, the other high-level player of the gambling sort is first baseman Hal Chase, who played for five teams and was later found to have bet on games
and
having tried to fix them. Chase batted .291 over 15 seasons (1905–19) with decent power, good speed and some flashy glove work, yet he too falls far short of Cooperstown-level caliber.