Moments after the New York Mets finished the most exciting (and, depending on how things play out, the most consequential) regular season game of their 62-year history, news arrived that Pete Rose died.
(It also happened to be my birthday, but that is neither here nor there.)
As a sports fan, I have been married to the New York Mets for as long as I can remember.
No choice really. I was born in Flushing. My Dad was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, so it was a National League house. My Italian grandmother loved the Mets. Ed Kranepool lived around the corner, and the restaurant he operated with Ron Swoboda was half a mile away.
But in the late 70s and early 80s, while I remained in a loveless and passionless marriage with the New York Mets, I had a torrid love affair with the Cincinnati Reds.
I wish I could blame it on M. Donald Grant. On June 15, 1977, Grant traded Tom Seaver from the Mets to the Reds. I could say, hey, the Mets betrayed me, my hero went to the Reds, and I followed him there.
I wish I could blame it on the 1976 World Series. The Reds swept the Yankees, and by the transitive property of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, I became a Reds fan.
But alas, the timeline doesn’t work. My cheating had begun as far back as ’75.
And at the heart of my love affair with the Cincinnati Reds and the Big Red Machine was my man crush on Peter Edward Rose.
The Big Red Machine
As a kid I loved baseball. I’d put baseball cards in the spokes of my bicycle. I thought the height of fashion was a long sleeve shirt under a short sleeve shirt with a batting glove in the back pocket. I would buy Big League Chew, even though it was horrible gum, because it approximated chewing tobacco.
And I would read baseball statistics. No, not read…I would study baseball statistics.
If someone said Ty Cobb had the highest single season batting average, I would correct them. “Nope, Nap Lajoie hit .426 in 1901.”
I knew Joe Gordon won the MVP* the year Ted Williams won the Triple Crown.
I could reel off the top 10 hitters on the all-time hit list.
And I would absolutely devour the backs of baseball cards. I studied them like Hebrew scholars study the Talmud.
And in the mid-70s, when I was really into baseball statistics, the Big Red Machine had the most awesome statistics, the most fun-to-read backs of baseball cards.
How stacked was this lineup?
- Joe Morgan won consecutive MVPs
- Johnny Bench was the best-hitting catcher of all time
- George Foster’s 1977 season was the best by a hitter over 3 decades
- Tony Perez, arguably the 5th best hitter on the team, is in the Hall of Fame
Heck, even the lesser players…
- Cesar Geronimo won 4 Gold Gloves from 74-77 and oh by the way hit .307 in 76
- Dave Conception played in 9 All Star games
- Ken Griffey Sr. hit .300 over the 5 years he was on the Big Red Machine, and presaged his son’s career with fabulous outfield play
But the most exciting player on the team, at least for me - and, based on the recent documentary, Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose, the entire city of Cincinnati+ - was Pete Rose.
He had the stats, of course. Batting titles and consecutive 200 hit seasons and hitting streaks and so so many doubles.
But it was more than that. He was such a baseball player. The headfirst slides. Sprinting to first base. All-star at 5 different positions. Switch-hitter. It was hard to imagine anyone loving baseball - loving playing baseball - as much as Pete Rose.
By the mid-80s, a lot had changed. The Big Red Machine had long since idled. The Mets had awoken from hibernation and were exciting again. The New York Football Giants had my attention, almost as much as any baseball team.
And yet, I must have still been into Pete Rose. Because my sister – on September 30, 1985 – 39 years to the day before Pete’s death – gave me a scrapbook for my birthday. It is filled with newspaper and magazine clippings of Pete’s 1985 season – the year he caught and passed Ty Cobb on the all-time hit list.
The Tragedy of Pete Rose
I won’t dwell on all that came after. And I won't weigh in on the Hall of Fame candidacy - I have mixed feelings about that.
But I do want to say the remainder of Pete’s life was a Shakespearean tragedy.
(There are wonderful Shakespeare quotes about roses – not just the famous “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, but also ‘the rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem for that sweet odour which doth in it live.” But really the most accurate quote for this section comes from the hair metal band Poison: “Every Rose has its thorn”).
Here’s the thing about the great Shakespearean tragedies: the protagonist’s downfall comes about because of a fatal character flaw. Indeed, that flaw is sometimes too much of a virtue. Macbeth’s ambition. Lear’s vanity. Othello’s jealousy. Hamlet’s intellect.
Pete Rose might well be the most competitive sonofabitch in modern American sports. And competitive people love the action. (Michael Jordan, another possible contender for the competitor throne, was known to place a bet or two.)
And when gambling threatened to destroy his life he did what all problem gamblers do – he doubled down. He lied for decades about gambling on baseball. Watching the recent documentary I got to thinking that Pete had embodied the George Costanza theory of lying: It’s not a lie if you believe it.
Pete's competitiveness, the fire that made him one of the most exciting athletes of my lifetime, is a big part of what brought him down.
All these years later I’m not quite sure how I feel about Pete Rose. But I can’t help but think that the Twitter wit behind Super70s Sports said it best:
"Super Sky Point to Peter Edward Rose. He was crass. He was selfish. He was full of shit. He was his own worst enemy. But nobody played harder, nobody loved baseball more, nobody won more games, and nobody got more hits. He’ll always be a Hall of Famer to this kid. #RIP"
* Gordon led the AL in strikeouts and GIDP, and led all 2nd basemen in errors! That, my friends, was an injustice
+ Local banks in Cincinnati wouldn't let people use 4192 as their ATM pin because it was too easy to guess
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