A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose

By Tom Callahan

To the annoyance of a great many and the appreciation of a great many more, baseball takes some time to play. No specified amount of time, like 30 sec. in the huddle or 24 sec. to shoot, but a good deal of time, a suspension of time, almost an absence of time. Last week's interruption, blessedly brief, was not a time-out but a time-in. The labor leaders were starting a clock in a timeless place. One baseball season is a novel that develops into a chapter that dissolves into a sentence and ends up a phrase. A career can be that way too. Even an era. But anyway, a season is the minimum span of any meaningful attention to baseball.

In football and basketball, say, Gale Sayers' and Elgin Baylor's full splendor may be inferred from a single move. But a rooftop homer might have sprung from anyone who ever hit a home run, or from Henry Aaron, who hit 755; and while making one swan dive in the outfield, even Tommie Agee or Ron Swoboda of the Mets is the equivalent of the Giants' Willie Mays. Baseball players plainly cannot be known at a glance. "Every player, good or bad, at one time or other has played like a Hall of Famer and a Hall of Shamer." This is an old ballplayer speaking, one who by the way contends, "Baseball is just about the best thing this country has going for it." So consider the crackle in his voice. "But we're all old ballplayers, that's the point," he says. "Who doesn't play baseball? How many girls play football?"

He is 44 years old but seems both younger and older, sort of timeless too, and he is still thriving at the major league level. In an ordinary profession, the 40s may be a disquieting, though far from a disqualifying age. Mortality's half time. But for a 44-year-old ballplayer, the end is more than just perceivable. The fight to hold it off is well on. And the spectators know that the struggle represents no less than a Simple love of life. This beguiling summer, the most single-minded baseball player since Ty Cobb has done better than play with time. He has reached back into it to play with Cobb. It took Pete Rose two decades and more, just a blink and a nod on the eternal baseball schedule, but he has come to both a paramount moment in his game and a place of moment in any enterprise. By the numbers and beyond them, he is what he does. Rose is baseball.

Coiled to the left of home plate, he has scarcely stirred from the position he staked nearly 23 major league seasons, almost 4,192 hits, ago. The brush-cut hair that blew to bangs and billowed to bouffant has been tamed and dyed. The kneesprung crouch has lost barely a trace of temper. The burly body remains respectably taut, a gunnysack full of cantaloupes and cannonballs. The seamed and arid face, a slowly eroding riverbed, is as wide open as a gap-toothed grin. It is the map of an obstinate man with 737 doubles who still flings himself flat and breaststrokes like a gopher into second base.

He states, "I'm not scared to say I love the game." As though he ever was afraid. "But my players are." For a year, Rose has been the manager as well as the usual first baseman of the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown and original team. "Maybe it's because everyone knows how much money we make, but today's young players hold something in. Just on the field and in public. It comes out in the clubhouse, when only the other players can see." Joy is the word. "Twenty-five years ago, they gave me $400 a month to play baseball. I couldn't believe it. For being Rookie of the Year in 1963, I got a $5,000 raise that brought me up to $12,500. My last season in Philadelphia , I made more than $10,000 a game--a game. But all along, I've played for fun and showed it."

No player had less enthusiasm for striking, but to the discomfort of his employer, Rose supported the union: "I needed the Players' Association's permission to take a cut over the maximum 20% to return to Cincinnati." This shift dropped him from a high of nearly $2 million to below $500,000. He smiles. "Where would I be without the Players' Association?" Had the owners elected to bluff through a struck season with minor leaguers, he was agreeable to managing the Reds. But Rose, the player, would have been on strike. "I wasn't going to get the hit that way," he shudders. "I think most people will forgive me for breaking Cobb's record. From the beginning, didn't they say I played like an old-timer? I guess I was an old-timer before my time.''

Old-timer? He is the Cro-Magnon man. Going into last weekend, he needed 20 more hits before he would reach 4,191, return to 1928 and rendezvous with the roughest competitor in baseball's history, Tyrus Raymond Cobb. Somehow Rose overshot his true generation, and has had to hustle almost a quarter of a century to rejoin a gang of bronze men just like him. "Wagner, Speaker, Musial, Aaron--Ty Cobb." He rattles off the last of the stops he has been hurrying past for years. "Ty Cobb," he says with, wonder. Rose's ten-month-old son is named Tyler only because Carol, his second wife, would not approve Tyrus, though he lobbied passionately. "If I was chasing Schmedley Milton, now that would be one thing," Rose says reasonably. "I would never have named my kid Schmedley. But Ty Rose, there's a name for you ..."

Until last year, when New York Yankees Pitcher Waite ("Schoolboy") Hoyt died grudgingly at 84, he served Rose as a Cobb historian and utility Merlin. Having been a pallbearer for Babe Ruth, Hoyt was a certified carrier of legends. In retelling tales of Cobb, Rose animatedly acts them out, clapping the dirt off his thighs just so, snatching up particles of outfield grass in the pristine signal that Player-Manager Cobb had for a knockdown pitch.

Not that Rose admires viciousness. "I know," he says, "people picture me running over Ray Fosse in the All-Star Game [of 1970]." Scoring the winning run, Rose spread the catcher like apple butter. Fosse's shoulder and career came unhinged. "I wish it hadn't happened," Rose says. "It ruined that kid." But he adds, "I'm glad we won the game." Regarding comparisons with Cobb, Rose joins in few of the arguments. "I don't steal bases like he did, and he didn't wear a tie on the road like I do." It will be fine with Rose if people continue to think Cobb is baseball's best hitter as long as Rose has the most hits. He says, "We both loved to hit and hated to lose."

Pointedly Rose likes to wonder how many errors Cobb committed, suggesting that he knows there were more than a few. Beyond the five different positions that Rose has played in the All-Star Game (first, second, third, left and right), he is proud of changing posts several times for the good of his team and vain about his outfielding record (.991). He does not dwell on how many fewer games (3,034 to 3,455) and at bats (11,429 to 13,689) Cobb enjoyed over his 24 seasons.

Exactly when Rose first made out the ghost's gray outline is unclear. But on the 1973 night of his 2,000th hit, near the end of an interview, he observed casually, "Cobb took this long to get 1,861." By 1981, when Rose led the league in hits at the age of 40, but 55 games were struck, he was heard to worry, "Cobb is getting further away." If not in Philadelphia at the mean end of the 1983 World Series against Baltimore, then in Montreal at the bad beginning of last year, the chase seemed doomed. Thanks in huge measure to Rose, their richest free agent, the Phillies in 1980 finally celebrated a world title after 97 barren years, but when they neglected to win another, he was discarded as too old. Benched in the third Series game against the Orioles, Rose got a glimpse of twilight. The Expos gave him a trial last year, but could not conceal that it was just a flyer.

Meanwhile, Cincinnati's attendance had crash-dived from 2.6 million at the 1976 crest of the Red Machine to 1.2 million in 1983. For his turnstile appeal, certainly not his .259 batting average, Rose was called home last August. He singled and doubled in his first game, slid himself into a perfect mudball, and hit .365 the rest of the year. He could take his time with Cobb after that, and he has. Platooning at first base with another reclaimed icon, Tony Perez, 43, Rose sees to the right-handed pitchers. Though a switch hitter, he bats predominantly left-handed now.

For a respectable period this year his average held near .300, and while it has cooled to around .270, 56 walks have plumped his on-base percentage to a sensational .393, third in the National League. "I can't ask my players to be selective at the plate if I'm not," he reasons. Also, he has been hit by the pitcher three times. "I have to show them how to use their elbows, don't I?" Pitchers try to overpower Rose inside, but his solution to waning bat speed has long been just to choke up a little more. Soon he may be holding the bat by the wrong end. In the meantime he is wearing out the left-field rug with liners and pulling more than a few balls into right field. "I still have no trouble with fast balls," he says. "I still have my eyes and reflexes." He lightly notes his age and denies his infirmities.

To Phil Niekro, 46, the New York Yankees' elderly knuckle-ball pitcher, "experience after a while becomes another word for compensating, listening to your body, squeezing the maximum out of what's left. When I started, my age now would have boggled my mind. But these days I think anything's possible." Niekro lacks six victories for 300. The wise Chicago White Sox pitcher Tom Seaver, 40, got there last week. He has lost only the least of his gifts, velocity. Discussing Rose, he says, "Pitchers don't have to run, remember. Not that Pete was ever a very fast runner, just a very smart one. Generally speaking, I don't think he ever tried to do more than his body would let him."

This is the impression Rose has painstakingly conveyed. "The only way I'll say I was lucky is that I was born with no handicaps," he says defiantly. "Al1 the drinking I didn't do, all the smoking I didn't do, that was my own dedication. [He has been less circumspect around women and has also shown more than an academic interest in horses.] I've had broken toes and hyper-extended elbows, but the only time I didn't play was when I couldn't walk out there. You know, I don't ever catch cold in the summertime. You can't catch cold in the summertime."

Seaver's lasting memory of their term as Reds teammates in the late '70s is of a doubleheader: "Pete had a terrible day, a miserable day, at third base. Leaving the park late after the second game, I heard the cracking of a bat and went back out on the field to see Russ Nixon [a coach then] hitting grounders to him at third. I watched from the shadows for a while. That's Pete to me." Knowing Rose's determination, some opponents marshal their best skills especially for him, and they are his favorites. "Do you know what [Houston's] Nolan Ryan told me the other night? He said, 'I hope it's me pitching the day you're going for the record. You can look for the fast ball right down Broadway in the express lane.' I can just see him pulling up his straps for me now. 'Let's play a little hardball.' "

Rose's earliest playmate in suburban Cincinnati, Eddie Brinkman, "the Babe Ruth of our high school," made it to the major leagues for 15 distinguished seasons and retired ten years ago. "At seven and eight Pete was really a little guy," recalls Brinkman, now a White Sox coach. "I'd pitch and he'd catch, and when the hitter swung and missed, Pete would stick the ball up in their face and say, 'Hey, batter, batter, batter.' " Pete was a banker's son, though his father was more famous for playing halfback with the semipro Cincinnati Bengals at the age of 42 and sparring with World Featherweight Champion Freddie Miller. "In high school," says Brinkman, "Pete was still pretty small, a 5-ft. 8-in., 150-lb. football player. That's why not too many baseball scouts were interested in him. But Pete just decided he was going to make himself into a great player and did." Somehow he made himself 5 ft. 11 in. and 200 lbs.

Seeing Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals run out a walk to first base, Rose resolved that he would do that every time if he ever made it to pro ball. Rose's uncle Curley Smart was a clubhouse helper for the Redlegs and helped Pete into an extra uniform. While still in high school, Rose became a familiar figure around the team, having a catch with Johnny Temple or Roy McMillan. Signed eventually at the age of 19 by Buddy Bloebaum, another uncle, Rose took just three years in the minors to turn into an annoying presence at Reds training camp in the spring of 1963, threatening to displace well-liked Second Baseman Don Blasingame. The manager, stoic Fred Hutchinson, issued few clarifications. As Rose remembers, "I had been playing enough to think I might have made the team, but I still had a minor league contract when we came home the day before the season opened. Hutch told me to go get a hotel room that night, and I didn't understand. Then he mentioned that he didn't want a lot of my neighbors bothering me. I was starting."

No hitter forgets the first pitcher he faced in the big leagues, though Rose wonders yet why it was modest Earl Francis for the Pirates that opening day and not Bob Friend. "My first time up, Francis walked me on four pitches. What he didn't realize was I couldn't have swung at any of them." It was the first of 1,506 walks. "Frank Robinson followed with a homer--on the second pitch. Since Cincinnati used to open before anyone else, I scored the first run of the year." It was the first of 2,129 runs. Off Friend three games later, he collected his maiden hit, a triple, the first of 1,028 extra-base hits.

For fellowship, Rose gravitated to the black players, and was warned by the front office about fraternizing too much with Robinson and Vada Pinson. "Pete is turning nigger on us" was the brutal expression of the day. "But they were the only ones who treated me like a human being," he says. "I think now maybe they were able to see something in me." Robinson remembers it this way: "We accepted him for what he was. They called him a hot dog for trying to do things he couldn't. We admired him for laboring beyond his skills. They resented him for taking one of their friends' jobs. Well, we could all relate to that. Nobody had to show him how to hit, but they wouldn't even show him how to be a major leaguer. So we did."

Rose's first night on the road, he came in at curfew to find that his roommate had put the chain on the door. "I didn't know where to go, but finally I went to Vada's room and he let me stay over. I remember it like yesterday because the next morning was the first time in my life I ever had room service. Vada bought breakfast. It was $12.75." His store of figures charms most people but bothers a few. On the last day of Rose's rookie season, Stan Musial scratched a single to each side of him and retired with 3,630 hits, the highest total in the 88-year history of the National League. Eighteen seasons later, Rose still fretted for those bouncing balls, considering them two hits he might not have had to get to pass Musial.

At the close of Rose's sophomore season, Cincinnati lost the pennant on the last day, but a more profound loss changed him. "We saw Hutch go from 220 lbs. to 140 lbs. with cancer that year and never once complain. Tough. Really tough. Great. He was a man. It was like a skeleton walking into the clubhouse to conduct a meeting, but that skeleton was in charge. It did something to me, lifted my intensity a level, made me approach long-term goals like they were short-term goals. That winter I was playing for Reggie Otero, Hutch's third-base coach, in Venezuela. We were bouncing along in the bus, listening to the Spanish radio, when I thought I heard someone mention Hutchinson, and Reggie started crying. I knew Hutch was dead."

The following season was the first of the 15 years that Rose hit .300 or better, the first of his ten seasons with 200 hits or more, a feat unmatched even by Cobb. Last season, throughout major league baseball, only four men accumulated 200 hits. Looking at Rose's and Cobb's distinction the simplest way, all anyone must do to gather 4,191 hits is to come up with 200 a year for 20 years and then get 191 more. Against this standard last week, the 3,000th hit of seven-time Batting Champion Rod Carew, 39, splendid as it was, might have seemed diminished. "I wonder how he felt," Rose muses with concern. Shifting, he says, "How do we know, 100 years from now, that they won't be pitching from 80 ft. instead of 60 ft. 6 in.? You can't say any record is unbreakable. Cobb never imagined I would be coming along. I feel a little sorry for him and Ruth. Neither of them had a number on the board to shoot for."

Every great athlete fascinates Rose. Once he used to sit up all night in the car listening to West Coast games; now he keeps his satellite dish as hot as a wok. He peppers his discourses on his own records with Richie Allen's homers and Jim Bunning's shutouts. Rose is no more self-centered than a fried egg. "Sometimes I get the feeling that everyone thinks I spend all of my time working out statistics," he says defensively. As a matter of fact, First Wife Karolyn testifies, "There never was a morning when I didn't see Pete at the kitchen table figuring out his records and averages." Not unkindly, she says, "What makes him a success as a ballplayer was what made him fail, in my opinion, in our marriage. He never grew up."

A life painted entirely by the numbers does have a certain sad cast to it. But baseball is founded on statistics, after all, and as Rose puts it wonderfully, "If you have 70-some hits against Phil Niekro, and you have 40-some hits against Joe Niekro, that's over 100 hits against the Niekro family, isn't it? One-fortieth of my hits. Who wouldn't know that? Don't you know how much money you have in the bank?" At the same time, his prized distinction is the fact that he has played in 1,916 winning games. "That's about 180 more winning games than Joe DiMaggio played games. How many teams will win 100 this year? Will any? Do it for 19 years and then come catch me."

Oddly, though, his richest memory is of a losing game, the sixth of the seven with the Boston Red Sox in the 1975 World Series. "That game was 3-0, 3-3, 6-3, 6-6 and finally 7-6 for the Red Sox. I turned to their catcher, Carlton Fisk, and said, 'Ain't it great just to be playing a game like this?' That's a particular moment for me, but as I look back, it seems that all of the great moments are from World Series and playoffs. Winning baseball games has meant the most to me." In that Series Cincinnati won the seventh game. Rose was the MVP.

Retiring has yet to occur to him. "I might play next season, I might play the year after that. I just can't think of anything better to do in the summertime." But Rose surely understands that before too long he will be a manager exclusively, and all managers eventually receive a summer off. He has a plan: "I was raised 1 10 miles from the Indy 500 and 100 miles from the Kentucky Derby. I love cars and horses, but I've never been to either. Someday I'll go." Latching onto the record, Wheaties, coin minters and T shirt entrepreneurs are feathering his nest egg. His diary will be published within three weeks after he collects the record, and Andy Warhol is already at an easel. Rose has refused "all the money in the world" to put Japan at the end of his itinerary. Waggling one of the black Japanese bats he has taken to hiding from souvenir hunters--and perhaps from Reds Owner-Auto Dealer Marge ("Buy American") Schott--Rose says he will not risk his reputation or the glory of his record.

Besides, he expects to go on managing. "I want to build character and confidence in young players, stick with them in some jams and show them what's really at the bottom of this game." Second in their division and unsatisfied, the Reds have been baseball's most surprising contenders. In contrast to many accomplished players-turned-managers, Rose is described by his troops as almost always patient and almost never distant. "You know how managers always say, 'I don't care if they like me as long as they respect me?' Well, that ain't my philosophy." He sees talent everywhere. "I was the guy everyone said couldn't do all this stuff, remember? Really, I wish these kids all could go through what I have, but I don't think it's fair to ask every one of them to get 4,000 hits." His principal ally is Coach George Scherger, 64, Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson's first teacher in the minor leagues. "George doesn't tell me what to do," Rose says, "but if he did, I'd do it."

One recommendation every old manager makes to every new one is to execute the squad cuts briskly. However, never having been demoted, Rose says, "I just can't do it quick. If they want to, I'll talk all day." The last of five cut last spring was a sloe-eyed and red-freckled pitcher, Ron Robinson, fondly nicknamed "True Creature." "Shoot, I've idolized him," says Robinson, who was one year old when Rose broke in. "The day Pete was made the manager, I was the first player in the clubhouse. 'How are you doing, Ron?' he called over to me. I couldn't get over the fact that he knew me. Shoot."

Robinson lasted one-third of an inning in his starting debut, suffering four hits and four errors. Rose eventually arrived at the mound. " 'I got to take you out,' he told me. 'No reason. I just got to. You got bad luck or something, kid. Go home and turn your mirrors the other way.' " That was worse than devastating, but not as awful as being the last man cut.

"Is there anything you want to say?" Rose asked Robinson in farewell after an extended monologue and a lengthy silence. "Yes," the pitcher said finally. "I hope you don't get any more hits." Rose was dumbfounded: "What did you say?" Robinson blurted, "I hope you stop hitting." In a smaller voice, he added, "Because I don't want you to get the hit until I get back." The manager regarded his young player with a look of amazing optimism that both of them felt. "Don't worry, I'll wait for you," Rose said. Robinson is back with the Reds, 5 and 3, hoping to pitch on the historic day. --By Tom Callahan

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]

[*] Lifetime figures as of Aug. 9.