For Pete's Sake, He Cried

By Tom Callahan

When Pete Rose finally overtook Ty Cobb, emotion at last overcame Rose. For several minutes after a back pounding from teammates, opponents and even the umpires, he was left alone at first base. Then the base itself was removed, confiscated for posterity, and he was lost. "That's the first time I was ever on a baseball field," Rose thought later, "when I didn't know what to do." He "was doing all right," as he put it, "until I looked up and started thinking of my family." Particularly his father, who died in 1970. "I saw him up there, and right behind him was Cobb. Right behind him. Regardless of what you think, Ty is up there."

As the ovation swelled last Wednesday, everyone in Cincinnati's brimming ball park felt close to Rose, but only First Base Coach Tommy Helms was nearby. A quarter of a century ago, Helms and Rose were minor-league roommates, partners in mischief, who both became Rookies of the Year in the National League. A temporal way of fixing Rose's career is to remember that Helms actually followed him to that eminence by three seasons but has already beaten him to pasture by eight. Displaying tenderness publicly for the first time maybe in 44 years, the great roughneck laid his head on Helms' shoulder and cried, bringing Petey Rose out of the Reds' dugout on the run. His bat-boy uniform has had to be let out a few times in the twelve years since Petey was three. As they wrapped their arms around each other, the father seemed the child.

It was a cool, coming-of-autumn evening on the Ohio River. At Rose's every motion, the flashes from the instant cameras made a light show. Enough newsmen joined the "Rose Watch" to prompt the youngest Cincinnati players to ask their manager in hushed voices, "Is this what a World Series is like?" Rose grinned and nodded. A few days before in Chicago, a left-handed Cubs pitcher wrecked his shoulder in a bicycle accident, and for several hours the city of Cincinnati was listed in critical condition. Throughout his 23rd season, Rose has played himself routinely against right-handers. So, starting after all in the final game of the Chicago series, he slapped two hits to equal Cobb's storied 4,191, and very nearly a third. For a man with a home-attendance clause in his contract (almost six bits a ticket after 1.5 million), this is the definition of integrity. Though Rose had said, "I have a way of things always turning out right for me," nobody caught the suggestion that he was on the brink of two wonders, the other one timing.

Fifty-seven years to the day since Cobb pinch-hit and popped up in his final major-league at bat, Rose stroked a clean single to left center on a 2-1 slider from Eric Show in the first inning of a 2-0 victory over the San Diego Padres. "You missed a good ball game tonight," Rose told President Reagan over the phone. For some reason, Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and National League President Chub Feeney missed it too. Not only did Rose score both runs and make a defensive dive for the final out, but unbelievably in the seventh inning, he duplicated his inaugural 1963 triple off Pittsburgh's Bob Friend, an identical shot into the left-field corner. Could Rose be starting over? "In total bases, I'm right on Babe Ruth's heels now," he said, meaning 116 behind. "And I've got a chance to catch Cobb in runs (103 to go)."

This is not a vendetta against the irascible genius who batted .367 over 24 seasons, though relative merits are always debatable (see box). Rose has decided "you couldn't be that bad a guy and get 4,191 hits." And he has known all along "you can't compare Honus Wagner and Ty Cobb with Peter Rose and (Boston's .349-batting) Wade Boggs. I respect all of the old-timers. They did what they had to do against the competition they had to play against. The travel was better in those days; the surfaces are better today. But if you start arguing dead balls and bad gloves, spitballs and relief pitchers, nobody can win." All the same, he had to put in a word for speedy "black outfielders," none of whom were allowed to confound Cobb. "Willie Mays and Bobby Bonds were chasing my stuff down," Rose reminded. In a telephone call ) that much entertained the press box, a deskman back at one newspaper had a question: "Is he saying black people run faster than white people?" Stop the presses.

Unlike Ruth-chaser Roger Maris and others under journalistic seige, Rose kept both his hair and humor. The two-a-day press conferences, better attended than some State of the Union messages, raised issues as profound as the soup du jour at Flanigan's on Second Street, hereafter to be known as Pete Rose Way. "I knew chicken noodle was on Tuesday," he said significantly. But that night an 0-for-4 showing got him away from the specials (asparagus) and back to the basics (vegetable). Ron Robinson, a raw Reds pitcher who last spring had fretted that he wouldn't make it back from the minors for Rose's moment, whacked his first major-league hit on Tuesday. The game was halted, and Robinson was given the ball.

Inexhaustibly, Rose softened everyone's wait by spinning old baseball tales, some of them set in speakeasies. Like the time in Chicago when a number of the Yankees, conversing too loudly about the "Big Guy," momentarily found themselves in the company of Al Capone. "If you want an autograph from the Big Guy," they were advised, "don't go inside your pocket for a pen." Wistfully, Rose wished he could meet the Big Guy. "He'd have to give you a tip on a horse or something, wouldn't he?"

Modern baseball players acquainted with Little Big Guys shared the week's news columns. Rose's warm moment was a distraction and counterbalance to the drug scandal, though redemption goes too far. During the Pittsburgh trial, Rose's name was tossed around loosely when one of those informed reformers, certainly not reformed informers, ran out of fresh cocaine and started throwing stale amphetamines. Except to say that he didn't think much of the proceedings, Rose resisted efforts to stretch a single into a symbol.

Afterward he contended, "I'm not smart enough to really have the words to describe my feelings." But he is wise enough to know when a picture needs no caption, such as the tableau of the two Roses and the endless cycle that survives even plagues. "He's a good boy," Rose said. "Nobody's going to get mad at him if he can't get 2,000, 3,000 hits." He shot Petey a sharp look. "But you better." Rose did not stop at recruiting his son to chase after him. When the Padres' Tony Gwynn, 25, reached first base in the late innings, Rose apprised Gwynn that he, too, was good enough to shoot for 3,000 or | 4,000 hits. As Pete says, "That's easy, getting 3,000. What the hell?"

But who is there for Rose to pursue? "I'll make somebody up," he said without care, "somebody who has 4,300 hits or so. I haven't decided his name yet." Charlie Something. And every time he gets a hit, or makes an out, or just plays a game, it's a record.