Living Life by the Numbers

By Tom Callahan

For 26 seasons, no one has been depressed to know that there was a baseball player who lived his life according to the numbers, who kept statistics in so many categories that he seemed to be a portrait of a ballplayer painted by the numbers. On the contrary, the calculations of Pete Rose have been central to his charm. Who else remembers ordering room service in 1963, and that it was $12.75?

On the last day of Rose's first season, the great Stan Musial squirted a final pair of singles, one to each side of Cincinnati's rookie second baseman, and retired. For 18 years Rose deplored those bouncing balls as two hits he might not have needed to pass Musial. He thinks that's normal: "How hard is it to remember you had 170 hits your first year and 139 your second, which is only 309 your first two years, when you've had ten 200-hit years and are averaging 198 hits a season for 20 years?" Furthermore: "If you have some 70 hits against Phil Niekro, and some 40 hits against Joe Niekro, is it twisted to be aware that you have over 100 hits -- one-fortieth of all your hits -- against Mrs. Niekro's sons, and to wish she'd had more children? Doesn't everyone know how much money they have in the bank?"

Of course, money is a significant statistic, and Rose's famous ambition was to become the "first $100,000 singles hitter." His original minor-league salary was $400 a month. For being the National League's rookie of the year in 1963, he received a $5,000 raise that brought his annual pay to $12,500. Twenty years later, he was earning $10,000 a game.

Rose's father was a banker, a numbers man who always seemed to be hunched over a column of figures. He was also a semipro football player who competed into middle age for the old Cincinnati Bengals. "When I was young," the son recalls, "people would stop me on the street to tell me I could never be what my father was."

One uncle signed him. Another uncle, who worked in the Reds' clubhouse, had outfitted Rose for several sweet years of sideline catches. But when Rose came back at 22 to dislodge second baseman Don Blasingame, he was shunned by Blasingame's buddies. Familiar with cold shoulders, the black players took him in. Frank Robinson remembers, "Nobody had to show Pete how to hit, but they wouldn't even show him how to be a major leaguer. So we did."

Rose made himself the star of the team and, in company with Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez, turned the mid-'70s into a golden age. Their habit was to rag each other and everyone else at the batting cage, a merciless system that worked for them but ruined some humbler talents. If a wittier but lesser player tried to hold his own, they would trumpet their salaries in unison. It was another way of keeping score.

To those close enough to see it, Rose's greed for numbers was softened by small generosities -- All-Star rings arranged for clubhouse men. Of course, there was his abiding love of baseball. Naturally, he can recount every tick in the seesawing sixth World Series game of 1975, won on a twelfth-inning homer by Boston's Carlton Fisk: 3-0, 3-3, 5-3, 6-3, 6-6, 7-6. During and after it, Rose called that game the best he ever knew, the one he almost didn't mind losing. Only in the past few days could that possibly bring a sneer.

Gambling goes with being a throwback. In 1985, on the eve of his record 4,192nd hit, Rose entertained the press with speakeasy stories bootlegged from the old Yankee Waite Hoyt. "I wish I could have met the Big Guy," Rose said, meaning Al Capone. "Wouldn't he have to give you a tip on a horse or something?" At the time nobody thought that was anything but delightful.