PETE ROSE
On the cover
FRONT COVER: Pete Rose slides head first against the San Francisco Giants, 1972. ED REINKE / THE ENQUIRER
BACK COVER: MICHAEL E. KEATING, ED REINKE, FRED STRAUB, JEFF SWINGER / THE ENQUIRER, TONY TOMSIC / IMAGN IMAGES
Credits
A product of The Enquirer
This book contains articles previously published in The Cincinnati Enquirer and the book Pete Rose: 4,192 published by The Enquirer. The text has been mildly edited for style, clarity and length. Special thanks to Beryl Love, Marty Brennaman, Rick Kennedy, the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library, the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum, Cincinnati Public Schools, USA Today, Getty Images, Pediment Publishing, Chris Eckes, Chris Fenison, Jordan Kellogg, John Kiesewetter, Katrina Marshall, Kim Nuxhall, Greg Rhodes, Larry Richmond, Dashiell Suess, Kristin Suess, Kevin Welch, Joe Wessels, Jason Williams, David Wysong and, most significantly, The Enquirer ’s reporters, photographers, artists, editors and librarians.
Editor JEFF SUESS
Executive Editor BERYL LOVE
Copyright © 2025 by The Enquirer
All Rights Reserved • ISBN: 978-1-63846-134-0
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner or the publisher.
Published by Pediment Publishing, a division of The Pediment Group, Inc. • www.pediment.com Printed in Canada.
This book is an unofficial account of Pete Rose’s career and is not endorsed by Major League Baseball or the Cincinnati Reds.
OPPOSITE: Pete Rose connects on one of his 4,256 hits. MALCOLM EMMONS / IMAGN IMAGES
OPPOSITE: The Big Red Machine at Riverfront Stadium, 1976: Ken Griffey, Pete Rose, Don Gullett, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, George Foster, César Gerónimo, Dave Concepción and Tony Pérez. FRED STRAUB / THE ENQUIRER
Foreword
BY MARTY BRENNAMAN
Pete was a larger-than-life figure. The thing that impressed me most about him, and I articulated this to him many times throughout the years: “You’re the same person, personality-wise, as the day I met you on March 1, 1974.” Nobody had more reasons to have a change of personality over the years than Pete did, but he was always the same person — from the 8-year-old kid playing baseball on the
West Side of Cincinnati to becoming one of the greatest players of all-time to all the off-field things he dealt with.
Pete really showed his consistent personality in how he treated the media. It didn’t matter what he had going on, good or bad, he always took time to talk to me and the reporters. He was an incredible interview, the best I’ve done. During his National League record-breaking
44-game hitting streak in 1978, when he got within seven or so games of the record, Pete had every national media outlet following him around. He took time for everybody from the New York Times to the weekly suburban Cincinnati newspaper. I just marveled at it. He made “Jim Smith” from some small-town paper feel just as important as the senior writer from Sports Illustrated, and he did it without fail.
He genuinely liked the media. He also felt he had an obligation to talk to reporters, because of how well he could swing the bat and what that did to elevate his stature. Even in his darkest hours, Pete didn’t duck the media. The day the story broke about baseball’s investigation into his gambling in 1989, we were in spring training. Pete was the manager, and the Reds were playing the Mets in St. Petersburg. We always did a pregame radio show. I called Jim Ferguson, who was the Reds’ media relations guy, to see if Pete was going to do the show that day. Pete had already reached out to Jim to assure him that
he would meet with me.
Pete’s whole world was collapsing, and he thought about our pregame interview. He understood how important radio’s role is in communicating with the fans, whom he loved. Before I turned the recorder on, I told Pete there would be some days when we’d have to talk about some type of investigation-related development. Without hesitation, he said: “When you feel you have to ask me tough questions, you ask them.” It amazes me to this day that he had the presence of mind to always talk to me, and it strengthened our friendship. Over the last several years, we still talked at least two or three times a month. I say everything I say about Pete with extreme prejudice. Nobody knew his warts better than I do. But I judge a person often times by how they treat me — and he was very, very good to me. He was a true friend.
I want to thank The Cincinnati Enquirer and executive editor Beryl Love for doing this book, providing fans with a keepsake memory of Pete that they can cherish and pass along to generations of baseball fans to come in their families.
LEFT: Marty Brennaman interviews Pete Rose after his record-setting hit. ED REINKE / THE ENQUIRER
OPPOSITE: Reds player-manager Pete Rose sits in the dugout at Riverfront Stadium, Opening Day 1985. ED REINKE / THE ENQUIRER
The Boy from Braddock Street
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY • THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER • JUNE 14, 2015
The walk into his past isn’t easy. Pete Rose hobbles back in time to his boyhood home, because his knees ache and he’s put on a few pounds and because he is 74 years old. Baseball is youth and Pete Rose was baseball, but all that’s in the past now.
“This was all clear, through here,” he is saying. Pete points to a wall of green, a mess of weeds and overgrowth that now defines the view from the front of the house on Braddock Street in Riverside, where he grew up. Pete’s not a man seeking his past — I asked him to bring me here — but he’s still a bit beholden to it. And in peculiar awe.
“It don’t look the same,” he says.
I ask him to knock on the door. He demurs. “Don’t want to inconvenience ’em,” Pete says, so we walk around to the backyard instead, where a basketball hoop once loomed not five feet from the kitchen window. Just up the hill, Pete and his friends had carved out a makeshift ballfield. The hoop is gone. Nature has done its work on the ballfield. “When I lived here, it was kept up,” he says.
Weeds own the view. Trees have grown
tall, overgrowth covers the path where 8-year-old Pete would sled ride, all the way down to Schulte’s Fish House. From the front porch, you could see the Ohio River nearly half a mile away. Now?
“I don’t remember everything being so cluttered,” Pete says.
The All-Star Game is coming in a few weeks and with it, memories of a less fettered Pete Rose. His life was a whole lot simpler with a bat in his hand. He won three world championships, he passed the great Ty Cobb, he managed the young Reds to the brink before Lou Piniella took them over the top. We all know what happened next.
With age come complications. Things get cluttered, for better or worse. Pete Rose, once as simple a personality as existed, kept the extraneous noise at bay for a very long time, until it gathered in one mighty wave and swept him away. What’s left is a lingering, low-grade tragedy, in the person of a man whose view was perfectly clear for such a long, glorious time.
“You gotta remember,” Pete says, “all we did was play ball. That was all we had.”
A lot to live up to
Harry Rose wouldn’t let Pete go to the movies. There was a theater across River Road from Bold Face Park, as Pete recalls. This was the late 1940s, when attending Saturday matinees was a rite of schoolage passage. Harry worried about his first-born son’s eyesight. “He wanted me to be a hitter,” Pete says.
Harry worked at a bank downtown, crunching numbers. It was just a job. His passion was sports, specifically semi-pro football. At home and work, Harry was polite and unassuming. On the gridiron, he was an abject load.
His Riverside Athletic Club team might draw a weekend afternoon crowd of 5,000. Harry’s grit was legendary. He was a smallish man (about 5-foot-8, maybe 175 pounds) playing a large man’s game and owned a competitiveness not often seen.
Harry once appeared on a TV show where he was asked to demonstrate proper tackling technique. He launched himself at a director’s chair, sending splinters all over the set.
“I saw him break his hip, then crawl
OPPOSITE: Pete Rose reminisces as he walks around his childhood home on Braddock Street in the Riverside neighborhood of Cincinnati, 2015. SAM GREENE / THE ENQUIRER
trying to make the tackle,” Pete recalls.
Little Pete was a ball boy and water boy at his dad’s games. He’d pass around the hat at halftime, for money to pay the referees. “I saw him get a (knot) on his elbow big as a softball. He put a bandage on it with some ice, then intercepted a pass and ran 70 yards for a touchdown the next play.
“Every once in a while, someone in
(Las) Vegas will come up to me and say, ‘My dad played against your dad, and he was a son of a b—.’ Which he was.”
Harry Rose was not the prototype helicopter dad, but he wanted things done a certain way. He had Pete switch-hitting at age 9, a skill Pete perfected over the years, using the wall of Schulte’s as a backstop. Pete had a broom handle, his younger brother Dave a rubber ball.
“I’d let him get as close as he wanted,” Pete says. “The closer he got, the harder it was to hit. Hour after hour, he’d try to strike me out. I wore that wall out.”
The family never went on summer vacations, because summer was when Pete played ball, and Harry made deals with all of Pete’s coaches:
If they agreed to allow Pete to bat left-handed versus righthanded pitchers, and vice versa, Harry would guarantee his son’s attendance at every game and practice. “He didn’t think it was fair to the team, for one of the star players to go on vacation,” Pete says.
Harry Rose tested himself. Maybe it offered a break from the sedentary monotony of the bank. Or maybe it was Harry being Harry. Every day at close to 5 p.m., he’d get off the public bus at River Road and Cathcart Street. Cathcart slopes steeply uphill, not 45 degrees, but close. Harry would sprint up Cathcart in his patent-leather work shoes, make the right onto Braddock and sprint to his house at the end of the lane. Every day. “Who does that sound like?” Pete asks.
Pete recalls that on Sundays, Harry would visit his mother, who lived up River Road maybe a mile and a half. Harry would leave his house, take the Anderson Ferry across to Kentucky, walk several miles upriver, cross a bridge back to the Ohio side, then visit his mother. “Just for the exercise,” Pete says.
ABOVE: Enquirer sports columnist Paul Daugherty interviews Pete Rose at Bold Face Park in Sedamsville. SAM GREENE / THE ENQUIRER
When Pete was in the minor leagues, all of Harry’s letters ended, “Love, Dad. Keep hustling.”
In 1953, a reporter for one of the local papers wrote of Harry, “He is 41 years old, father of four, still can run 100 yards in 10.5 seconds.” When Harry was 58, he challenged 29-year-old Pete to a 40-yard dash, while both were at Colerain High School for an offseason Reds charity basketball game. Harry won. Two weeks later, Harry died of a heart attack. Pete got the news from his sister while he was across the river getting a haircut.
“If he wasn’t like he was, he might have lived longer. My dad was never sick. He never missed a day of work,” Pete says. Harry felt sick that day, though. Pain in his chest. He didn’t ask for help. He caught the bus home, made it to the top of the steps, saw his wife and died.
A lot lived on
Lots of Pete lived on through Harry. We are at Bold Face Park on a recent afternoon, sitting atop a massive stone structure that once contained changing rooms for the park’s two swimming pools, long since filled in. We climb a flight of steps to the top. Pete looks across the park, its two softball fields neat and recently groomed.
place. Eva Sams lived on the third floor, alone but for a pet monkey named, yes, Pete. “The meanest SOB,” Pete Rose says. “It would bite everybody, then hide in the rafters.”
“I lived over there in the summer,” he says, pointing to a three-story, red-brick rowhouse on the opposite edge of the park. That would be his grandmother’s
Pete lived with Eva, because the baseball wasn’t very good four miles down the river, where Braddock Street was. Pete (and Harry) wanted Pete to play against the best. So his Knothole summers were
lived with grandma.
“I was pretty lucky we had all this,” he says. “I developed right here, just by playing. If that field was open, we were on it. I just walked across the street. I had my bat, my glove and my ball.”
Life didn’t move a lot in those summers. It lolled, like the river. It might have been boring for anyone not named Pete Rose. His singleness of purpose afforded
Pete
for
ABOVE:
credited his father
making him the hardworking player he was. SAM GREENE / THE ENQUIRER
Opening Day
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER • THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER • MARCH 31, 2013
On Opening Day 50 years ago, Pete Rose walked into Crosley Field without a Major League Baseball contract, without the iconic No. 14 on his Reds uniform.
At the end of the day, the Cincinnati kid went home to the West Side without a hit, going 0-for-3 in the Reds’ 5–2 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates.
But the 21-year-old rookie was all smiles.
“I was the happiest guy in the world, playing second base for the Cincinnati Reds on Opening Day,” said Rose, 71, who will attend Monday’s Reds-Angels opener before reminiscing about his career at “4,192 — An Evening with Pete Rose Live” at U.S. Bank Arena.
“If you’ve ever seen the picture of me leaving the dugout, running out onto the field (for the first inning) with Gordy Coleman, Gene Freese, Leo Cárdenas, Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson and Johnny Edwards, I’ve got the biggest grin on my face you could ever have,” Rose said.
The former Western Hills High School standout realized a lifelong dream had come true when he was photographed
with his parents, LaVerne and Harry “Big Pete” Rose, at Crosley Field before the game.
“That woke me up to what was going on. Geez, I’m starting second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds! It was like someone slapped me in the jaw. Up to that time, having the kind of spring training I did, and making the team, was just all a fantasy,” he said.
In his first at-bat, on April 8, 1963, Rose walked on four pitches. For the first time, the Crosley Field crowd saw him sprint to first base after ball four, the move which earned him the nickname “Charlie Hustle” from Yankees players in spring training.
“I did the same thing in Little League at Bold Face Park. That’s the only way I played,” Rose said in an extensive Enquirer interview looking back on the past 50 years. (The Enquirer ’s game
COURTESY OF THE RICK KENNEDY COLLECTION
story explained that “Rose is always in a hurry. It’s not because he’s excited or nervous. It’s just the way he plays baseball.”)
After Pinson lined out, “Frank Robinson hit a home run, so I scored the first run of the year,” Rose recalled. It was the first of his 2,165 runs scored by a switch-hitter, one of his 22 Major League Baseball records from his 24year playing career (1963–1986).
OPPOSITE: Pete Rose with his parents, Harry “Big Pete” and LaVerne Rose, and his brother, David, at Crosley Field before his first Opening Day in 1963.
HAROLD E. RUSSELL / THE ENQUIRER
“Rose is always in a hurry. It’s not because he’s excited or nervous. It’s just the way he plays baseball.”
AL HEIM, SPORTS EDITOR (ENQUIRER, APRIL 9, 1963)
On that first Opening Day, the aggressive rookie was one of the least popular players in the clubhouse. Manager Fred Hutchinson, who had guided the Reds to the National League pennant in 1961, promoted Rose from lowly Class A ball and benched popular veteran Don Blasingame.
Rose arrived at Crosley Field that morning, 3½ hours before the game, to be added to the roster and sign his first
Reds contract. For $7,500.
Then Rose, who wore No. 27 that spring, went to the clubhouse and saw No. 14 hanging in his locker. The number had been worn the previous year by Tommy Harper and fellow Western Hills native Don Zimmer. Was that his request?
“Oh, no. I don’t think any (rookie) player ever told the big league ball club what number they wanted when they
first start. They give you a number, and you’re happy with it,” he said. He would wear No. 14 until he was banned from baseball for betting on the game by Commissioner Bart Giamatti on Aug. 24, 1989, when Rose managed the Reds.
Rose remains on the ineligible list, unable to work in baseball or qualify for the Baseball Hall of Fame. His main source of income is signing autographs near his Las Vegas home as baseball’s all-time hit king.
MALCOLM EMMONS / IMAGN IMAGES
OPPOSITE: Pete and the batboy, Opening Day 1969. FRED STRAUB / THE ENQUIRER
Setting a batting record was the furthest thing from his mind that first week with the Reds. Rose was hitless the first three games and worried Hutch would send him packing to Macon.
“All of the sudden, when you’re 0-for-12, you’re worried about going back to the minor leagues,” he said. In his fourth game, Rose tripled down Crosley Field’s left-field line off Pittsburgh’s Bob Friend in the eighth inning on April 13, a day before his 22nd birthday. He was off and running. Rose would collect 170 hits, score 101 runs and bat .273 to win National League Rookie of the Year. Over 24 seasons, he would win three batting titles; three World Series (two with the Reds); and the Most Valuable Player awards for the 1973 season and the 1975 World Series.
“Your goal when you sign a professional contract is to try to make the big leagues. And once you make it, you work your ass off to try to stay there,” Rose said. “Who ever thought it would be 50 years? It seems like it was yesterday.”
RIGHT: Pete played second base before moving to the outfield in 1967.
Champions!
BY BOB HERTZEL • THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER • OCT. 23, 1975
BOSTON — The team that couldn’t win the big one won the biggest one of all.
The Cincinnati Reds rule the world. Shedding forever the rap that they choked in the clutch, the Big Red Machine ended the most incredible of World Series by coming from nowhere to defeat but not humiliate the American League-champion Boston Red Sox, 4–3.
And, when it was over, the littlest man of all had become the biggest hero of all.
Joe Morgan, on whose shoulders the Reds rode all season, dropped a pop fly single in front of Fred Lynn in center field to score Ken Griffey from third base in the ninth inning with the run that put Fountain Square in the center of the universe.
But that was the end of it all. There was a beginning.
Trailing 3–0 after three innings, Don Gullett uncharacteristically wild and walking home a pair of runs, the Reds turned to Tony Pérez and Pete Rose for inspiration.
Pérez, the man who was trade bait over the winter, was the ignition, picking on
a Bill Lee blooper pitch and sailing it far into the darkness of the night, the baseball landing somewhere on Ipswich Street.
“I know that pitch was coming. I guessed,” said Pérez, who hit three home runs in the series.
And then there was Rose, who got 10 hits and a car as the series’ most valuable player.
Rose made it all possible, bringing the Reds into a tie in the seventh inning with a run-scoring single to center.
The beginning, then Morgan, then ecstasy.
As Morgan said just one day earlier, after the devastating home run by Carlton Fisk, “Today beer, tomorrow champagne.”
And the champagne flowed … and flowed … and flowed.
“This,” shouted Johnny Bench, “is the sweetest thing on Earth. I like it, not because it is liquor, but because it means you won.”
Winning, that was what it was all about for the Cincinnati Reds. In 1970,
they had failed in the World Series. In 1972, they had failed in the World Series. In 1973, they had failed in the playoffs.
Now they were in a foreign ballpark, coming off a defeat that had to shake them, in a World Series that was tied. And they fell behind, 3–0, but came back.
“I won’t say I wasn’t worried, now,” said Morgan. “But I looked at it like a poker game. We had the best eight guys on the field and one of the best pitchers in baseball. We had a full house.”
The Reds’ full house was called, not beaten.
“I felt we had the best team in’72 and ’73 and we lost and I couldn’t believe it,” said Morgan. “But until you prove it on the field, you can’t say anything. Now I can go home and say it. We are the best.” It didn’t start off well for the Reds. In the third, Gullett came completely apart. With one out, he walked Bernie Carbo, then gave up a single to Denny Doyle.
Carl Yastrzemski followed with a hit and Boston led, winding up with men at second and third. An intentional walk was called for on Fisk.
OPPOSITE: The Cincinnati Reds dominated the 1970s, winning back-to-back world championships in 1975 and 1976. Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, César Gerónimo, Ken Griffey, Don Gullett, Dave Concepción, Tony Pérez, George Foster and Johnny Bench.
FRED STRAUB / THE ENQUIRER
That loaded the bases. Settling down momentarily, Gullett struck out Fred Lynn. Then it happened. A walk to Rico Petrocelli. A walk to Dwight Evans. Two runs given away by the Reds. It was 3–0.
“It didn’t really bother me,” said Rose. “In this park, you can’t get enough runs. You have to keep getting more.”
This was a lesson the Red Sox were to learn. The rest of the way they battled and fought, struggled and kicked. But they could not score.
Jack Billingham, then Clay Carroll, who wound up with the win, and finally Will McEnaney put them away.
It ended with the man Boston wanted at the plate, the 36-year-old Yastrzemski, a legend in this city. He swung at a McEnaney pitch and lofted it to center. There was a roar from the 32,205 as the ball began its upward flight.
Then there was silence. The ball was not going to be far enough. Bench had already leaped upon McEnaney. Rose joined in. Then fans were everywhere and the Reds, in one giant ball of humanity, were entangled in the middle of the field.
They had won by scoring in their final at-bat for the 26th time. In all, it was win No. 115, not a bad year.
The comeback started so innocently, with Rose hitting a sixth-inning single. Then, with one out, Bench hit the perfect double-play ball.
RIGHT: Rose in action at third base against Boston in the 1975 World Series. BOB FREE / THE ENQUIRER
LEFT: Reds players celebrate beating the Boston Red Sox in Game 7 of the 1975 World Series, one of the greatest ever. BOB LYNN / THE ENQUIRER
LEFT: A crowd fills Fountain Square after the Reds’ World Series victory in 1975. BOB FREE / THE ENQUIRER
BELOW LEFT: Cincinnati fans celebrate the Reds’ 1975 World Series title. MARK TREITEL / THE ENQUIRER
OPPOSITE: Pete Rose and broadcaster Joe Nuxhall celebrate with champagne in the Riverfront Stadium locker room. MALCOLM EMMONS / IMAGN IMAGES
BELOW: Reds fan Bill Michel Jr., age 7, rides on his father’s shoulders after a 1976 World Series game at Riverfront Stadium. ED REINKE / THE ENQUIRER
Pete Comes Home
BY GREG HOARD • THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER • AUG. 16, 1984
Pete Rose is a rambler no more.
The local boy who has made 4,062 hits comes home again today to become player-manager of the Cincinnati Reds, ending a 5½-year absence from his hometown. He replaces Vern Rapp, who was informed of his firing before Wednesday night’s 3–2 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals.
Rose, 43, who had spent the first half of this season with the Montreal Expos, will be reintroduced as a Red at a 4 p.m. press conference at Riverfront Stadium. The Expos agreed to trade Rose’s rights to the Reds in exchange for a player to be named later.
“Pete is coming mainly to be the manager, and also pinch hit and fill in a few times,” Reds’ President Bob Howsam said Wednesday night.
“What I expect from him is what I always expect from a manager — to work hard and lead a winning team.
“Vern Rapp has made every effort
to do an outstanding job from the standpoint of getting everything he could out of his players. He was not as successful as we would have liked so we’ll see if another approach might do something.”
Rose was in San Francisco Wednesday
with the Expos and attempts to reach him at the club’s hotel Wednesday evening were unsuccessful. “He does not wish to be disturbed until 9 p.m. (midnight Eastern time),” a hotel operator said. Both Rose and Rapp denied knowledge
OPPOSITE: In a monumental move, Pete Rose returned home to Cincinnati on Aug. 16, 1984, as the Reds’ new player-manager.
ED REINKE / THE ENQUIRER
JERRY DOWLING / THE ENQUIRER
Move Over, Ty Cobb
BY JOHN ERARDI • EXCERPT FROM PETE ROSE, 4,192: BASEBALL’S ALL-TIME HIT LEADER
It is 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 11, 1985.
Pete Rose emerges from his concrete-bunker office deep in the bowels of Riverfront Stadium. He is walking at a rapid pace with Reds’ publicity director Jim Ferguson en route to the pre-game press conference. Rose is carrying his black Mizuno bat, model PR 4192.
The previous night’s game had not been a good one. In his first shot at the record at home, Rose had popped up three times. He had lined out to left field in his last at-bat, momentarily stopping the hearts of 51,000 fans.
Rose knew he had been too anxious at the plate. He had swung at some bad pitches. He hadn’t enjoyed the game.
But Rose has forgotten all that. At this moment, a garbage truck is coming toward him. Rose thinks nothing of it.
There is enough room for the simultaneous passing of a chunky-sized athlete, a publicity man and a garbage vehicle in the dark tunnel which encircles Riverfront Stadium at ground level.
But then, unexpectedly, the truck grinds to a halt. A young man jumps out
of the passenger side and yells, “Hey, Pete!” He is carrying a piece of paper.
Rose drops his head in his hand in disbelief and tries to pretend he doesn’t see or hear the man. But the autograph seeker is persistent. Rose signs and continues to the press conference.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” says a writer observing the scene, not knowing how prophetic he will be.
The press conference is a dud. The best line is one of the last. Rose is asked where all his energy comes from.
“Well, the only place I can think of,” says Rose, unbuttoning his Mizuno jacket as he talks, “is this!”
He rips open the jacket like a comic-book hero. Underneath is a Wheaties T-shirt. Rose’s face is already on Wheaties cartons and Wheaties billboards around town (“Great out of the box,” reads the ad) and now Wheaties is on Pete Rose’s chest.
The reporters roar.
Rose is good to them.
Eric Show, who would be pitching this night for the San Diego Padres, isn’t.
Unlike every other pitcher who is asked about No. 4,192, Show expresses total
indifference. During the Padres’ batting practice, he explains why.
“When time passes, Lord willing and assuming the Earth continues to exist as we know it, I might be a trivia question. But in the eternal scope of things, who really cares?” says Show.
Told that it is the 57th anniversary of Ty Cobb’s last at-bat, Show replies: “Well, then, the stars are in the proper position (for Rose’s big hit).”
Show, who fancies himself an intellectual and likes to talk right-wing philosophy as a member of the John Birch Society, leaves to hit. Seeing this, Padre second baseman Tim Flannery, who is not a Show admirer, approaches him: “Eric, you think everybody in the world’s against you. Well, this time, they are.”
Everybody, that is, except Cobb. Cobb isn’t alive to talk about his last at-bat. But the man who caught Cobb’s pop-out is. Mark Koenig, 82, was a 25-year-old shortstop for the New York Yankees on Sept. 11, 1928.
“What a difference 57 years make,” he said. “I never thought Cobb’s record would be broken. But if somebody’s
OPPOSITE: At 8:01 p.m., Sept. 11, 1985, at Riverfront Stadium, Pete Rose singles to take the crown as the all-time Hit King with his 4,192nd hit. MICHAEL E. KEATING / THE ENQUIRER
“He’s the fans’ player. I feel like we’re part of everything he does. And this is the greatest thing he’s ever done.”
ESTHER PETERSON, FAN (ENQUIRER, SEPT. 12, 1985)
JIM
BORGMAN / THE ENQUIRER
gonna do it, I’m glad it’s Pete. He’s a helluva ballplayer, a real hustler.”
Umpire Lee Weyer, who would be working the plate, was working the bases in the game in 1974 when Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home-run record. Weyer also worked Rose’s first game. He’d forgotten about it, however.
“Were you with Jocko Conlan’s crew in ’63?” he is asked.
“Yeah,” he says.
“You were at Rose’s first game.”
“Did I see his first hit?” he asks.
No, he is told. But few people did. Rose didn’t get a hit on Opening Day, 1963. Only 4,481 people were in the stands a few days later when the Reds were beaten, 12–4, by the Pirates. Most of them had departed by the time Rose got his first hit, a triple, in the eighth inning.
The crowd on Sept. 11, 1985, would be much bigger. The game is sold out.
In batting practice, while 300 media people mill around the infield and the press box, Rose hits the ball soundly. First-base coach Tommy Helms is pitching. At 5:49 p.m., in four allotted swings, Rose hits the ball the last three times right on the nose.
“He’s much quicker tonight,” observes
batting coach Bill DeMars. “He’s always confident, but right now he’s oozing it.”
7:48 p.m.: A small plane circles overhead carrying a streamer in tow. It reads: “Latonia Is Betting On Pete.”
7:50 p.m.: The game starts. Reds pitcher Tom Browning retires the Padres in order.
7:57 p.m.: The Reds come to bat. Eddie Milner comes out of the dugout. Rose follows, carrying his familiar black bat, made of Kentucky lumber and formed in Japan. A white pine-tar rag is draped over the handle and a red weighted donut rings the barrel. People are still in their seats. Milner pops out.
7:59 p.m.: Rose heads for the plate and the fans come to their feet. People flee the concession lines. The Reds’ elevator operator stops the elevator to come out to watch. The sun is setting behind third base, and the stadium has a bronze glow. A few flashbulbs are popping in the lower-level blue seats. Behind the outfield fence, below the outfield seats, in an area appropriately named “The Pit,” there are eight men from the grounds crew. They are there to get the baseball if Rose hits a ground-rule double or a home run. They can’t see the game; they can only hear the crowd. As if this isn’t torture enough, they have to wear rain hats. People above them will take great delight in splashing beer on their heads.
Rose moves into the batter’s box. He steps to the front of the box, kicks some dirt, and walks to the back of the box. He settles his left foot, then puts his right foot well in front of it. He waggles his bat back and forth. As Show goes into his windup, Rose brings his right foot back, almost next to his left one, and goes into a crouch, peering at Show from behind
his front shoulder. A calmness seems to settle over the stadium like the calm in the air when people are anticipating an explosion.
Show delivers. Ball high. Rose fouls the next pitch straight back. Oooh! says the crowd. Then, ball inside. Booo! Show kicks some dirt on the mound. Catcher Bruce Bochy gives the sign.
The digital clocks in right and left field read “8:01.” Show delivers. Crack!
The ball jumps off Rose’s bat. The crowd rumbles. Rose is bucketing towards first. The ball seems suspended as it passes over the shortstop’s head.
Left fielder Carmelo Martínez starts in as though he might have a play. He pulls up. The ball drops in safely, smacking off the turf. A huge rooooaaRRRRR! comes from the crowd.
Fireworks bang and light up the sky. Toilet-paper streamers float from the upper deck onto the field.
Rose makes a big turn around first as Martínez throws the ball into shortstop Garry Templeton. Rose turns back to first, claps his hands and then slaps palms with coach Tommy Helms. Padre first baseman Steve Garvey shakes Rose’s hand.
Pandemonium breaks loose. Led by Pete’s son, 15-year-old Petey, the Reds rush out of the first-base dugout. Just behind Petey is Tony Pérez. Padre Bobby Brown races from the third-base dugout all the way across the field to shake Rose’s hand.
“PETE! PETE! PETE!” the fans chant. Teammates Davey Concepción and Pérez hoist Rose onto their shoulders. A giant roar goes up in the crowd.
A member of the grounds crew pulls first base from its moorings and walks
off the field with the white square above his head.
The massive electronic scoreboard in center field alternately flashes likenesses of Rose and Cobb with their respective hit totals.
Out of the stands comes Reds president Marge Schott, and out of the center-field gate comes a bright red Corvette. As it gets closer, its license plate can be read: PR 4192.
Show walks the dozen steps from the pitcher’s mound to first base and says something to Rose — nobody hears what, not even Rose. He returns to the mound, sits down, and watches.
The Goodyear blimp hovers in the sky, directly above the stadium. The yellow bulbs on the belly read: “Pete Rose, 4,192.” The bulbs then act out a pantomime of Pete’s “big knock.”
There are so many flashbulbs popping that the whole stadium has the sparkle of a diamond being rotated beneath a bright light.
It is a scene never to be forgotten by first-base umpire Ed Montague, whose father had played against Cobb.
“It was like something from The Natural,” the umpire would later say.
“The (blimp) was directly overhead. There were a few clouds in the sky with a pinkish tint. It was a perfect setting. It was like it was meant to be.”
The scene is bigger than life. Bigger that J.B.’s home run on Johnny Bench Night in 1983, bigger than Rose’s return in 1984. It’s the biggest individual moment in Cincinnati sports history and among the biggest ever.
ABOVE: The Pete Rose model Mizuno bat, center. ED REINKE / THE ENQUIRER
Reds Legend Dies
BY MARK WERT AND JASON HOFFMAN • THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER • OCT. 2, 2024
Pete Rose, the Cincinnati native who became baseball’s all-time hits leader as well as one of the most divisive figures in the sport’s history, died Monday. He was 83.
After reaching the pinnacle of the sport he loved, Rose was banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling while manager of his hometown Reds.
That came just four years after Rose had broken Ty Cobb’s hit record, a mark that still stands. He is Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader with 4,256.
The lifetime ban from the game kept the Sedamsville native out of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, even though he still holds numerous career and single-season records.
In addition to the hit title, Rose also played in more games, had more at-bats, had gotten on base more and had singled more than anyone in baseball history. He also made the most outs in MLB history.
Rose was named National League Rookie of the Year in his first year for the Reds in 1963, even though he had
barely been scouted and got a tryout only because of his uncle’s connections.
Over his 24-year career, Rose was named an All-Star 17 times and was the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1973. He won three batting titles and two Gold Gloves despite playing more than 500 games at five different positions during his career.
His 44-game hitting streak in 1978 garnered national attention as well, eventually tying a nearly 100-year-old National League record and setting the modern-day mark for the NL.
Rose also was part of three World Series-winning teams, including two with the so-called Big Red Machine here in Cincinnati in the 1970s (he was the MVP of the 1975 series). He won the other title with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980.
“I am the winningest athlete in team sport history,” Rose said in an interview with The Enquirer during the summer of 2018. “To me, my biggest record is the number of winning games I played in. And that’s also a testament to all the great teammates I played with.”
His biggest regret: Betting on baseball
In that interview, Rose expressed few regrets — except his gambling and his 15-year refusal to admit the truth until he did so in a tell-all book published in 2004.
“There’s only one thing I would change if I had to live it all over again … I would obviously turn my life around and not bet on baseball,” Rose said. “Having said that, I feel like I’ve been a pretty good citizen.
“You never read about me being in a bar after hours, beating up my wife, or getting into a fight with a fan, and I was as gracious to everyone as I could be.”
He tried for reinstatement and one last shot at the hall in 2015 but was denied by now-commissioner Rob Manfred.
One of the reasons? Rose admitted to Manfred that he continued to bet on baseball even after all those years.
“Significantly, he told me that currently he bets recreationally and legally on horses and sports, including baseball,” Manfred said in a news release recalling a meeting with Rose. That meant to Manfred, that Rose had not “significantly ‘reconfigured his life.’”
SAM GREENE / THE ENQUIRER
OPPOSITE: Pete Rose, pictured at the 2017 ceremony unveiling his statue, died Sept. 30, 2024, at age 83.
RIGHT: An autographed Pete Rose jersey on display is part of the Reds Hall of Fame’s Stars of the Queen City exhibit in 2015. AMANDA ROSSMANN / THE ENQUIRER
“I am the winningest athlete in team sport history. To me, my biggest record is the number of winning games I played in. And that’s also a testament to all the great teammates I played with.”
PETE ROSE
“It is not at all clear to me that Mr. Rose has a grasp of the scope of his violations of Rule 21 (the rule that got Rose banned initially),” Manfred said in his statement at the time.
When Rose was asked why he didn’t come clean originally in 1989, despite what many considered overwhelming evidence, Rose said in the 2018 interview that he was afraid.
“I was trying to hold on as long as I could. Baseball is all I had and I was trying to support two young kids,” he said. “If I got kicked out, there was nothing to fall back on.”
Still, Rose made a living in those subsequent years, even as his name continued to cause controversy. And he remained beloved by many in his hometown.
“Free Pete” T-shirts were common sights at Cincinnati Reds games.
Rose eventually settled in Las Vegas, where he signed autographs and made personal appearances for money, even as he was in and out of tax trouble.
Rose also scored occasional endorsement and TV commentator gigs through the years, although those also came and went with different controversies.
One such controversy involved the
allegation that he dated and had sex with underage girls while playing for the Reds in the 1970s. Rose said that the woman was 18 when he knew her.
Even though he lived in Las Vegas, he still considered Cincinnati his home.
“I’ve been all over the world, and to this day Cincinnati is the baseball capital of the world,” Rose said.
Rose was married twice and most recently engaged.
He is survived by his children Fawn Rose, Pete Rose Jr., Morgan Erin Rubio, Tyler Rose and Cara Rose (who acts under the name Chea Courtney).
JIM BORGMAN / THE ENQUIRER