Originally Posted by bk400
Washington Post Article by Rick Reilly below:
Pete Rose died Monday, which surprised me. I never thought he’d slow down long enough to do it.
I knew him well. He fascinated me. I’d never met a guy who looked at life like a door he had to knock down, even if there was a perfectly good doorknob waiting.
Pete lived his entire 83 years, not just his spectacular baseball career, like he was double-parked. He’d sprint to first base the instant the ump called ball four. Vin Scully once told his listeners, “Pete Rose just beat out a walk.” I once saw him sprint off after striking out.
He’s the only player I ever knew who’d calculate his batting average before rounding first. Gave him something to do. I always felt that’s also why he got into gambling. Playing baseball like it was a midnight prison break wasn’t thrilling enough for Pete. He needed more action, more adrenaline, more chances to beat somebody.
One night, in 1985, I went to stay at his house after he’d won a home game as the Cincinnati Reds’ player-manager. It was the same year he got his 4,192nd hit, breaking Ty Cobb’s record and making him the all-time major league hit leader. It had been an exhausting night with a hundred managerial moves. After he dealt with reporters and grabbed a two-minute shower, we were rolling home in his car, Pete fiddling with the radio so he could yell at the sports-talk hosts.
“Idiots!” he said, turning it up.
We got home around midnight, but his wife, Carol, a former Philadelphia Eagles’ cheerleader, was still up and asked if we wanted pancakes. I wanted pancakes, but Pete didn’t even notice her. He was already working the TV, trying to find out who’d won the night’s hockey games. Then he moaned, “Goddamn Canucks!”
Pete was a guy who did everything very fast and all at once. Thinking never entered into it. There wasn’t time. He was a dive-into-home-plate-first-and see-if-a-catcher’s-standing-there-later kind of guy. Potential consequences never came up. All that mattered to Pete was the game. He lived for it. Teams, wives, decades, kids and grandkids would come and go; it was always baseball.
Michael Jordan took up golf. Jimmy Carter took up construction. But Pete Rose lived only baseball to his dying day. In fact, on Sunday, the day before he died, he was at a baseball card-signing event in Nashville with some old teammates. Who got the last autograph?
One time, on my way to the Las Vegas airport, I dropped by his sad little autograph booth in a Caesars Palace memorabilia shop, where for years he sat several hours a day, a couple of weeks per month, hawking his tacky baseball wares. I had my luggage.
“Where you off to?” he asked.
“Italy,” I said.
“Why the hell you goin’ to Italy?”
“Who doesn’t like Italy?”
“Never been,” he said. “I don’t go nowhere that don’t have baseball. Why would I? I can’t sell no autographs there. Can’t talk baseball with nobody there. What am I gonna do in Italy?”
“Relax?”
“Nah!”
That’s why banning Pete from baseball in 1989 — and from Cooperstown — was about three floors past unfair. It was all he had.
Baseball way overthought him. They figured that of course Pete knew players couldn’t gamble, so he must have had some game-fixing conspiracy going on. But Pete never cared about the money. Pete just cared about the juice.
“How do you feel about it?” I asked him once.
“About what?”
I stared at him.
“Getting banned from baseball?” I said. “For gambling?”
“Well, sh--,” he said. “I never bet against my team. I always bet on us to win. See? I can’t understand what’s so horrible about that.”
“But Pete,” I tried to explain. “The day you don’t bet is the day the bookies bet against you.”
“Nah!”
The whole Pete Rose Hall of Fame kerfuffle is a hurricane in a hat anyway. Pete is already in Cooperstown. They can’t avoid mentioning his achievements, even if he doesn’t have a plaque. You don’t need a plaque to know this 17-time all-star was one of the baseball greats. And, my God, he admitted to everything and apologized to everybody years ago. What more did the game want from him?
The sad thing now is that Pete’s obituaries will have “banned from baseball” in the first sentence. He played 24 pedal-to-the-metal, jaw-dropping, fabulously entertaining years un-banned. That’s the first sentence.
He loved baseball, from his constantly tapping feet to the helmet that was always flying off his head.
It’s just too bad baseball didn’t love him back.
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10-02-2024, 12:09 PM
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