56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (35 page)

“Pete, you are the greatest,” says a woman named Harriet who isn’t buying anything but has just stopped to say hello, “In our house you are already in the Hall of Fame.”
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Rose nods at this. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he says. Rose doesn’t quite look his age; his body, fleshier, naturally, than it was during the playing career from which he is now a quarter century removed, nonetheless remains similar in character: chesty, compact. He has substantial shoulders, thick wrists and small, wide hands. No neck. Legs that are slightly bowed. He is 5′ 11″ or so, and has a pot belly that’s hidden on this day beneath the loosely fitting shirt. Rose’s eyes flicker with an eager restlessness and—in the firmness of his handshake, in the way he might turn his head sharply to attention or absently roll his shoulders—he recalls that same intractable energy, that superball quality he possessed more than three decades ago, in the summer of 1978 when, at age 37, he hit in 44 consecutive games and became the only player since Joe DiMaggio to have a streak of even 40 in a row.

That 44-game run is another thing that customers like to talk to him about. “I was there in New York when you tied the National League hitting streak record, Pete!” someone will say. Some fans even bring Rose faded game programs from one of the games late in his streak, just to show him.

“That was the hardest thing I ever did in baseball,” says Rose of the feat that would win him, among numerous other benefits and accolades, an extended audience with President Jimmy Carter at the White House. “That really was the only time in my career that I felt pressure. When I was going after Ty Cobb’s hit record [in 1985] I had all of September to pass him. I did it on September 11th, but if I hadn’t I would have done it on September 12th. In a streak when it is June 23rd, you’ve got to get a hit. When it’s June 24th, you’ve got to get another fucking hit. No rest. That’s what made it hard, and that’s what made it fun. As much as that streak was the most challenging thing for me as a player, it was also the most fun, just great. I felt like I was helping baseball, like it was good for the game.

“I tried to stay focused by just setting close-term goals for myself when it was going on—beat the Reds team record, beat the National League record, get to 40 in a row,” Rose goes on. “But sure, I thought about getting to Joe DiMaggio. Once I reached 40, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought that maybe I could do it, break that record. Even though I knew that I was still really a long way off.”

THE THIRD CHILD
and first son of Harry and LaVerne Rose was born on April 14, 1941—“The year of DiMaggio’s streak,” Pete tells people today—the same afternoon that President Franklin Roosevelt tossed out the baseball season’s ceremonial first pitch in Washington, D.C. It’s fitting. “Pete plays every day like it’s Opening Day,” Reds teammate Joe Morgan would say more than 35 years later.

Raised in Anderson Ferry, a bare-knuckled, blue-collar section of Cincinnati, hard by the Ohio River, Pete, like his father before him, was an undersized and enormously driven athlete. Harry played semipro football, and was known as both a hard man to bring down and as a ferocious defender; one time, as Pete tells it, Harry suffered a broken hip on a play, but still got up to tackle the ball-carrier.

Pete also played football, and also relentlessly. But even before he made the varsity team at Western Hills High he realized that this was a game, in the long run, better left to larger men. In baseball, where size hardly mattered, he could improve his performance and get ahead of the others through sheer repetition in practice. Rose likes to say that he played baseball for the opportunity to succeed the way his father, “the only man who ever truly influenced me,” never had. At age nine, at Harry’s bidding, Pete, a natural righthanded batter, became a switch hitter. From that day forward, Pete says, “I never went two days of my life without swinging a bat. Really. Most days, whenever I could, I would hit for hours.”

That dedication, and the fact that Rose was a hometown boy, attracted the Reds far more than did his natural ability. Rose was smart and intense on the field and he had a knack for making contact with the ball. In 1961, during Rose’s first pro assignment, to the Florida State League, another Cincinnati prospect named Chico Ruiz said after watching Rose, “That guy has a base-hit bat.”

He won the National League Rookie of the Year award at age 22 in 1963 and the old-timers said that they’d never seen a ballplayer quite like him. Rose played every moment as if it were his first, and last, on the ball field, hurtling headfirst through the air to slide into third or even into home, crashing into railings to catch pop-ups and famously bolting to first base after drawing a walk. His joy was unceasingly apparent, the way he would fairly yelp and clap his hands after getting a hit, making the turn at first base and then hungrily eyeing second. To Rose, playing baseball was a privilege and opponents calling him “hot dog” or “Hollywood” didn’t diminish his zeal. When veterans chided him for racing to first base after ball four (“It’s called a walk for a reason, bush-leaguer,” they’d call out), Rose just kept right on doing it. He wanted to get to first as fast as possible, he told reporters, flashing his gap-toothed grin, “Because I’m afraid the ump might change his mind.”

He batted leadoff, came to the plate 700 times a season and was good for more than 200 hits. “The only thing I don’t like about baseball,” Rose said during those early years, “is that they don’t play enough games.”

Watching Rose play was certainly nothing like watching Joe DiMaggio. Rose, forever churning, never looked graceful on the field. Where DiMaggio’s effort was fluid and concealed, Rose’s was ever obvious. DiMaggio, long and angular, always knew just how hard to run—to glide, really—to get to where he needed to go and always, it seemed, got there safely. Rose, burly and broad, played like a bull just let into the ring, his romps around the basepaths ending, inevitably, in a spray of dust.

Yet Rose felt a clear and certain kinship to DiMaggio, his boyhood idol. Far more than most players around him Rose studied, and felt a connection to, the history of the game. He read baseball biographies, and he would ask coaches and veterans for information, for small but salient details he might apply to his own career, about the players who came before him. What impressed Rose most about DiMaggio—what made him leap when he was offered the chance, before the 1968 season, to go with DiMaggio on a goodwill trip to visit U.S. troops in Vietnam—was a single element of the DiMaggio legacy: Late in his career, his body aching and breaking down, DiMaggio still ran out every hopeless pop-up, every routine ground ball, even in the final throes of a blowout game. “It’s because there may be someone in the crowd who has never seen me play before,” DiMaggio said memorably, explaining his hustle. Those were words that Rose heard about as a young ballplayer, words that never left him.

“I still don’t know why they invited me to go to Vietnam with him,” says Rose. “I wasn’t really famous yet, just in Cincinnati. When they said, ‘Do you want to go to see the troops, to lift morale?’ I said, ‘not necessarily.’ It was 1967 in Vietnam! Kind of scary. Then they said Joe DiMaggio was going and I said put me down. If it was good enough for Joe DiMaggio, it was good enough for me.

“We got over there and it was a jungle. Hot as hell. They gave us these ‘GS 15’ identification cards and we always had to have them with us to show we were part of the military. GS 15 made us honorary colonels! I must have been the youngest colonel ever. You needed those cards so that in case you got captured you’d be treated like a prisoner of war. Otherwise if they got you they could do whatever they wanted to you.

“We were in Vietnam for 19 days, just going from barracks to barracks in different spots. It was hot, man. And it was pretty hairy sometimes. You heard mortar shells going off pretty much wherever you were. We’d sometimes travel in a helicopter and we’d fly low, practically skimming the treetops, going very fast, 140 miles an hour. I thought it was the pilot playing with us, giving us a little joyride, but then we found out it was because of ground fire. We had to move fast so no one could shoot us. In one place that we were, a U.S. helicopter came in and they started bringing out body bags—I counted them. Nineteen. All dead marines. I swear to God. I just kept telling myself, Hey if Joe DiMaggio can be here and do this, then I can too.

“The soldiers all couldn’t wait to meet him, they’d come up and gather around. But then all they wanted to ask him about was Marilyn Monroe! He never talked about her. I couldn’t have cared less, I just wanted to talk to Joe about hitting, about baseball, about how to stay out of a slump—I hated slumping. He didn’t say much, but if he did tell me an old story, I would eat it up. I was just thrilled because I knew that after that trip Joe DiMaggio would always know me. I figured he’d be watching me.”

BY THEN, AND
on into the 1970s, most major leaguers couldn’t help but to appreciate, even admire, Rose as much as the fans did. Sure, he still irked some players, guys who wished he’d just pipe down, but there was no dismissing the sincerity of Rose’s style. Even if he was brassy, barreling about, embracing the press, ready to talk baseball, anytime, anywhere, with anyone; even if he had a certain hubris, declaring his intention to be the best hitter and highest paid player in the game; well, even so, he never lost his innocent affection for the game, never betrayed a moment of guile, never shed the aw-shucks aura that had marked him when he strode into the major leagues as a big-eared, buzz-cut rookie. He won a batting title in 1968, another in ’69, and between those years he was visited in spring training by Ted Williams, who said to him, with everyone listening, that if there was anyone out there who could hit .400 in a season and be the first to do it since Williams himself had hit .406 in that long-ago and gilded summer of ’41, if anyone could do it, it would be “you Pete, you’ve got the goods.”

Rose coveted statistics, cited them unbidden in postgame interviews (in 1964 after ending a modest 11-game hitting streak he’d volunteered to a reporter, “I never did think Joe DiMaggio’s streak was in danger”) and this was just another part of his strange charm. The numbers were carrots to a plow horse. “Pete Rose is the most statistics-conscious ballplayer I’ve ever known,” the great Reds catcher Johnny Bench said once. “And I wish we had eight more guys like him.”

Rose turned 37 in 1978, his hair long and shaggy now, his muttonchop sideburns running deep along his jawline. Pete Rose was now nearly as often called Charlie Hustle, a nickname first bestowed with a mild sense of derision when Rose was an exuberant minor leaguer, but now imbued with respect. A
Cincinnati Enquirer
poll that season—published, coincidentally, just a few days after Rose’s hitting streak had begun—reported to no one’s surprise that his peers around the National League considered Rose the “best competitor in the game.” A total of 30 players were surveyed. Rose received 14 votes. No one else got as many as four.

The oldest player on the Reds, Rose should have been in his twilight. He’d played in nearly 2,400 career games, come to bat some 11,000 times, worn down more cleats than all but a tiny handful of major leaguers will wear down in a lifetime. And yet it was impossible to view Rose, on the heels of yet another 200-hit, .300 season as in anything but full bloom. “Rose ignores birthdays,” said Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson that spring. “In his mind he’s a 17-year-old, with the same enthusiasms and desires of a kid that age.”

He began that ’78 season 34 hits shy of 3,000 in his career, and just before Opening Day he predicted, correctly as it turned out, that he would pass the milestone in a May series against the Expos. After that? “Four thousand hits is impossible,” said Rose, “but 3,631 is possible— that would top Stan Musial’s National League record. I’d like that.”

The nation now knew well who Pete Rose was, and not just from his amusing Aqua Velva TV commercials. In the ads, Rose, in his Reds uniform, was shown at the plate, rapping pitch after pitch; a moment later he was holding up a flask of the blue aftershave lotion, grinning his toothsome grin, his bangs low on his forehead, and singing—yes, singing!—that there was something about an Aqua Velva man. The irony that the irrepressible Rose, the sweatiest ballplayer alive, would rely not on nature’s salty funk but on a store-bought tonic to make him “smell like a man,” was lost on no one. He had become a household name with the Reds’ four trips to the World Series between 1970 and ’76, and with his 1973 National League MVP Award. He’d batted .370 in Cincinnati’s win over Boston in the entrancing, seven-game Series of 1975; stepping up to bat in the 10th inning of the epic Game 6, Rose had turned to Boston catcher Carlton Fisk and said, “This is some kind of game, isn’t it?” At the end of that season S
PORTS
I
LLUSTRATED
had named Pete Rose its Sportsman of the Year.