Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (20 page)

His was the autograph that the kids in the crowd coveted more than any other. A prospect such as first-round draftee Courtney Hawkins— who signed for nearly $2.5 million in 2012 and who did a memorable televised backflip on draft day—might have strolled to the parking lot unbothered but not Pete Jr. “These kids have stacks of Pete Rose Jr. autographs at home,” says Tim Hayes, a reporter for the
Bristol Herald Courier
who began covering the BriSox in ’02. “I know. I grew up here. I have about 16 Carlos Lee autographs that I’ve kept to this day. Rose Jr. is the biggest attraction in Bristol in my time.”

He wore number 14, and the door to his bare, uncarpeted office was always unlocked. Through the record-hot summer of 2012 Petey went out with the young team hours before each game, hitting fly balls, showing a batting grip, teaching baseball under the Southern sun. The BriSox play about 65 games a year.

For the 2013 season the White Sox moved Pete Jr. half a step up to another short-season rookie ball team—this time in Great Falls, Mont., another dot on the sprawling baseball map of the United States. Great Falls is well-known for its UFO activity, and Pete Jr.’s team, the Voyagers, is named for a never satisfactorily explained sighting of two flying disks in 1950.

As a manager Rose Jr. emphasizes fundamental play and the importance of knowing the situation, of knowing yourself and your opposition. Because many of the offensive players on instructional league teams are so fresh-faced and so often easily frustrated when they don’t dominate as they did in high school, Rose Jr. hammers home the truths of the game— notably the importance of learning to accept failure. He teaches this old and enduring baseball lesson as only he can. “Who has the most hits in major league history?” Rose Jr. asks an assembled group of new players. After a moment or two someone calls out, “Your dad.”

“Right. And who has made the most outs in major league history?”

To this there is no reply. The players peer in quietly.

“That’s my dad too,” Rose Jr. says

It is in places like Bristol and Great Falls that Pete Rose Jr. has spent his baseball career—his life, really—both before and for many years after his stirring Reds debut. Rose Jr.’s major league experience, accumulated entirely in that September of 1997, amounts to 14 official at bats over 28 days. And yet he played professional baseball from ’89 through 2009. Twenty-one years in the minor leagues. He made 31 stops and played for 27 teams. He played winter ball in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua and Colombia. He came to the plate 8,160 times in the minors, got 1,924 hits, drove in 1,058 runs, scored 915, walked 751 times and struck out 855.

All told Rose Jr. appeared in 1,972 minor league games over those 21 years, and here are the most remarkable facts of all: More than a third of those games were played for independent clubs with no major league affiliation. And only 166 of his career games—less than 9%—were above the level of Double A. This catalog of minor league numbers is unlike anything the game has ever seen.
¹

“Off the charts,” says Bob Hoie, a leading minor league researcher for SABR. “It’s astounding, really. No one in the past 50 years has had a career even close to that. To play in that many games is extraordinary. To play so many games in low-level leagues? That is unheard of.”

HE WAS born on Nov. 16, 1969, six weeks after Pete Rose had laid down a two-out bunt hit to edge Roberto Clemente and win his second consecutive batting title. Peter Edward Rose II read the birth certificate. (The “Jr.” just came about, naturally, and stuck, sounding less pretentious than “The Second.”) He wasn’t the first Rose child—Fawn, born late in ’64, would at age four and five play in the so-called father-son game with the Reds—but from the start, he was the one ordained. “Did Pete ever love that boy!” recalls Karolyn Rose. “It used to be baseball first, then Fawn, then me. But when Petey was born he jumped to the top of the list. After baseball I mean.”

Official major league baseballs were placed in Petey’s crib (he liked to rub his tiny fingers along the stitches) and before he had learned to walk his father had taught him to hold a bat in a stance. The 1971 Reds media guide featured Pete Jr., 15 months old, on its cover—no one else, just Petey in a triptych of poses, cherubic in a roomy Reds uniform, preening before a camera and seated before a typewriter like a hard boiled reporter, a bottle of milk, straight-up, on the table beside him.

When Petey was five years old a Baltimore Orioles scout—the Roses’ friend Jack Baker—wrote the kid up a mock professional baseball contract as a lark, specifying that Petey was to become the highest paid player on the O’s. Big Pete laughed loud and hard when he saw the contract and Karolyn had it framed.

All through the mid-1970s, at the height and sway of the Big Red Machine, little Pete and other players’ sons—Ken Griffey Jr., Eduardo and Victor Perez—spent long parts of days and countless stretches of night at Riverfront. Fawn was there too, a determined tomboy in those years, and Petey likes to say that when it came to the Wiffle ball games, “she was better than all of us.”

The kids would grab their gloves and zip around the field and the clubhouse, darting up the tunnel and back just because they could, yelping out to hear their voices echo along the way. They’d clown around with Joe Morgan and eat too many snacks and try on all the batting helmets and sometimes throw a ball around together for a while, down the foul lines, before the team came out on the field.

Petey was always in uniform. He would dress before a full-length mirror, pulling on his regulation Reds issue: double-knit fabric, built-in sash belt, fitted hat, shoes polished just so, his name stitched—not ironed—on the back, above the number 14. Petey was ready to play. “No!” he’d shout if any sort of facsimile outfit were offered up. “I’m not wearing that! I’m wearing what Dad’s wearing!” Karolyn ordered a couple of extra uniforms for little Pete in case one was in the wash.

There was the time that Griffey Jr. threw up after eating too much corn on the cob, and the time when Big Pete said that, Sure, the cackling pitcher Pedro Borbon could take a whack at cutting his son’s hair; Petey emerged from the clubhouse with a new hairstyle of a sort—call it Dutch-boy punk—that took weeks to grow out. When game time neared and they were supposed to go sit in the stands with their moms, the kids might hide in the umpires’ dressing room, noodling with stuff until clubhouse uncle Bernie Stowe came and pulled them away. After the games the boys could come to their dads’ lockers, but only, and on this score Reds’ manager Sparky Anderson would not bend, only if Cincinnati had won the game.

In a locker room of stars (Morgan, Perez, Bench, Concepcíon…) Petey’s dad was
the
superstar, the face of the team, the face of all of baseball, the darling of all media and a swaggering pitchman in TV commercials. There was no bigger life in Cincinnati in those years. Rose might drive Petey and Fawn to the ballpark in his Porsche; Karolyn sometimes showed up to get the kids from school in the family’s Rolls-Royce. For a while the Roses had a dog named King Tut. Everybody knew little Petey by name and people called to him in greeting wherever he went.
²

“He was our leader, really confident even as a young kid,” says Eduardo Perez. “We’d play ball, imagining we were big leaguers. We’d be going against the Big Red Machine and of course we always won. Petey organized us, set the rules. I don’t want to say he was cocky—he has never had that quite the way his dad has it—but Petey was the kid who figured things out.

“I’ll never forget my six-year-old birthday party,” Eduardo goes on. “My parents strung up a piñata in our yard. We were all knocking at it with a plastic Wiffle ball bat, but nothing was happening. Then it got to be Petey’s turn, and you could see he was thinking about what to do. He had it in his head to get that candy. He
loved
candy. Well, he goes and grabs a
wooden
bat. One swing and that was it. Candy everywhere.”

Rose Jr. remembers the sweetness of those early years, and the high jinks, with a laugh. (By the time he and Eduardo were in their early 20s they would reminisce on those days in the manner of rocking-chair ancients gazing back on their prime: “Remember when we were young.…”) Yet what endures, the moments that Rose Jr. says he carries with him, that hold him steady in his path, are not about the romping and the playing, but about the baseball and his dad. Driving to the park together, arriving hours early when there were just a few other folks around. Sitting at the locker side by side. Usually Big Pete had work to do—extra hitting, sharpening his bunt defense, testing the ground after a night of rain—or he would go off and make a phone call for a while. Petey knew not to bother him then, just waited for those moments in the dugout when his father would pound his glove and nod over at him—
Let’s go
—and the two of them would bound out onto the bright green grass in front of the Reds dugout to play catch. “Right to my chest,” Big Pete would say holding up his glove for a target. “Put it right here.”

When the time was right, closer to the start of the game, Big Pete might gather a few of the kids and a Reds teammate together and get a little game of pepper going behind home plate. “It was just about being with my dad, wanting to be where he was,” says Pete Jr. “That happened to mean playing baseball. Isn’t that just how it is? If your dad is a cop, you want to be a cop.”

In the backyard at home, morning time usually, Petey would stand with his bat and Big Pete would throw batting practice, always with a hardball, always pitching overhand, even from the earliest years. There was one particular day, and both father and son still recall it fondly, when Big Pete was a little wild and kept bouncing pitches in the grass, until Petey, exasperated and maybe four years old, finally called out: “Hey, Dad, get this crap over!”

HE WAS narrower in build than his father, and ruddier in complexion, and yet, by nine and 10 years old, unmistakably Pete Rose’s son. When Petey was nine, his dad was in Philadelphia, playing for the Phillies and it was the summer of ’79. “We were staying on Locust Street,” Rose Jr. says, “and we would get on the subway and take the Broad Street line right to the ballpark. People would look at us and say, ‘Hey, it’s Pete Rose and his kid!’ Everyone knew us. But it was kind of normal too. We were just riding the subway to work.”

At Veterans Stadium, Petey occasionally served as a batboy and a clubhouse gofer. He’d shag flies during batting practice (sometimes alongside Ruben Amaro Jr., who was four years older and who would grow up to become the Phillies general manager), and he’d throw on the sidelines with his dad. In the dugout in the middle of a game, he’d go up to a player, Mike Schmidt maybe or Greg Luzinski, and ask questions like: “What pitch did that guy throw you?” Even with his prepubescent voice Petey could sound a lot like the other Pete Rose. Once Rose Jr. and Bud Harrelson’s kid, Tim, got into a fistfight around the batting cage, just like their fathers on the field at Shea Stadium in 1973.

“Pete Junior had this way about him,” says Greg Gross, a Phillies outfielder. “It was like he had been in the big leagues for a while.”

Most of the time Rose played in Philadelphia, though, Petey didn’t live with his dad but in Cincinnati with Karolyn and Fawn. The marriage fell apart late in 1979, finally undone by Pete’s extravagant philandering, and after the divorce in ’80 and the lawyer battles over alimony and child support and who would get which house and which cars (Karolyn kept the Rolls and a Jeep; Pete kept the Porsche), Karolyn would tell the story of the last straw. One day Petey had come home from being at the racetrack with his father—in Cincinnati, Big Pete used to take them over the river to Latonia, put a little money down, get some dinner—and said, “Guess who I saw today, Mom? Dad’s girlfriend!” That wasn’t the only time; Petey had seen the girlfriend at the ballpark too.

Karolyn had known about Pete’s parade of other women from the start, had accepted it as a curse of loving the s.o.b. she loved. She had weathered, barely, Pete’s fathering a child with another woman and then the paternity suit against him. But this was too much. Life seemed to be getting away from her. “Flaunting it in front my kids? That’s not going to work,” Karolyn says. “I could handle what I could handle—my own reasons. But I did not want Fawn and Petey to grow up and think that what Pete was doing was acceptable, as if that was something you could do to your wife.” The girlfriend whom Petey saw turned out to be Carol Woliung, who would become the mother of two of Pete’s children.

Petey came to Philadelphia only from time to time, on school breaks and parts of the summer, when Big Pete called for him. During the 1980 World Series, Petey flew with the team to Kansas City. He’d hardly seen his dad in months—divorce proceedings were ongoing—and Big Pete had had to wrest Petey from Karolyn with a court order. Karolyn said that she’d resisted letting Petey go to the Series out of indignation and anger that Big Pete had not invited Fawn as well.
How could he leave her out? How could he exclude his daughter?
Pete, in the midst of that $800,000-ayear Phillies contract, explained that he had nowhere for Fawn, as a girl and now a teenager, to comfortably stay.

So it was Petey who slept in his father’s hotel room during that World Series, who saw his father up and pacing, bat in hand, by morning’s light. During games Petey sat in the dugout, wearing number 14, cheering on the team and calling out “Get a hit” to his father before at bats. In the clincher, back in Philadelphia, Rose singled three times.

“I spit, I chew sunflower seeds and gum,” Petey said then to a reporter. “I go between innings to get Tootsie Rolls. This is the best thing to happen in my life.”

The nation saw Petey then, just as they saw him when he was brought into one of his father’s Aqua Velva aftershave commercials. The two of them stand on the steps of the dugout wearing their Phillies whites and looking out toward the field. Petey has his slim arm across Pete’s back: “Hey, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“When do you think I’m going to start shaving?”