Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (21 page)

Big Pete, inspecting the face: “It’s going to be a few years, Son, but when you do you’ve got something great to look forward to.”

“Aqua Velva, right, Dad?”

They give one another jokey little buddy-pal punches on the chin. “Aqua Velva,” Big Pete says, “it makes a man…” and Petey finishes, “feel like a man.”

In 1982, when Petey was 12, he appeared on a big league baseball card, Fleer number 640. It’s a candid shot, middle of a game. Petey is on one knee by the on-deck circle and Big Pete crouches beside him, bat in hand, doughnut on the barrel, pine tar rag by the handle, looking out at the pitcher with fingers raised to make a point, telling Petey something about what’s going on in the game. The photo is labeled
PETE & RE-PETE
. The back of the card tells of Rose’s fine season and .325 batting average the year before, closing with this paragraph: “On August 10, 1981 Pete surpassed Stan Musial’s alltime National League hit record with 3,631 hits. Cheering him on throughout his great career is his faithful and loyal son, Pete Rose II.”

BIG PETE didn’t make it to Petey’s Little League games during the Philadelphia years, of course—even when the family was intact in Cincinnati he didn’t get to them, playing his own ball games with the Reds— but even in his absence, his presence was felt. There was always someone around to remind Petey whose son he was. “Hey, what’s the matter with Pete Rose’s kid?” an opposing player’s parent would crack, chortling if Petey struck out or dropped a ball. “No wonder his dad got out of town!” Then brassy Karolyn, at every game with snacks for the kids, would rumble over and tell the parent in her convincing hellmouthed way to shut it. And shut it the parent invariably did.
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Petey’s strikeouts weren’t all that common though. He could play, could handle himself on a ballfield. When Big Pete came back to lead the Reds in August of 1984, it meant Petey was back too—back in a Cincinnati uniform and back in the clubhouse with a half-sized locker all his own. Being batboy was just the nub of it. Petey came early to the park, hit in the cage, went out and got some hacks off Tommy Helms or whichever coach was throwing BP. He’d get in line near the bag at first or third and take ground balls, circle under pop-ups. He played pregame catch with any Reds player who needed to get warm and he was always ready to shoot the bull about that night’s game. “I think he thought he was actually on the team,” says Buddy Bell, the Reds’ third baseman in those years. “You know, he kind of was.”
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Of course Petey’s life was not whole, not with his father now remarried. An underlying sadness inhabited him, an emptiness. The three of them—Petey with Karolyn and Fawn—were in a new house now, on Neeb Road. Petey didn’t have Big Pete throwing batting practice to him in the backyard anymore. He hit off a pitching machine. “He was still our same Petey, still full of energy, ready to play ball,” says Karolyn. “But he was different. Sometimes, I would see him looking around in a way that I hadn’t seen him do before, his eyes moving this way and that. Like he was unsettled.” Later Petey would describe the divorce as being mystifying to him, and unexplained. One day his mom had packed up their things and they’d left without his father for Puerto Rico. They stayed at the Perezes’ place for a while, and when they came back to Cincinnati his father’s stuff was out of the house.

Big Pete couldn’t stand even talking to Karolyn, although Petey and Fawn knew that the feeling did not go both ways. As angered as she was—and it was she who had demanded the divorce—Karolyn still had a thing for Pete. It felt like she wanted him back. “I think she still loves him,” Fawn said a few years after the split. But there was never even a hint toward reconciliation. It was after that 1984 season that Big Pete and Carol had named their infant son Tyler after Ty Cobb, the figure who loomed larger than any living being in Big Pete’s life.

Petey knew that things would never be the way they had been, that life at home would not again be the way he wished it could be. But at the ballpark? Well, that could be a kind of home for Petey. That could work. At the park, Petey was in the throes of that wonderful, anticipatory summer of 1985. His father was the Reds’ player-manager, and the team, crummy for three years straight, was suddenly winning and fans were coming to the ballpark, and it was all because of Pete Rose. He was about to do something that no one had thought could ever be done. He was stalking Cobb’s alltime hits record, full of the chase and keen to the record on every front, right up to the night of Sept. 11, 1985, when he had 4,191 career hits and needed one more, and nearly 50,000 people packed Riverfront Stadium to see what Pete Rose could do.

Eleven-month-old Tyler Rose may have been in the stands swaddled in Carol’s arms, but it was Petey who was in the dugout beside his father, down by the bat rack before the game. They had their gloves on and when his dad gave that familiar nod—
Let’s go, time to toss
—Petey loped up the dugout steps and out onto the field. He was growing tall, closing in on six feet, and even if you were in the very first row behind the Reds’ dugout, and particularly if you were among the thousands and thousands behind that, you looked onto the field and saw that number 14 jersey and naturally thought that this was the man himself.

Cameras flashed like a light show and the crowd erupted in huge cries, standing and clapping and calling out the name: “Rose!” “Pete Rose!” “Tonight’s the night, Rose!” It was unlike anything Petey had ever heard, louder than a World Series game. He punched his glove and turned to look for his father. But Big Pete had stayed in the dugout instead of coming onto the field. Petey looked in and caught Big Pete’s eye and saw that big familiar grin, and Petey realized, as he stood out there naked and awed under the stadium lights, what his father had given him: this moment before the crowd on this night so that he could feel the thrill of it, the joy, the electricity and the weight. So that for a moment he could stand in his father’s shoes.

When Big Pete stepped out of the dugout himself a few moments later, the crowd surged again, understanding now that they would see the two Roses play catch. Petey recalls the first ball his father threw to him arriving as if out of a rifle, a much harder throw than usual and the powerful
thwock!
in his glove another reminder that this night was different from all others. Petey could hardly see through the tears in his eyes. He felt nauseated almost. His throw back to Big Pete sailed too high. The next time he got the ball Petey threw it almost straight into the dirt. It was as if he had never played catch in his life and his legs felt weak and unsteady.

Through the pregame and the top of the first inning the crowd’s hum rose and fell, and then Rose stepped to the plate, bottom of the first, and drove that clean opposite-field single—yes, indeed, hit number 4,192!— that made the game, and all the world it seemed, come to a stop. Pete Rose Jr. was 15 years, nine months and 26 days old. He went out onto the field with the Reds’ players and hovered on the outskirts of the celebration as so many teammates—Perez and Concepcíon, Browning and Franco, Hume and Murphy and O’Neill—gathered around Pete at first base and hoisted him onto their shoulders. Marge Schott appeared, escorted out by a policeman, and put her arms around Big Pete. Even after she and all the Reds players had left the field, Petey along with them, and with umpire Lee Weyer back of home plate seeming inclined to resume the game, the volume of the crowd did not wane. On and on it continued. Six minutes, seven minutes, eight.…Petey saw his father standing alone at first base. Helms, the coach at first base, draped an arm around Big Pete and turned toward the dugout, and Petey heard the catcher Dave Van Gorder say, “You should go back out there.”

Petey felt unsure. For all his father had given him on the baseball field, all the access and freedom, all the tutelage, there were still the many things that his dad withheld; there were borders around Big Pete that Petey was not supposed to cross. Fawn and Karolyn stood beside one another in the stands. Petey’s grandma and his uncle Dave were there too. All of the huge crowd was cheering. And even as Petey summoned his resolve and did it, as he ran out of the dugout and onto the field toward first base, he wondered how it would turn out, whether his arriving at first base would be O.K. with Dad.

He would say later that this was the first time that his father had ever hugged him, really hugged him, a tree trunk of a 44-year-old man to Petey’s green stalk, not letting go. Petey could feel that his father was weeping, his body racked—and that too was a first—and he could feel his father’s heart beating, and he could feel his own heart beating and now in their first moment together since Pete Rose had taken it away from Cobb, since he had become the Hit King, he said into Petey’s ear, “You’ll catch me.” Petey couldn’t say anything to that, not one thing. He only stayed in the embrace and patted his father on the back, the way macho old buddies do upon greeting, or the way a woman might pat a man to signal that an embrace is chaste. There was a stiffness in the way Petey held on to his father, although in Big Pete at this moment there was no stiffness at all.

What Petey would say—and he would say this too on camera in a documentary film, so it was not a personal detail that he had a mind to hide— was that he was so very happy to have gotten that hug from his father, on television, before all the masses of people at Riverfront. And he added that for all the roaring in the stadium and all the many eyes that he knew were upon them, as he stood out there in that strange, first true embrace, the crowd was in fact not there at all, and that when he and his father were together at first base, “There was nobody there but me and him.”

Chapter 13

Suspended Belief

A
CROWD OF 55,438, a regular-season record for Riverfront, had come out for this Opening Day against the Cardinals. Rose was beginning his fourth full season as the Reds’ manager, and now, April 4, 1988, it seemed at last safe to say that he would not be getting in the batter’s box again. He was 10 days shy of his 47th birthday, 20 months removed from his last at bat. This was the 26th Opening Day that Rose had been in a major league dugout and the 107th straight opener in the continuum of Reds history. The team wore black armbands to remember Ted Kluszewski, the brawny Cincinnati slugger of the 1950s and the batting coach for the Big Red Machine. Big Klu had died a few days earlier. “I never heard a bad word said about him,” Rose said after attending the funeral. “He was a prince.”

Rose’s final appearances as a player had passed quietly in the summer of 1986. He’d started that season, his first as the Hit King, on the 15-day disabled list with a nasty flu (just the second stint on the disabled list in his career) and had slumped terribly once he came back—playing through a steady hum that he should hang it up. Fan polls suggested as much and so did commentators. Rose was not chasing Cobb anymore, and as a player he was hugely diminished, no longer helping the team. He had more miles on him than anyone in major league baseball history—by a long shot—but still Rose found it too hard to pull away. In May and June and into early July, he kept putting himself into the lineup at first base, batting second, just about every time the Reds faced a righthanded pitcher—singling softly here and there, fighting to keep his batting average above .200. “I don’t want to be around him when the end of his career comes,” Joe Morgan once said. “I know what it will do to him…It is his life.…When I’m through, I’ll still be Joe Morgan. He won’t be Pete Rose and I worry about that.”

On Aug. 11 of that 1986 season, Rose got five hits in five at bats in a home game against the Giants, four singles, a double, three RBI. “That was the 10th five-hit day of my career,” he said in his crowded manager’s office after the game, correcting a reporter who’d gotten it wrong. Six days later, a Sunday at Riverfront against the Padres, Rose went up as a pinch-hitter to face Goose Gossage in the eighth inning. Gossage threw three fastballs and Rose struck out. Rose was 45 years, four months and three days old, his batting average stood at .219 on the year, and that, it turned out, was the last of the 15,890 times he came to the plate in the major leagues.

Rose, though, never said, “I’m done.” He couldn’t. He didn’t put himself into a game the rest of the year, but he didn’t announce his retirement as a player in the off-season either. He wasn’t on the roster when 1987 began, though the possibility persisted that season that ol’ Pete, as manager, might activate himself at any time. He did nothing to discourage such talk. Up on Given Road, he loaded up the pitching machine and hit for long stretches after the games. At the ballpark he watched pitchers, deconstructing, as he always did. Weeks and then months went by but Rose would not rule out a return, no matter his age or faded skills. He kept his black bats around him in the clubhouse. Maybe, he said, the Reds would need a pinch-hitter late in the year. “I know I can hit the bleeping baseball,” he said. Not really, though. Not in a way that Pete Rose or Harry Rose could be proud of, and Pete knew that deep inside. Fawn said at the time that her father bore a perceptible resentment toward Pete Jr. “Petey has the one thing Dad doesn’t have now,” Fawn said. “Youth.”

It was only a couple months after the end of that 1987 season, at base-ball’s winter meetings, that Rose allowed to a few reporters—no press conference, no big declarative statement, it was almost an aside—that he was through playing the game. He did not want any kind of farewell tour, he said, no send-off at Riverfront, no to-do, no fuss. “Don’t people understand I’m not retiring?” he said. “I’m just moving into a new position. I still have a uniform on.”

Yes, he was still in and into the game and the Reds players, most of them, though not quite all, loved him as a manager. He bustled around as he always did, energy unbound, and he let loose his peppery ragtime of talk. He managed the team with great attention to detail, reminding players of the particulars of each umpire’s strike zone, telling them which grounds crew cut the grass high or low. He was loyal to the Reds who worked hard for him and he always knew what time it was in each of his player’s lives. “He messes with me just like he did when he was playing,” said pitcher Bill Gullickson. “You can clown with him but you respect him.” Added outfielder Eric Davis, “He is one of us.”

That Rose was sometimes accompanied at the ballpark by a coterie of neckless and decidedly unpolished men (often with pagers clipped to their belts) did not jar his players. Pete knew everyone in Cincinnati, they figured, and he was the type to gather the street life around him. Although Pete often talked about the football games and horse races he had won or lost money on, the players did not know and few suspected—“It never crossed my mind,” says Rob Murphy, a Reds reliever from 1985 through ’88—that Rose was during those years wagering heavily on the Reds, if not every night then close to it. They did not for the most part find it surprising or out of character that he watched out of town ball games so intently.

“Well, there was this one time,” recalls Reds pitcher Tom Browning. “There was a Padres-Giants game on TV in the clubhouse.” Browning at one point casually questioned a Padres pitching decision (
had they left the starter in the game too long?
) and Rose became irrationally angry at him. “What do you know? You’re a manager now?” he snapped. Browning believes Rose was so on edge because he had money on the game.

Rose managed splendidly, though, showing a patience that belied his otherwise insatiable style. He accumulated and retained subtle and valuable details about opposing players, and he made in-game decisions that the players understood and generally agreed with. Cincinnati hadn’t climbed back to first place, but the Reds seemed on their way. Under Rose they were winners, finishing second in 1986 and ’87 (as they would again in ’88) and were a lot better off than before he’d taken the job. “Pete was like God to us,” says Browning. According to analytics done by stats emperor (and devoted Rose supporter) Bill James, Rose had become, “one of the most impressive and intriguing [managers] in the league…just as much a tactician as an emotional leader.”

ONE MONTH into the 1988 season, on the last day of April, Rose clashed with umpire Dave Pallone. Pete had run out to argue a ninthinning call that cost the Reds a game against the Mets in Cincinnati and in the heated face-off that followed Pallone unintentionally jabbed Pete’s left cheek. In response Rose pushed Pallone once and then, more subtly, again. Pallone ejected Rose from the game and before long the Riverfront fans began heaving things onto the field. Finally, for his safety, Pallone went inside, leaving just three umpires to work the game’s final outs. Two days later Rose got the news from the league: a $10,000 fine and a suspension of 30 days. This was the first suspension of his life. No manager had been banned for that length of time since Durocher got kicked out for a year in 1947.
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Rose howled that his suspension was way too severe and others echoed on his behalf. Pete was no repeat offender, after all—umpires liked him and Rose had a reputation for being fair. Besides, Pallone had poked him first. The man who suspended Rose, however, National League president A. Bartlett Giamatti, did not bend. “Such disgraceful episodes are not business as usual, nor can they be allowed to become so,” explained Giamatti, adding that the league would not “countenance any potentially injurious harassment of any kind of the umpires.” And another thing, Giamatti said, “I hold managers to higher standards of behavior.” When Rose, his agent-attorney Katz at his side, came to baseball’s Park Avenue offices to appeal the case, a committee of three team executives denied him and upheld the ban.

Giamatti had taken over at the National League in 1986, directly off an eight-year tenure as president of Yale University. He had been a scholar of high prestige and a literature professor of enormous popularity, and was also a man who loved baseball in a way that he loved few things. He’d grown up in small-town New England, a deeply devout Red Sox fan, and a few months before accepting his appointment as the youngest president in 200 years at Yale, he had commented, “The only job I ever wanted was to be president of the American League.” (Rose, upon hearing of the remark during the Pallone fallout, said, “I wish he’d gotten what he wanted.”)

Giamatti wrote beautifully about baseball and in 1977 had done a piece for
Harper’s Magazine
in which he likened the Mets’ trading of Tom Seaver to the Masaccio fresco on a wall of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, the
Expulsion of Adam and Eve
. Giamatti believed in the sanctity of baseball and in the value of its purest tenets, and he believed as well in the power of punishment as a deterrent.

The season before the Rose-Pallone incident Giamatti had suspended Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross for 10 days after Gross was found to have glued sandpaper onto the heel of his glove, ideal for scuffing a base-ball. Giamatti’s written denial of Gross’s appeal is well-admired for its clarity, intelligence and thoughtfulness, and is included in a collection of Giamatti’s writings,
A Great and Glorious Game
. In his ruling Giamatti declared that he viewed cheating as categorically more serious than most physical transgressions (abusing an umpire, say, or an opponent). While an impulsive act of violence on the field “can never be condoned or tolerated,” Giamatti wrote, it might be seen as an outgrowth of the “aggressive, volatile nature of the game.” Cheating on the other hand is “cool, deliberate, premeditated” and antics such as Gross’s, “seek to undermine the basic foundation of any contest declaring the winner.”

The extraordinary length of Rose’s ban did not follow from Giamatti’s code. His shove of Pallone was certainly not premeditated, nor cool, nor a threat to undermine the foundation of the game. There was nothing cheating about it. The shove might have been seen as an extension of an exchange in which Rose was physically provoked. Still, the incident was bush and thuggish and by any reckoning intolerable, and it came up against another core of Giamatti’s beliefs and mission—he felt charged to protect and enforce a respect for the game and its explicit rules. So, a 30-day ban it was for Rose, and on top of the fine another $82,000 lost from his half-million-dollar Reds salary. (Baseball warned Schott not to pay Pete during the ban.) Rose, along with Katz, had gotten a first, up-close sense of Bart Giamatti and of the convictions and thought-lines that guided him.
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ROSE’S GAMBLING had intensified, in season and out (the NFL, of course, and college sports too) and some of the men around him in the mid-1980s, Tommy Gioiosa and Paul Janszen and the event organizer Mike Bertolini, among others, were at the heart of the group that placed bets for Pete and would be connected to his downfall. Rose spent time working out at Gold’s Gym, which had become a seat of illegal steroids, cocaine activity and bookmaker gambling. Gioiosa worked as a manager at Gold’s and everyone still thought that he looked a lot like Pete, only juiced. Janszen, a steroids dealer, well-muscled and comfortably over six-feet, acted as a kind of bodyguard at some of Rose’s autograph sessions.

“All of a sudden I’ve got to go through him to get to Pete,” complained Willie DeLuca, a Cincinnati restaurateur and bookie who had known Rose since the early ’70s.

Before the 1988 season Rose was summoned to see baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth. The commissioner had heard about the heavies who sometimes hung around with Rose at Riverfront and wanted to explicitly warn him to keep unauthorized people out of the clubhouse. After that meeting, Rose told people close to him that he was relieved Ueberroth hadn’t asked him about his gambling.

At home, Rose watched a gargantuan television set, along with two smaller ones, keeping tabs on several games at once. Janszen came over a lot with his girlfriend Danita and she and Carol would talk while the men followed the sports. When games were on that he had a stake in, which was much of the time, Pete could become intensely reactive and even more tightly wound than usual—he would be suddenly overjoyed, then suddenly irritated, just as Browning had seen in the Reds clubhouse. Some of Rose’s friends felt then that the gambling had gotten to be too much. “But he was going to be the last to see it,” says Jeff Ruby, who opened his upscale Covington restaurant, The Waterfront, in 1986 with Rose as a key investor. “It’s like my daughter telling me I’m addicted to cigars and I say I’m not. But I was. She knew. We all saw things in Pete, but he wasn’t going to hear it.”

Late at night after home games, Pete sometimes went over to Sorrento’s, a family restaurant on Montgomery Road in Norwood, and sat at the bar. This was DeLuca’s place. Willie was a warm, friendly and enormous man, with an extraordinary ability to balance objects on his nose—a football helmet, a chair, a samurai sword. Willie always had a big salad and a Diet Coke waiting for Pete when he got there. West Coast ball games played on the satellite TV and it was understood that the guys hanging around the bar might have a little something riding on them. Willie would take a wager on just about anything—no betting slips, you were on your honor. Everyone loved Willie and everyone enjoyed having Pete around. He was easy to talk to and he’d sign autographs for free and chatter about sports and put down his fork and smile for the camera whenever someone came over to take a picture with him. He was seen as smart money too. One day Pete might be rooting for the Dodgers, the next day he’d be rooting against them, and not for reasons that had anything to do with the Reds’ place in the standings.

IN THE ballpark, that 1988 Opening Day went very well for Cincinnati. Giamatti threw out the first ball and though St. Louis, the defending National League champions, took a 4–1 lead, the Reds buckled no further. Trailing 4–3 in the seventh inning Rose put in Jeff Treadway to pinch-hit, then called for a bunt play that led to the tying run. Rose used four relievers in the game, and none gave up a run. He ordered three intentional walks and each time the move paid off. Finally, in the bottom of the 12th inning a two-out single by Reds’ leftfielder Kal Daniels won the game. The huge crowd was delighted—this was Cincinnati’s sixth straight Opening Day win—and for Rose the victory came with sweet icing: Daniels had stroked his game-winning hit off Larry McWilliams, the pitcher who, as an Atlanta Brave in 1978, had helped to stop Pete’s hitting streak at 44 games.