Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (19 page)

Later still, when Jackson is asked what he did with the $5,000, he answers: “I put it in my pocket.”

It does seem clear that Shoeless Joe was a follower and not a ring-leader in the fix, and although he and the other players were acquitted at trial (jurors carried some of the Sox around the crowded and jubilant courtroom on their shoulders), Commissioner Landis, aware that the integrity and perhaps the solvency of the game was under threat, banished every one of them.

In 1951, less than 10 months before Jackson’s death, the House of Representatives in South Carolina—Shoeless Joe lived much of his youth and his postplaying years in or around Greenville—passed a resolution to appeal to baseball for his reinstatement. The appeal was denied. The South Carolina House appealed again in ’85, this time to new commissioner Peter Ueberroth who had reinstated Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, players banned for their casino associations by Ueberroth’s predecessor Bowie Kuhn. (“The world changes,” Ueberroth said.) Ueberroth also rejected Jackson and so the state tried one more time in ’89, appealing to commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti amid the heat of the Rose gambling investigation. Three weeks before signing Rose’s lifetime ban, Giamatti officially denied the Jackson petition, writing in part: “I, for one, do not wish to play God with history.”

Rose’s case (along with
Eight Men Out
and the 1989 movie
Field of Dreams
) helped revive interest in Jackson’s situation and also moved the emphasis onto the question of his suitability for admittance to the Hall of Fame. Earlier debate around Jackson had centered more generally on the clearing of his name and the restoration of his legacy; Cooperstown itself moved to the forefront only after Rose was barred. When fans in South Carolina rallied behind Jackson once again in the ’90s, they had the Hall in mind, and it was in those years that Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Feller publicly took up the cause. Williams pleaded directly with Bud Selig—unsuccessfully—on Shoeless Joe’s behalf. “Damn it,” Williams, then 80, told friends of his Jackson advocacy, “I’m going to keep it going until I’m gone.”

Linked by their banishments, Jackson and Rose—as Cincinnatians can tell you—are also linked by the city itself. Much of the 1919 scandal came together in Cincinnati, the site of Games 1, 2, 6 and 7. On the eve of the Series opener, shops and street corners swirled with rumors that the fix was in and later, after all the games were done, the Reds’ World Series win seemed not a victory at all, but a sour and unwanted gift.

“When everything was going on with Pete, there was a lot of talk about 1919 around here,” says Jeff Ruby, the Cincinnati restaurateur who was close to Rose during the late ’80s. “The idea was that a gambling situation in baseball was hitting us hard again. It was 70 years later—70! One thing I’ve learned since coming here”—Ruby arrived in Cincinnati in 1970 as a young man from the East Coast—“is that in this town history really matters. People have long memories.”

For all the linkage of their fates, and the fact that both of them greatly endangered the game through gambling, Jackson and Rose committed very different sins with different implications. Jackson’s fix appears to have been an isolated case in his life, while Rose’s gambling was heavy and chronic. Unlike Jackson, however, Rose was never, even after exhaustive investigation, accused of attempting to throw or alter the outcome of a game. Nor was Rose ever charged or even suspected of giving anything less than full effort with full intent to win in every one of the 3,562 major league games in which he played.

PETE ROSE and Denny McLain are not friends, though they’ve been closely coupled at various times in their lives. In 1969, the two were credited as coauthors on a paperback manual,
How to Play Better Baseball
(not to be confused with Bud Harrelson’s
How to Play Better Baseball
, published in ’72). Later they appeared at card shows together, and in 1988, when McLain was working as promotions director for the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Komets pro hockey team, he hired Rose to do an event at the rink. “Pete Rose Night” went very well (thousands lined up for autographs) and during the visit Rose and McLain went out for dinner. A quarter of a century later, McLain recalled that dinner as he sat in front of the Paterno Brothers store—in between signing for the fans and greeting passersby on their way to the Hall of Fame.

“Pete had his guys out with him that night,” said McLain. “Every rat in his cage. They were such talkers and such amateurs. As the night went on [some of Pete’s friends] started talking about doing a cocaine deal. I could hardly believe it.” Less than five months earlier McLain had left the Federal Correctional Institution in Talladega, Ala., having served 29 months of a 23-year sentence for several crimes including extortion and an attempt to distribute three kilos of cocaine. His prison time had been drastically reduced because in an appeal it was determined that procedural errors had been made during the original trial.

“I took Pete aside at one point and said, ‘What are you doing with these guys?’ ” says McLain. “He said, ‘Nah, they’re my friends.’ I tried to talk him away from it. These guys were amateurs, clueless. I said to Pete, ‘Do you know what could happen to you if you get caught? Look at what happened to me. You do not want to end up there.’ He started talking about how, Yeah but I’d gotten my case reversed and all, which to me was ridiculous logic.”

This dinner in Fort Wayne was also mentioned in a phone conversation that became evidence in the Dowd Report, which also included a separate and well-detailed suggestion that Rose was near to and aware of cocaine dealings. Rose, though, has never been charged with a drugrelated crime and he has firmly dismissed any suggestions of involvement with cocaine.

“I have no idea what ended up happening with all that,” McLain said. “But it was right out there on the table. I said to him, ‘Pete you are fucking crazy. You’re crazy. What are you doing with these guys? You’re Pete Rose.’”

Chapter 12

Petey

July, 1997, Central Georgia

T
HE OLD bus traveled northward through the night, making time on I-75, whirring up and inland toward Chattanooga. The seats were full of ballplayers, the members of the Double A Chattanooga Lookouts, a Cincinnati Reds affiliate that had just played a game in Jacksonville. Among these teammates was a third baseman of inevitable renown: Pete Rose Jr.

That summer Petey—to everyone he was Petey—was having the finest season of his career, batting comfortably above .300 and with newfound power. He was on his way to a Chattanooga total of 25 home runs, 31 doubles and 98 RBI in fewer than 450 at bats. No one could say for sure, but there were whispers around the club that the time was drawing near, that, finally, when the Reds roster expanded in September, Rose Jr. would get his chance to play in the major leagues.

Now the hour was late and the air inside the bus hung stale and dense. Here and there yellow foam rubber worked its way out through tears in the faded fabric of the seats. A TV screen above the aisle flickered silently. Someone belched. Jacksonville to Chattanooga meant seven and a half, maybe eight hours in all—more than 400 miles to ride.

Rose Jr. was well familiar with this kind of trip. He was playing in his ninth season in the minor leagues, seven of them spent at lowrung A ball. He knew not to take even an uninterrupted bus ride for granted (he’d endured roadside breakdowns in five states over the years), and he had long since learned that in the minor leagues you get your sleep whenever and wherever you can.

He zipped up his ball jacket and folded his arms across his chest. Wedged into his window seat, he grew tired of the rhythmic monotony, the blur of yellow-orange highway lights and the ceaseless black road. The bus rolled past Waycross, Dixie Union, mileage signs to Atlanta. Soon Petey’s eyes fell shut, and his neck went slack. It was a warm midsummer night. Pete Rose Jr. was 27 years old, and in his sleep he had a dream.

He is at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, the cradle of his boyhood and youth, and he is stepping into the batter’s box. The crowd is thundering all around him and there is a pitcher, faceless and nameless—irrelevant—on the mound. His father is in the stands. Suddenly it is quiet, and the pitch is thrown. And in his dream Pete Rose Jr. is aware that this is his very first at bat in the major leagues.

He swings at the ball, and he hits it hard, and he can feel the clean, weight
-
less ricochet off the bat and see the ball on its path, a white streak going into rightfield, curling toward the foul line and an outfielder moving toward the ball, and all of it, as he would recall more than 15 years later, “vivid. Very, very vivid, as vivid a dream as I have had in my life.”

He begins to sprint down the first base line. He is wearing the red number 14 on his back. He can hear the crowd again, and the fans calling out his name, “Petey! Petey!” as they stretch their necks and peer down toward rightfield and the ball as it drops fair to the grass. And now he is angling toward first base, and making the turn, and the ball is being gathered in by a rightfielder (also nameless and faceless); now he is nearing second base, knowing that the ball is coming there too and that there will be a play on him. And so he leaves his feet, all Pete Rose Jr. of him., and he goes hard into the bag, arriving headfirst and safely in a spray of dirt.

It very nearly came true, “that crazy, real, strange dream that”—Rose Jr. says—“I sometimes still think about.” He arrived to the big leagues less than two months after that bus ride, getting there Sept. 1, 1997, nine years to the day after he signed his first professional contract. In his second at bat for the Reds he pulled a ball to the right side and it bounded off the glove of the Royals first baseman, Jeff King. Rose Jr. turned at first base and held there with a single. The camera showed his father, in the front row behind home plate, fleshier than he might have been at age 56, sunglasses and ballcap on, standing up and clapping, a grin on his face. “For Pete Rose Jr. only 4,255 more hits to go,” a television commentator would say.

Petey had come to the park that day from his in-laws’ home in Cincinnati, driving along the same streets he had so often traveled as a child with his mom or dad—a piece of Glenway, a stretch of Queen City Avenue, a few miles down I-75 to Second Street and the side road now called Pete Rose Way—and pulling into the players’ parking area at what was now Cinergy Field but would always be Riverfront to him.

He dressed beside the locker with his nameplate on it, and bantered with Bernie Stowe and the other clubhouse men. There was still the same old carpet, but some of the lighting was new. In all, the clubhouse seemed a changed, familiar place. He had been awake in his room until 5 a.m., he told people, “with nothing on, doing my stances in the mirror.”

He buffed his shoes and buttoned his white jersey. Until now, the number 14 had been taken out of circulation, no longer available to any Reds player, but Petey’s dad had said it would be O.K. for him to wear it. He tarred up his bat and when he jogged onto the field the early crowd leaped forward. Before it was announced that Rose Jr. would play, the Reds had sold about 16,000 tickets to the game. After the announcement they sold 16,000 more. Red-white-and-blue bunting hung around the stands as if it were Opening Day, and a helicopter clucked loudly overhead trailing a sign that read
WELCOME HOME PETEY
. This was one of the largest crowds of the season in Cincinnati; the Reds were out of the pennant race and on their way to a losing year.

“I haven’t been to a Reds’ game in seven years, since Pete was banned,” one fan told a newspaper reporter from West Virginia. “But I saw Pete’s first game, at Crosley Field in 1963, and I’m here to see Petey’s first game.”

Petey took batting practice just as he had at the same home plate under the same cage during the 1980s—as a teenage ballplayer at Oak Hills High, tagging along to work with Dad—but this time he was being paid a prorated portion of the big league minimum, $150,000 a year. This time Petey was hitting in a group with the other starters in the Reds lineup.

After BP, after a game of catch and some infield, after he’d gone back inside, pulled on a clean shirt and buffed his shoes one more time, he was in the dugout, standing at the rail beside Eduardo Perez, Tony’s son, another kid who’d been raised in this same clubhouse, raised by the Big Red Machine. Eduardo was Petey’s age, almost exactly, and already in his fifth big league season. In the 1970s they had played Wiffle ball together in the tunnels at Riverfront, more times than either of them could count. It was 12:56 p.m., about nine minutes before the start of the game and Petey turned to Eduardo and said, “My dad just got here.”

Yes. Big Pete, up from Florida, was striding through the ballpark gates then with his wife Carol, stopping first to greet Reds owner Marge Schott with an embrace. Some 32,000 fans in the house, another payday Rose and Schott could congratulate themselves on. Marge took a drag on her cigarette, and Rose made a joke about how he might just leap the railing and pinch-hit. Below, on the bench, far out of sight and earshot, Pete Jr. had the familiar cold feeling wash over him. “All kinds of chills,” he says. It’s a feeling he often gets when Big Pete is near, even before he has seen him, before, it would seem, he could be certain his father is there. “I know,” he says. “I get the feeling and I just know. I am always right.”

The crowd stood and applauded a few minutes later when Pete Rose appeared in the stands and made his way down to his seat at the rail—waving to folks he knew—and the applause began anew when Petey ran out to third base for the top of the first inning. He bent and with his index finger wrote “HK 4256” in the dirt by the bag, the HK standing for Hit King, the inscription being what he scrawled onto the baseball field before every game he played. He gathered in a few warmup grounders from tall Ed Taubensee at first base. And then with Petey pounding his glove and fielding-ready at third, Reds lefthander Mike Remlinger threw his first pitch to Kansas City’s Johnny Damon, making it official: Petey was a big leaguer.

He was hitting seventh in the lineup, and his first at bat came in the bottom of the second inning, the Reds trailing 1–0, the tying run on second base. He carried to the plate one of the black Mizuno bats that were custom-made for Big Pete to use during the home stretch of his pursuit of Ty Cobb in 1985, and on Petey’s way to the batter’s box, he called out to his father, “This one’s for you.” He had been saving this bat for this moment since he was 15 years old.

Though Petey normally stood straighter in his batting stance than Big Pete had, with his hands higher and his feet wider apart, for that first pitch he got down in his father’s old crouch, the black bat low over his shoulder in tribute. He followed the path of the pitch (a fastball) out of Kevin Appier’s right hand and he looked the ball all the way into Mike Macfarlane’s catcher’s mitt, just the way his dad had taught him to do when taking a pitch.
Understand how the pitcher is trying to get you out.
The fans were tingling and abuzz, getting what they had paid to see.

Petey struck out that first at bat, high fastball away, but then came the base hit, leading off the bottom of the fourth, on a 3-and-2 count. Petey would play all nine innings, make a nice backhand play at third base, draw a walk. And though he went down on strikes a second time and though the Reds lost the game, Pete Jr. recalls this day as the best day of his 21-season playing career. When the media surged around him afterward, he kept tugging on the 14 on his chest as he spoke and he grinned and nodded a lot. “The nine years of bus rides, bad food, bad hotels, bad fans. It was all worth it,” he said.

He met his dad after the game too—outside the players’ tunnel, near the media entrance—and his father hugged him. And though it really
was
the best day of Pete Rose Jr.’s long and winding baseball life, it was a day darkened too.

“I’m the only guy to play his first game in the big leagues, and my dad wasn’t allowed in the locker room,” Rose Jr. says. He is saying this more than 15 years after that day. “Every other guy you ask: Did your dad come to your locker after your first game? The answer is yes. My dad? I wasn’t even allowed to leave passes for him. It was miserable.

“Imagine if he could have come in, if we could have walked out of the clubhouse and onto the field the same way we always used to do, only now I’m the one playing and he’s the one watching. And after the game he could have come over to my locker instead of the way I used to go over to his. I know, I get it. I guess I understand why he wasn’t allowed, but even so, couldn’t they have just let him in? What was he going to do, come in there and be some crazed bad guy? Come in and start taking bets on the game? He would have just come in and talked baseball with everyone. That’s what he does. He could have just come in and been with me. My dad. But he wasn’t allowed in. Why did
I
get penalized? What did I do?”

August 2012, Bristol, Va.

One of the most popular nights of the year at Boyce Cox Field, home of the low A Bristol White Sox, is Mayberry Deputy Night, a takeout from the old
Andy Griffith Show
. It features a Barney Fife impersonator—a local man of local renown named David Browning—who meanders among the crowd, handing out summonses for miscues and infractions. Say, being bald. “Guess you went from Head and Shoulders to Mop and Glo,” the putative Fife will say, writing a guy up. If someone calls out “Hey, Barney, where are your bullets?” He pulls them out of his breast pocket. Just like on
Andy Griffith
. The BriSox, as they are affectionately known, typically draw about 550 or 600 people per game. On Mayberry Deputy Night several hundred more turn out.

This is the field where in 2011 at the age of 41, Pete Rose Jr. began his professional managing career. The 30 or so BriSox ballplayers dress in close and spartan quarters: metal benches, gymroom lockers. Some are mid-to-late twentysomethings hanging on for the last of their baseball lives, others are teenage bonus babies on their first professional stop. To pass the time before a game, players will gather around and do card tricks or take turns making mouth-farting noises. Later at night a group will sometimes go to the State Line Bar and Grille, the only joint open, and try to meet some girls.

In the outfield at Boyce Cox, the home run fence looms 16 feet high and is plastered top-to-bottom with sponsor signage: Blevins Tire & Recapping Co.; Appalachian Orthopaedic Associates; McDonald’s; VFW Post 6975; Walgreens; Walmart; Addilynn Memorial United Methodist Church; and so on. A large American flag flaps on a pole behind centerfield, and beside it a stand of tall pine trees into which the best of the young sluggers might lose a baseball. If you were to sit on one of the orange plastic chairs beside the first base dugout where Rose Jr. liked to sit with his coaches during games, you could see past the trees and into the surrounding neighborhood. A battered red Chevy truck might roll down Division Street, turn onto Elmo and pull into a driveway where the driver shuts off the motor and goes inside his home. In the infield the base paths run 90 feet each and the distance from the mound to home plate is 60 feet, six inches.

A fair number of notable baseball figures have stopped in Bristol, the bottom rung on the Chicago White Sox’s organizational ladder, on their way up through the ranks—future American League All-Star Carlos Lee as a player in 1995; the major league’s former single-season saves leader Bobby Thigpen as a manager in 2007 and ’08 to name just two— but the arrival of Rose Jr. as Bristol’s manager created a level of excitement of an altogether different order; folks around the team were ecstatic. Each year on the eve of the season the team holds a Meet the Sox night in which fans, especially the bundles of children who come to games seeking autographs and foul balls, can chat with the team. Before the ’11 and ’12 home openers, there was a twist in publicity: The stadium marquee read, “Meet Pete Rose Jr. and the Bristol Sox.” Bristol is about a six hour drive south of Cincinnati.