All Rose Could Do Was Hustle--Right to the Top

Every schoolboy in America is familiar with the figure crouched at home plate. It is an American icon, as recognizable as the Lincoln penny. Some day, it will be on stamps, $2 bills, a mountain in South Dakota.

He doesn’t swing at a pitch. He pounces on it. Like a leopard going after a zebra. Then, he grabs his batting helmet with one hand and goes tearing down to first base as if every hound in hell were chasing after him.

The eyes are alight with an unholy gleam. They dart after the ball to see if he can take two.

He is a mass of energy. He is the only guy I have ever known who looks as if he is moving just sitting down. He charges at life. The face is a crag, but the expression is that of a kid who just got a pony for Christmas. You look at Peter Edward Rose and you are suddenly 25 years younger and it is summer and you are on the way to the old swimming hole with a frog in one pocket and fish hooks in the other.

Roy Campanella once said that in order to play baseball, you had to be a man but you had to have a lot of little boy in you, too. Pete Rose has more in him than Huckleberry Finn had. Mark Twain would have loved Pete Rose. The body is that of a caveman. Someone once said that Pete looked in uniform like a sack full of cannonballs, but the face is that of a dirty-faced kid looking in the window of a pastry shop.

Pete will never be old. He is stalled permanently somewhere between childhood and teen-age. Norman Rockwell invented Pete Rose. He came to the game right off a Saturday Evening Post cover.

Pete Rose bought the whole ethic--baseball, apple pie, corn-on-the-cob, Mom, Fourth of July fireworks, Horatio Alger Jr., The American Dream.

But the first time I ever saw him play, if anybody had told me this guy was going to get more hits than anyone else, I would have wondered what the guy had done with his Napoleon hat.

The first scouting report on Pete Rose was prophetic: “Can’t run, hit, throw or field. All Rose can do is hustle.”

And all Caruso could do was sing, as Bob Zuppke used to say. All the “Mona Lisa” could do was smile.

Pete brought a whole new dimension to the term hustle . To say Pete hustled was to say Kelly danced. It was only half the story.

He was too small, too slow, too eager, too homely. There was nothing to indicate he was going to become America’s Player.

But it is not entirely correct to say baseball dismissed him. “You could see he was going to be something, even in the minor leagues,” Dave Bristol who managed him at Macon, Ga., was recalling. “You knew he was going to set records at something, if not Cobb’s. All that determination. He didn’t hit a ball, he attacked it. He was like a guy breaking up a dogfight. He loved to hit and hit and hit. You go to his hotel room at night, and he’s hitting the bed post. Once, in the minor leagues in Macon, he goes 0 for 2 in the first inning of a game. Then he goes 6 for 8. It’s the only time in his life he ever got six hits in a game. But he got two every night.”

Pete reveled in baseball. He couldn’t believe his good luck. He couldn’t understand anybody who couldn’t. Once, when this reporter asked him if he wasn’t glad there was a game like baseball so he could make all this money, Pete’s answer was, “Yeah--aren’t you?”

He upgraded his ambitions as he went along. First, he wanted to become “the first singles hitter in history to get $100,000 a year.” He wanted to become the most prolific switch-hitter of all time. Then, he wanted to take the word switch out of the equation.

Pete Rose was the world’s greatest authority on Pete Rose. At a time when it was not considered manly to count your hits, Rose could tell you down to the last decimal point how many he had.

He began to stalk Ty Cobb years before anyone suspected it. It was in the 1975 World Series, when Rose had 2,537 hits--only 50 big leaguers topped 2,500 then. Pete was asked if he proposed to get more hits than anyone in the National League before he quit. “What about Ty Cobb?” Pete asked. “Cobb has 4,191!” the astonished reporters told the 34-year-old Rose. “Well,” said Pete, “if I get 200 hits a year for the next 10 years. . . . “

Every spring, this reporter would find Rose around a batting cage in Florida, banging out line drives and shouting: “Every summer, three things are going to happen--the grass is going to get green, the weather is going to get hot, and Pete Rose is going to get 200 hits and bat .300.”

For 10 seasons, that happened. For 14 seasons, he hit .300. For three, he led the league. For 23 seasons, he did something Cobb hardly ever did--he won. The teams Pete Rose played for were in seven playoff series and six World Series. Ty Cobb did not play in a World Series the last 20 years of his career. Pete played to win, not to star. He once caught a ball that plopped out of the glove of Bob Boone, the catcher, to preserve a World Series win for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980. He once caught a ball that plopped out of the mitt of left fielder Alex Johnson at the wall--and Pete was playing center field at the time. “It’s the only 7-8 putout you will find in the books,” Pete recalls. “The next day, Alex dropped a line drive at his belt buckle and he yells over at me, ‘Where were you?’ ”

Pete will remind you he played in more winning games than anyone else.

Will Rogers once gave John Wayne some career advice: “Keep working.” Pete Rose believed in it. He played anywhere just to be playing. He started out at second base. When Tommy Helms came along, he moved to the outfield. When George Foster came along, he moved to third base. When Philadelphia came along with Mike Schmidt at third, he moved to first.

He was unstylish but effective. When this reporter chided him for having the only cauliflowered chest in the league from stopping ground balls on it, Pete retorted, “I’ll stop them with my teeth if I have to.”

For generations, the argument, “Who was the greatest ballplayer in history?” was pretty much restricted to Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb. Not any more.

Lots of people consider Pete Rose, now that he’s about to catch Cobb, to be lucky to be on a page in history with the likes of Ruth, Hornsby, Williams, Aaron, Mays and Musial. They may be lucky to be with Pete Rose. Somebody in that lineup has got to get his uniform dirty.

Lots of guys just want to get in the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose wants to lead it off. And he does.