Rose Hits Jackpot (4,192), Keeps Going : His Single Breaks Cobb’s Mark--and His Triple Breaks His Own

Steve Garvey could have pulled the hidden-ball trick. Pete Rose never would have seen it coming. Rose’s eyes, like his clothes, like the brand-new car his boss just gave him, like his heart, were oh, so red.

No other color would have done. The man was a study in scarlet from the day he was born, right down to his father’s last name. The Reds were the ballclub of his boyhood and the team that invited him to the big leagues in 1963. He was a Red when he batted for the first time, nervously drawing a walk off a Pittsburgh pitcher named Earl Francis, and he was a Red here Wednesday night when he became the hittingest hitter in history.

Rose’s 4,192nd hit--”The Big Knock,” as he sometimes had referred to it--was struck against San Diego pitcher Eric Show in the first inning of Wednesday night’s game at Riverfront Stadium and went into left-center field. At last, Ty Cobb’s record had been laid to rest, 57 years to the day Cobb took his last swing, and Rose wept at first base when it was over, the first time he had cried since the night his dad died.

“I was all right until I looked up, and then I saw my dad up there with Ty Cobb, and that took care of me,” Rose said.

It was a single that did it for him, naturally. A hit by any other name would not have smelled as sweet. The record-breaker, a liner that fell well in front of left fielder Carmelo Martinez, was the 3,162nd single of Rose’s career.

Just in case anyone doubted whose night this was, Rose had two hits, including a triple in the seventh, walked once, scored both runs in a 2-0 victory and made a glorious, diving stop of a grounder to get the game’s final out. Refusing as always to act his age, Rose excitedly hopped up and down and slapped palms with his teammates when the evening was done.

Some of Rose’s favorite people--Dave, Davey, “Doggie,” Buddy, Eddie, Petey, Garvey and others--were there to embrace him after the big hit. Dave Parker later stood near home plate, clapping with his long arms above his head. Davey Concepcion and Tony (Doggie) Perez boosted Rose onto their shoulders near first base. Buddy Bell and Eddie Milner congratulated their teammate, 15-year-old batboy Petey Rose hugged his father and Padre first baseman Garvey shook his friend’s hand.

The crowd of 47,237 gave Rose a seven-minute ovation, during which he wiped tears from his eyes and finally placed his face on first-base coach Tommy Helms’ shoulder. Marge Schott, the auto dealer who owns the Reds, had a red 1985 Corvette driven onto the field as a gift to her team’s hard-driving player-manager.

Also seeing red before the night was over was Rose’s victim, the pitcher. After congratulating Rose at first base, Show sat on the mound during the celebration. Three innings later, he got into a quarrel with Martinez in the dugout--over another hit, not Rose’s--and nearly came to blows with him. Show left the park before the game was over, without comment.

This was the only unpleasantness of the evening. The postgame festivities included a phone call from Ronald Reagan to “Pete Rose, alias Charlie Hustle” during which the President jokingly commiserated with Rose on behalf of “those of us who are in the middle of our careers.” Rose, ever the Cincinnati kid, simply said: “You missed a good ballgame tonight!”

This was Pete Rose in microcosm, a man who made up in hard work and heart what he lacked in natural talent and formal education. “I’m really not smart enough to come up with the words to tell you what was going through my mind,” Rose said after the game. And later: “I didn’t plan on being emotional. I don’t have any experience at that.”

Another American hero, John Wayne, once said: “I don’t act. I react.” Pete Rose just does what comes naturally. In the weeks leading up to the big knock, he did and said what felt right to him, not necessarily what was proper. Perhaps there were days he should have played and days he should have sat. Perhaps there were things he should or should not have said. But to his own self he was true.

Even eight weeks before the opening game of the season, Rose was unafraid to be himself. Another man might have politely declined when asked, as Rose was during a February promotional luncheon at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York, to name the date he would make baseball history. Another man would have aw-shucksed his way through the day.

Rose looked at the extra-large calendar month that a representative of the Mizuno sporting goods company had suddenly placed on display. “Well, for one thing, you’ve got the wrong month,” Rose said. The calendar page was a blow-up of September. Rose said the hit would come Aug. 26.

“OK, so I was wrong,” he said last week in St. Louis. “Sue me.”

The 44th September of Pete Rose’s years began with a game against the Pirates in Cincinnati. He collected his 4,186th hit in that Sept. 1 game. It was the one that bounced off his left shoe and should have been called a foul ball. Rose himself had screamed “The ball hit my foot! The ball hit my foot!” to the umpire, but later, when Pirate catcher Tony Pena quoted him on that, Rose grinned ear to ear and said, “Aw, you know, Tony don’t speak very good English.”

Either do Pete.

This was another of those days when even members of the opposition let Rose know they were pulling for them, at least in their own way. “Jason Thompson told me he wished I’d get the big knock against the Pirates,” Rose said, “and then get thrown out at second base.”

On Sept. 2 at St. Louis, Rose played, but except for his pitcher, he was the only player in the Reds’ starting lineup who did not get a hit. This gave him another opportunity to repeat his oft-stated position that “there ain’t no pressure on me at all. Pressure’s when you got a time element. Roger Maris had pressure. He had to break Babe Ruth’s homer record before the season ended. There was pressure on me in ’78 during my (44-game) hitting streak. I had to get a hit every night. The only pressure on me is if Mr. Bergesch (Bill, the Reds’ general manager) told me I couldn’t play in ’86.”

Each day as Rose inched toward the record, he held court with pregame and postgame sessions with the press. There was no shutting him up. There was no question so personal that it offended him and no tap-dancing in his answers. Only occasionally could anyone even get a rise out of Rose. When asked if he had bunted for any hits lately, Rose snapped back: “Yeah! Why? They don’t count? Cobb had a lot of bunt hits.”

He was rarely on the defensive. Then again, except for a paternity suit and an admission once that he had popped diet pills before games, there has been nothing of a scandalous or even particularly serious nature to discuss with Rose during his 23-year career. He is not a complicated guy. He is a guy whose great joys in life include watching ESPN’s “Sportscenter” and calling Bell Telephone’s “SportsPhone,” just to keep up with the scores. In winter, his interests change. He follows football.

Rose does not believe in being analytical with his thoughts or discreet with his jokes. In St. Louis he flashed back to a trip the Reds once took to Sapporo, Japan, where manager Sparky Anderson won over the local citizens with his affable ways. A few weeks later, the Reds surprised everyone by firing Anderson. “Those people (the Japanese) must have wondered how the hell we ever won the war,” Rose said.

Quoted coldly, some of Rose’s remarks might smack of questionable taste, but to be around him when he makes such remarks is to understand the innocence of his intent. He still cracks jokes about “the Ayatollah” and about groupies and about gays. He says he hopes the President won’t be too busy to call him “because there’s a missile on the way or something.” He doesn’t think and talk. He just talks.

But true ballplayer that he is, Rose quickly makes up for errors with good catches. One day, after a discussion of his lucrative new contract as a spokesman for a cereal company, Rose said: “I know there are a lot more people who play baseball than there are who eat Wheaties.” As soon as his audience started laughing, Rose realized what he had said. “But we’re closing the gap,” he added.

Wednesday night, before getting his big hit, Rose squeezed in another commercial. Asked about the secret to his endurance in baseball, he whipped open his jacket, Superman style, to reveal a Wheaties T-shirt. But after the game, when someone asked about the slick Corvette he had received, Rose shot from the lip: “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with that, when I already got $150,000 worth of Porsches in my driveway.” Not exactly a slogan for Chevy’s next advertising campaign.

When Rose boasts of his possessions, he often tries to recover by saying that he is attempting to provide incentive for young players who wonder if they will ever make it big. Long ago, Rose vowed to become “the game’s first $100,000 singles hitter,” and eventually he made that much and more. “I’m living proof that you don’t have to hit home runs to be a success,” he said.

While never professing to be a brain, Rose knows he has baseball smarts. In recent years, when his talent was on the wane, Rose always sat next to his managers, Paul Owens in Philadelphia, Bill Virdon in Montreal, asking them to explain their every move. With typical candor, of course, he also acknowledged that one of the reasons he bugged Owens and Virdon so much is that he hoped they would get so sick of him, they would put him in the lineup.

“They say good players make bad managers, but I know who you’re thinking of when you say that,” Rose said Sept. 3 in St. Louis, after leaving himself out of the game even while using four pinch-hitters in one inning. “You’re talking about Frank Robinson and Ted Williams. But look at the talent those guys had to work with.”

Told that Cobb and others had not succeeded as managers, Rose replied: “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ll be lousy at this. But we ain’t had a month under .500 since I took over the team.”

The first thing Rose did when he took over the team was relate to the players, since he was still one of them. He restored television sets to the clubhouse, allowed the drinking of beer on airplanes and relaxed the club’s curfew.

On TV: “If they have to come to the clubhouse and watch the four walls, they can’t relax. But 15 minutes before game time, the game goes on. I don’t want anybody watching ‘Days of Our Lives’ at that point.” On beer: “I don’t think two cases for 40 guys will hurt anybody. Now, if it’s two cases for one guy, you got a problem.” And on curfew: “You got to treat men like men and boys like boys. Can’t you see me knocking on Dave Parker’s door, asking him if he’s in bed?”

On Sept. 4, his last day in St. Louis, the football-playing Cardinals worked out at Busch Stadium. When the players begged him for autographs, Rose obliged and said: “Without your helmets, you guys sure are ugly up close, aren’t you?” Since nobody makes more jokes about his own looks than Rose, nobody took offense.

You just never knew what Rose would say next. Regarding the pitching Niekro brothers, Rose said he had 70 hits off Phil and more than 100 of his 4,000-plus off Phil and Joe, so “how come she didn’t have triplets?”

Someone asked what he, Pete Rose, had that other hitters did not have.

“Heart,” Rose said. “I got a bigger heart, that’s all. I’m like John Henry. ‘John Henry’s got a big old heart.’ Remember that?”

“You mean you’re a gelding?” a reporter asked, referring to the race horse.

“Like I said,” Rose replied, without missing a beat, “too bad I’m not like John Henry.”

On his only complete off-day of the last two weeks, Rose went to a race track in Chicago to bet a couple of races. He has horses at home, and sometimes they supply his only diversion from watching TV sports. Horses are on Rose’s mind so much that at one point, when asked about reports of baseball players’ drug use emerging from a courtroom in Pittsburgh, the increasingly Sparky-like Rose said: “I think they ought to let a dying horse die.”

Rose has a considerable amount of Cobb in him. Lew Fonseca, now 86, coached both men in his time and also managed the Chicago White Sox for a while. He was at Wrigley Field on Sept. 6 when Rose and the Reds got to town.

“They both speak their minds,” Fonseca said. “Cobb had more of a temper, but they both knew a lot about hitting and they both knew what was best for them. I think Cobb would have liked Pete, but he was proud, so I think the first thing he would have said to Pete was, ‘Look how long it took to break my record. Let’s see if your record stands 57 years.”’

Rose moved within three hits of Cobb’s record that day by popping his second home run of the season into the seats in right-center. In the press box, a reporter asked how many lifetime home runs Cobb hit, which moved Red publicity director Jim Ferguson to reply: “I’ll call Pete. He’ll know.”

With the homer and a single Friday, Rose needed two more hits to catch Cobb. He went hitless Saturday, and did not intend to play Sunday. But that turned out to be one of his finest days, finest hours. Rose put himself in the game, much to the consternation of those who wanted him to break Cobb’s record in Cincinnati. “If the game’s on the line,” Tommy Helms said, “Pete’s going to try to get a base hit. I don’t care if he’s playing in Russia.”

A pair of singles gave him 4,191, tying Cobb. Tony Perez approached Rose in the dugout and said, “What are you doing, buddy? Do you know what you’re doing?” Davey Concepcion approached Rose and said, “Take the rest of the day off. Go in the clubhouse and watch the rest on TV.” But Rose would not remove himself from the game, not as long as there was a chance to win it. Anyone who considered him self-possessed had to swallow hard.

Came Monday and Rose kept himself out of the game, feeling he wasn’t needed. On Tuesday, with 51,045 fans in the stands, he played, but went hitless.

And finally there came Wednesday, when all was said and done. “I saw this hit in my mind a million times,” Pete Rose said, “but now that it’s over, I’m a little confused. I don’t know what to do next. Maybe I’ll make up a player and chase him for a while.”