Baseball Players Find It Hard to Say Farewell : A Few Retire Gracefully, but Many Hang On Too Long For Their Own Good

Pete Rose approached Don Zimmer in March and asked, “What’s it look like?”

The Chicago Cubs’ coach knew exactly what the Cincinnati Reds’ player-manager meant. In fact, Zimmer knew it was the most serious professional question Rose possibly could ask an old, old friend.

Rose and Zimmer grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same Western Hills High in Cincinnati. As a boy, Rose idolized Zimmer, who was 10 years older and already a Brooklyn Dodger playing in the World Series.

They’ve been buddies much of their lives. Old-school throwbacks. Tight-lipped tough guys. Zimmer has a metal plate in his head from the beanings he endured rather than quit the game. Rose can say he lived for the game, but everybody in baseball knows Zimmer was willing to die for it.

“What am I going to say to him?” recalls Zimmer. “ ‘Pete, you can’t hit anymore.’ He’s the greatest hitter ever lived. I hit .235. I’m gonna tell him to retire?”

Zimmer spits in the dust by the batting cage, looks away, thinks.

“But there had to be some doubt for him to ask me.”

By April, Zimmer had made up his mind about the role of a true friend. He told Rose point-blank: “Pete, go to the general manager. Tell him you want to retire on May 15. There won’t be an empty seat or a dry eye in the place.”

Rose didn’t take the advice. He’s hitting .219 now. Though he has benched himself the last five weeks, Rose still says he might play again in 1987.

“You know, they booed Pete Rose in Cincinnati this season,” says Zimmer, now with the New York Yankees. “It depresses the hell out of me just to stand here and think about it. I’m a baseball man, and that hurts me. Why would you ever wanna put yourself in that situation, if you’d done the things that man has done, that they’d boo you in your own hometown at the end?

“But you can’t blame Pete. Not a bit. How many can walk away at the right time? I’ve been in the game 35 years. I can name ‘em on one hand.”

And Don Zimmer starts to name all the players he has ever personally known who retired before they had to quit, before they had the uniform torn off them. He names all the men who left with their dignity intact.

Zimmer can remember only three. “You know,” he says, “it just seems to be gettin’ worse.”

The last taste of glory must be the sweetest. Or else the thought of lost glory must be the bitterest. Why else would men as great and rich as Rose, Steve Carlton, Reggie Jackson and Tom Seaver pay such a price in pride to play a game for such desperate odds?

Why else would Tony Perez, Graig Nettles, Tommy John, Hal McRae, Phil and Joe Niekro--all grandfathers, or old enough to be--still cling to the game even though they long ago reached the last symbolic milestones available to them?

When have so many of baseball’s best men clutched at barren endings to their careers with such stubborn fierceness--playing for no other apparent reason than an inability to stop? Life may begin at 40, but baseball careers should end there, history suggests.

Perhaps thoughts of Jack Nicklaus or Bill Shoemaker--men who do not have to play a 162-game schedule--run in their heads. Maybe their decisions have been swayed by the way the public tolerated, then finally embraced Rose as he staggered after Ty Cobb for four mundane years (.271, .245, .286, .264).

Possibly they remember Gaylord Perry, Rod Carew, Carl Yastrzemski, Al Oliver, Willie Stargell and the way they hung on until they were shouldered out the clubhouse door by their own teams or shunned by every other club.

Or they may play for a simpler reason: greed. Oriole coach Frank Robinson rubs his fingers and thumb together in the universal gesture for cash: “They’ve gotten used to the really big money and they can’t walk away from it.”

This is not the standard-issue crop of over-35 players who seem to lose it every season. This year: George Foster, Gorman Thomas, Andre Thornton, Carlton Fisk, Goose Gossage, Ron Guidry, Vida Blue, Ron Cey and a dozen others. That’s just nature.

What’s different now is the slew of future Hall of Famers who are past 40, some way past 40, who will not go away. They have their 3,000th hit, 500th homer or 300th win, yet they refuse to set a retirement date.

When nagged or booed, or begged to quit, they bristle as if the very question were an insult. The year after he broke Ty Cobb’s hit record, Rose is reduced to saying: “What I don’t like is people who know nothing about the game to try to diagram my life for me.”

Cincinnati papers have even run polls with fans voting for Rose to quit. Carlton won his 300th three years ago. The last two years, he has been 9-20. He has taken his $1.1 million salary to three teams this summer and has even deigned to speak to the media.

Seaver won his 300th last season; now, he’s 7-13. Yes, he’s with the Red Sox now--a dreamy situation. But he was willing to hang on with the White Sox until midseason, hoping to land in an East Coast pennant race.

Jackson, who hit three homers in a game last week, seems to have a perfect final October stage set for him with the Angels. Yet he says he’s determined to play in ’87 despite his unproductive season.

Phil Niekro, 47, won his 300th last season with a final-day shutout. He could have called it quits with 16-8 and 16-12 seasons. Now he’s 11-11 with Cleveland and has allowed more than 345 runners in 211 innings.

Tony Perez finally retired, at 44, last weekend after six years as a part-time player with three clubs. At the end, Big Doggie didn’t scare anybody (.222). Nettles (most homers by an American League third baseman) is 41 and batting .217 for San Diego.

Of all the dogged old-timers, only one is still performing at exactly the same level as he has for 21 years--Don Sutton, 41, who is 15-10 for California and is maintaining almost exactly the same statistical profile and ratios as he has for the last 10 years.

Will he be different?

So many old-timers are determined to hang on by their fingernails that Sutton is one of a group of Angels who could be called The Nebulous Nine. All are old unsigned free agents who may be cut--even though they won the AL West. (Jackson, Doug DeCinces, Bob Boone, Rick Burleson, Doug Corbett, Brian Downing, Bobby Grich, Ruppert Jones are the others.)

“They don’t know when to walk away. Or some know, but they just can’t walk away from the cheers, the recognition, the challenge, the money-especially the money these days,” says Robinson.

“When you’re making $600,000 or $800,000 for one more year--well, in the old days, players weren’t as worried about doing with ‘less of’ after they retired. But they weren’t used to doing with ‘more of’ like the guys now.”

Good taste dies hard.

“We holler all the time about how great boxers like Ali and Leonard should retire before they get hurt,” says Robinson, who retired 57 hits short of 3,000 rather than embarrass himself for a statistic. “Well, you can get hurt out here, too.”

Hurt in the heart, he means.

Back in 1975, Robinson slugged over .500 as a part-time player-manager. But, in 1976, he suddenly faded. After just 67 at-bats, he knew the worst, benched himself and never played again.

“What I’d done (586 homers), I just didn’t want to drag it down. People want to look at you when you’re 50 or 60 and say, ‘I bet he could still go out there and do it.’ They still say that about Sandy Koufax, and he’s been retired for 20 years.

“But when you stay too long, you answer the question. There’s no such thing as that debate. They know you couldn’t do it. And that makes you a little bit smaller.”

Nothing makes baseball lifers sadder than witnessing that diminished greatness in their friends; the best athletes respect fine craftsmanship as much as any virtue and hate to see it tarnished by self-deception.

Joe DiMaggio, who got out pronto after one .263 season, said he knew it was time to quit “when I told my body what to do and it said, ‘Who, me?’ ”

Nothing brings out the sentimental, even the maudlin, in ballplayers like talk about aging. “It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between an all-star game and an old-timer’s game,” said announcer Vin Scully. At his retirement press conference in 1982, Steve Stone said, “I guess this is one of the few times when you get to see your own last rites.”

A more astringent perspective exists, however, one that dispenses tartly with the view of sport as an arena uniquely suited to grandiose personal myth-making. Such people snort when you call Reggie Jackson “Mr. October” and prefer to point out that he’s going bald and never could handle the fastball in his wheelhouse, anyway.

Earl Weaver is one such debunking realist. He never thought he was “The Little Genius.” And he doesn’t think it’s so terrible that he came back at age 55, for $1 million worth of contract, and failed.

“If we finish last, then we finish last,” he says. “I’ll at least have experienced it all. If you stay in this game long enough, everything will happen to you.” Which, obviously, is why many want to get out, and stay out, before it does.

“One good thing,” says Weaver. “The memory of this’ll help me stay retired. All I’d have to do is think about this crap and I’ll never come back.”

The great lure--perhaps even for Weaver--is a corny final hurrah. Sutton, Seaver, Jackson and Nolan Ryan (pitching against doctor’s orders these days with a potential career-ending shoulder tear) all see it shimmering in front of them as their teams enter the playoffs.

“We all remember Catfish Hunter,” says Yankee coach Stump Merrill. “Everybody said he was finished, but he came back and won a dozen games, then won the last game of the (‘78) World Series.”

That was the day Thurman Munson visited the mound in the first inning and told Hunter that he’d better hit his mitt with every pitch because “you don’t have squat.” The movie ends there. Hunter came back the next year and was emulsified (2-9, 5.31 ERA) in 19 starts.

The isolated few, such as Koufax and Ted Williams, who go out on a 27-9 season at 30 or leave with a .645 slugging average at 42, are such a poetic befuddlement to their peers as to redouble their place in lore.

“A couple have amazed me,” says Zimmer. “Richie Ashburn was my roommate on the expansion Mets. Hit .306, played center field, could still run. But he knew, I guess, that it was over. Just retired, even though everybody assumed he’d be back. He was always a classy man, but that was impressive.

“Ron Santo signed a two-year contract at $100,000 per, when that was big money. Santo told me, ‘I can’t do the job anymore. I’m quitting. I can’t play well enough to draw my money.’ I won a bet on that from a friend who said Santo’d never turn down the $100,000. But I knew Santo.

“Wish Willie Mays had done the same thing. Greatest player of my generation but I’m sorry anybody saw his last two years. You’d never have believed it.”

Sometimes a middle perspective is a suitable place to end. Roy White played 15 years for the New York Yankees. He was good, but never anywhere near great. After one poor season, the Yankees said goodby. He’d played on two world champions and he didn’t want to bounce from team to team. He wanted to start and end as a Yankee. But he couldn’t quit. So, he headed to Japan and played three more years--decompressing, getting the game out of his blood, building his nest egg for the long decades ahead.

“Some guys say they keep playing to reach a record, like 300 wins. But that’s not really it,” White says. “The life is so great that you just don’t want to give it up. It’s that simple. There’s nothing else that gives you the same excitement and challenge as building your skills for years, then going into a pressure situation and hitting a home run, or getting the key hit in a pennant race.

“I’m in harness racing now--major-league standardbreds--and one of the reasons is that, when one of our horses wins, it’s just like being in a game.”

White isn’t a party to all the pity that’s spent on aging stars. He’s a little sorry that Willie Mays didn’t retire a couple of years sooner. But that’s about it. He doesn’t think that a fine deed, once done, can ever be undone or really damaged.

“When you see the lifetime stats go down, like Mickey Mantle ending up hitting .298 instead of .300, that doesn’t seem right.”

For the rest of it, he understands why a man would sacrifice some dignity so he could play to the last game, the last hit, the last hope--yes, the last dollar, too.