Rose Finds Solace in the Game

Tug McGraw stood on the floor of Veterans Stadium on Monday, staring across the field at Pete Rose.

Rose, the Cincinnati Reds manager, had just pulled away from the batting cage, leaving in his wake a trail of reporters, former teammates and club personnel. Rose then retreated to the visiting team’s dugout, where only he and his demons sat.

“You know, whenever I get my name in the paper over some simple thing, something stupid, it infuriates me,” said McGraw, Rose’s former Philadelphia Phillie teammate. “When I think about what he’s going through every day, all the articles and headlines, it amazes me he hasn’t snapped. He must have some incredible inner peace.”

What Rose has is baseball. For a few hours, balls and strikes blot out writs and appeals, gambling charges and the bitter warfare between accused and commissioner. The game not only breaks up his day, it’s about the only thing that can break through the cloud of despair engulfing him.

That cloud forms wherever Rose goes. It’s inescapable because his predicament, mixed with his celebrity, deems it so. Rose always used to hold court rather than depend on them for relief. Nowadays he hides in the shadows in order to escape the harsh glare.

So Rose retreated Monday. Still, reporters found him. And the media, including this writer, sat, listened and waited for Rose to volunteer yet another morsel concerning his predicament even though he has long ago stated he has run out of answers. Some days he tries, which those around him say is to his credit. “Pete has really done a super job on keepino it away from the team,” Reds outfielder Ken Griffey said.

Monday was one of those days when Rose seemed out of the energy needed to carry through one more day of dealing with such questions. Talked out, Rose made only a passing reference to an old intimate in the Philadelphia press corps, saying he would do whatever his lawyers suggested concerning upcoming court cases.

Still the reporters waited, just as they have every day since March, when it was first revealed Rose was being investigated for allegedly gambling on baseball.

A lifetime ban -- which some believe is the equivalent of a death sentence to Rose -- has hung over Rose ever since. The charges and the ambiguities as to what is right or wrong grow with each passing day. Even as he sat in the dugout watching his team prepare to play the Phillies, Rose’s life took another turn. The lawsuit he filed charging Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti with bias was ordered out of the jurisdiction of a Cincinnati court that had’issued a temporary restraining order in Rose’s favor. Now Rose’s fate -- and that of baseball’s case against him -- is in the hands of federal judges.

After the Reds beat the Phillies, 2-1, Rose would talk only to writers who travel with the Reds. He told them, “We sort of expected that (the case would be taken out of Cincinnati) ... We don’t think it has any merit.”

Still, news like that can’t make his day. What does?

“This,” Rose said, motioning around the dugout. “And winning. It’s the ofly fun.”

To call it an ever-tightening noose might be putting it mildly. That it cannot be fun being Peter Edward Rose is obvious, written in every crease in his face. And nothing makes him smile -- except baseball. Those questions he welcomes. And perhaps the only thing Rose does more defiantly than defend his integrity against his accusers is keep that one little vestige of happiness intact.

So it was, on Monday, when Rose lit up the dugout. Because the subject turned to baseball. That he can talk about all day. That one subject, with its endless number of anecdotes and memories, erases the worry, the uncertainty and what has to be a world of pain he still has yet to reveal.

Just being in the Vet was enough to stir the memories.

“This was a great place to play baseball,” said Rose, who helped lead the Phillies to the World Series in 1980 and 1983. “It seemed like this ballpark was packed every night.”

“I couldn’t wait to get out here early and play (Greg) Luxinski in gin,” Rose said, his eyes dancing. “I rode the subway. ... Sure, I did. It only cost 40 cents and I couldn’t get lost. This was the last stop.”

Rose talked of his love for the Phillies fans, his hate for the alibis used by some that the fans here are toughest in the game. “They don’t boo effort,” he said.

Other memories flooded back. “Nolan Ryan struck me out three times in a game here,” Rose said. “I loved facing Nolan because he made you work your butt off. He was fun to hit off of.”

Then there was his former teammate, Mike Schmidt, whose tearful farewell May 29 Rose understood, but probably could never emulate. Heck, Rose didn’t even think Schmidt should have quit. “He was in shape, he could still play,” Rose said.

Rose’s eyes lit up when reminded the Phillies had not won the National League pennant in a while (since 1950) before his arrival. “Yeah, then we got to the big one, the World Series,” Rose said, a broad smile crossing his face. “And we won the big time. It took 97 years to do that here.”

He was, for a few moments, the one and only Rose people dearly want to remember, the embodiment of a boy in a man’s body, playing a kid’s game. And at such moments it seems all the sadder that it must matter whether he broke the rules or not.

Just as Rose can no longer freeze the frame so that only the winning and the glory days are remembered, baseball cannot go back to the days right before it realized it had no recourse but to investigate.

“I feel for the guy,” McGraw said. “... But it’s like people say. You have to be accountable for your own dilemmas.”