COMMENTARY : Rose’s Straight Line Between Fib, Felony

Pete Rose’s first professional lie was told at the suggestion of Phil Seghi, a member of the P Cincinnati Reds’ front office. Rose was 19 in 1960, but Seghi considered 18 a seemlier age for a recent high school graduate. So, on the day he signed his first baseball contract, Rose turned 18.

He had been kept back a year in school. While the work might have been made up during a summer session, that was the baseball season. Rose’s father instructed him to repeat the grade and play ball.

Pete Rose the elder was a banker, a marvel with figures, who had been a legendary semipro football player for the old Cincinnati Bengals. “When I was young,” the son remembered, “people stopped me on the street to tell me I could never be what my father was.”

The old man had a long-standing arrangement with the knothole and Little League managers of Cincinnati. In return for a guarantee that young Pete could switch-hit, he promised to leave the boy home when the family went off on its summer vacations. As a result, Rose never took a step out of Cincinnati until the day he reported to the minor leagues.

By then, he knew the life fairly well. In fact, he already had been a presence in the Reds’ clubhouse for several seasons. An uncle who worked there, Curly Smart, supplied him a uniform and arranged sideline catches with Johnny Temple and Roy McMillan. In Geneva and Tampa, Rose’s first bush league ports of call, everyone said he scratched, spat, cursed, laughed, belched, chased women and played cards just like a major-leaguer.

When Rose reached the big club in 1963, he displaced popular second baseman Don Blasingame and alienated every white man on the team. For company, Rose turned to the few blacks, who understood this kind of treatment.

“We accepted him for what he was,” Frank Robinson said. “They called him a hot dog for trying to do things he couldn’t. We admired him for laboring beyond his skills. They resented him for taking one of their friends’ jobs. Well, we could all relate to that. Nobody had to show him how to hit, but they wouldn’t even show him how to be a major-leaguer. So we did.”

His first night on a road trip, Rose blew curfew and was locked out of the hotel room by pitcher Jim Coates. Vada Pinson took the rookie in and, the next morning, sprang for a lavish breakfast. It was the first room service of Rose’s experience. “It was 12 dollars and 75 cents,” recalled the second-generation numbers man, who, like his father, would be hunched over columns of figures all his life.

“There never was a morning,” said Rose’s first wife, Karolyn, “when I didn’t see Pete at the kitchen table figuring out his records and averages. What made him a success as a ballplayer was what made him fail, in my opinion, in our marriage. He never grew up.”

Rose calculated: “If you have some 70 hits against Phil Niekro, and some 40 hits against Joe Niekro, is it twisted to be aware that you have over 100 hits -- one-fortieth of all your hits -- against Mrs. Niekro’s sons, and to wish she’d had more children? Doesn’t everyone know how much money they have in the bank?”

“He’s the most selfish player I’ve ever played with,” said Johnny Bench. “I wish we had eight more like him.”

The hits, 4,256 of them -- the most anyone ever got -- stopped coming in the middle of the 1986 season. Rose did not say he was withdrawing from the field to concentrate on managing. Two years later, he still was refusing to put it into words. As a matter of fact, he has yet to retire formally as a player.

Over the last three games that Rose started, he went eight for 13, including the 10th five-for-five game of his 24-year career. That day alone, he set 13 records. On Aug. 17, 1986, Goose Gossage struck him out with three fastballs (“I had two strikes on me before I could get the doughnut off the bat”) and that was that.

“He was a competitor,” Sparky Anderson, his old manager, said. “He was an old-fashioned ballplayer. He knew absolutely everything about being that and absolutely nothing else. For him, it wasn’t enough to compete through others. He had to put himself on the line some way. No, I can’t say I’m surprised at what’s happened.”

For betting on sports events, if not baseball, Rose was banned from the game he personifies. To support the long shots, he sold his own relics.

(“Do you know, we’re opening this new ballpark in Minnesota, the Humphreydome? An exhibition game. I’m leading off. Damn, I want that first hit. Someday, I’ll have more outs than anybody too, and I want to hear what that ball sounds like rolling around in my drawer.”)

To hide his shame from lawyer-friend Reuven Katz, Rose dealt in cash for his souvenirs and signatures, neglecting some taxes. Imagine that: He forgot how much money he had in the bank. Pleading guilty to two counts of filing false returns, he is now a felon awaiting a sentence that could include prison. In the shadow of that, Rose was his consistent self. He pleaded not for freedom but for a place in the Hall of Fame.

Several years ago, Rose corrected his age in the record books. “It’s easy to remember,” he said. “I was born in 1941, the year of DiMaggio’s streak.” For a man who keeps time by the inning, being out of the game is penalty enough.