Rest in Pete

Baseball's not the same without him

“The burgers taste better when you win”

I’ve seen lots of quotation books, full of incisive and memorable things said by world leaders, poets, and people whose importance might need a googling in order to determine. I even have three different versions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which is a handy way of picking out a few words to capture just about any sentiment you might want to convey.

I wonder whether, in future versions of a such a collection, the few words appearing above might be preserved for others to learn from. In case anyone might not already know, Pete Rose, who passed away today at the age of 83, won lots of times during his long and illustrious career in the majors. He won World Series rings and batting titles, All-Star games and MVP awards. You name it, and Charlie Hustle probably won it at some point. That’s what he did, so he would know what winning felt like.

I heard Pete Rose use the above phrase a number of times, at a fantasy baseball camp in Florida in the spring of 2002. How I got there is a story by itself, and maybe I’ll share it here some other time. But the point now is that I was on the Reds team, and I chose to wear Rose’s number 14 on my jersey, in his honor. I still have that jersey, signed by him, and it will always be a reminder of the only organized baseball games that I’m likely to play in this century.

The camp was held at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, which was the Los Angeles Doders’ spring training facilities before they moved to Arizona in 2008, and before it was renamed to honor Jackie Robinson in 2019. After Spring training had ended and the season was formally launched, the team opened their facilities to people with the means to afford a week of—to use a term which didn’t yet exist—cosplaying as big league ballplayers.

On the first day I was there, we went to the batting cages to dust off our swings. Mine had been in mothballs for decades, so far more than a half an hour would be needed, but I took whatever they were giving. And I’m telling you, when Pete Rose tells you to adjust your grip on the bat, or to raise your back elbow, you do it. And it made a difference in the way I hit the ball, too. As long as I live, I’ll get to say that I took batting tips from baseball’s all-time hit king.

Rose also provided a thrill that I didn’t see coming, at all. I think there were five or six games played over the three days of competition, and in one of them—I forget exactly which one—I came up to bat with a runner on second base and nobody out. My first instinct, every time up, was to make up for decades of lost time by swatting a pitch over the fence, but the reality is I was lucky just to put the ball in play.

In this case I hit a weak little nubber to the second baseman, which because I bat left handed is what I’m most likely to do. I got down the line as fast as I could, but was out easily at first base. As I returned to the bench, upset with myself for grounding out, Pete Rose said “Nice job” to me and then gave me a fist bump.

Did that really just happen? I asked myself. How could the best hitter baseball’s ever seen think that I did something good? But then I realized Rose was seeing something that I couldn’t: I had advanced the runner over to third base. I had given up myself to put the runner that much closer to scoring a run. And runs are what win ballgames.

I might have failed in my attempt at hitting a homer and circling the bases in triumph, but I did make a small contribution that could lead to a single run. And for the record, I don’t remember whether or not that run crossed the plate, but Pete Rose showed me that a fist bump was indeed warranted.

We only won a single game that week, but I’m happy to report that yes, the post-game burgers we were fed did seem to taste better. Perhaps, had we failed to win any of our games, I would have forgotten about this altogether, but our lone win that week was made all the better by confirming that Pete Rose’s words were indeed true.

Rose had already been banned from the game for many years by the time this camp took place, and it somehow felt as though it might somehow get resolved while he was still on this earth. There was no player in the game, at least when I was a kid, who meant more to the game than Pete Rose did. He was in a dead heat with Reggie Jackson, perhaps, but certainly that was it.

Billy Joel’s song Zanzibar summed it up nicely: “Rose, he knows he’s such a credit to the game, but the Yankees grab the headlines every time.” Of couse, when I saw Billy Joel in concert last summer, he had rewritten the verse to say “Rose, he knows he’ll never make the Hall of Fame.” And as it turns out, he was right about that.

So now, perhaps, Pete Rose might catch the kind of break with the Hall of Fame that he was denied during his lifetime. We’ll see what happens as the years ahead but, in a world where millions of dollars are now wagered—legally—on each and every big league game, does it really make sense to keep him out any longer? To me it doesn’t, when today’s crop of players—no matter what sorts of careers they might end up having—will probably not inspire any songs, written by Billy Joel or anybody else.

And the bottom image above is an alteration of Topps’ 1989 Pete Rose manager card. My name (and it was the last time I ever wrote anything as “Rob Harris”) splattered across Pete Rose’s hairline. How cool is that? The story it appeared with isn’t available online anymore, but it sure kicked up some controversy when it first appeared, many years ago. I’ll be forever glad that I thought to save the title image when I could.

More to come later. Until then….