Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (33 page)

It was Larkin’s turn next.

“A 12-time All-Star, he totaled 2,340 hits and 379 stolen bases in 19 seasons,” Selig continued. He read the plaque inscription right through to the last line: “He batted .353 in the 1990 World Series, guiding Reds to four-game sweep of Oakland A’s.”

Amid applause and cheers, Larkin came to the dais in his suit, officially the 45th Hall of Fame inductee on the stage. He thanked Jane Forbes Clark and Jeff Idelson. He thanked his wife Lisa and his parents, Robert and Shirley. He thanked his daughters and his siblings and other members of his family, and then he started to talk about growing up in Cincinnati, about going to Moeller High and rooting for the Reds in the 1970s, and going on to play baseball at the University of Michigan. To pay tribute to the many “influential people of Latin descent” who had guided him and befriended him along the way, Larkin spoke for several minutes in Spanish.

Larkin gave thanks all over the place—classy—and called out many people specifically. The crowd cheered and clapped at the names they recognized. Sparky Anderson. Bo Schembechler. Rod Carew. Tony Perez. After the dozens of passing mentions Larkin began to deliver his first extended anecdote of the afternoon. He said, “I played with some monumental figures in the game of baseball and I want to acknowledge a few of those guys.” Larkin paused and you could hear a few rowdy yelps come out of the crowd and someone shouted the name.

“You know it,” Larkin said. “Pete Rose. 4,256 of them. That’s right.” The fans really roared then, all those people who had made the trip from Cincinnati and had been out for hours in their replica Reds jerseys on their folding chairs beneath the sun.

Larkin spoke about how Pete helped him through some “very rough times as a young player,” and then he told this story from his first major league game, when Pete was managing the Reds and Larkin had arrived late after some travel troubles and was without any of his equipment. “Pete’s walking out of his office and he looks at me and says, ‘Larkin, it’s your first day in the big leagues and you’re already late.’ And I go, ‘Skip, I don’t have anything.’

“So he laughs, we share a few minutes, he asks me, he says, ‘You got any bats, gloves, anything?’

“I’m like, ‘No I have nothing.’

“He’s like, ‘Well, what size bat do you use?’

“I go, ‘Whatever size you use, Skip.’

‘How about your shoes, what size shoe you wear?’

“ ‘Those Mizunos, they look like they’ll work.’

“He says, ‘All right, here you go.’ So I take it.

“It gets no better than the first day of the big leagues, playing for the hometown team. Pete Rose, my manager, I’ve got his bat, I’ve got his shoes.”

After the game, Larkin went on, after he’d pinch-hit and driven in a run with a ground ball, and finished speaking with the media in the clubhouse, “Pete walks over to me and says, ‘How was that?’ I said, ‘That was awesome, man.’ He talks to me about growing up in Cincinnati, he talks to me about the opportunity to represent the hometown, the responsibilities of being a Red, how to conduct myself in a professional manner. He spends, like I said, about a half an hour with me and finally asks me, ‘It feel good in your hand, that bat? Those shoes, they feel good on your feet?’ I was like, ‘They are awesome.’ He’s like, ‘Good. Give them back.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Your stuff will be here tomorrow, give me my stuff back.’ ”

Some of the players on the stage cracked up,
Yep that’s Pete
, and the crowd on the lawn laughed too. Larkin said how he had been planning to take that bat and those shoes home with him and keep them forever, but Pete was a step ahead of him. “I just want to thank Pete for the opportunity,” said Larkin speaking now in more general terms. “His words of wisdom and his support and him talking to me all the time. Thank you, Pete Rose. I love you, man.”

It was right about then, not yet three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, July 22, 2012, with the Hall of Famers listening to Larkin’s speech and some chuckling at the stories and some applauding and others not, and Selig sitting with that neutral look on his face, listening, and the crowd out there on the hot, clear day in Cooperstown, whooping for Pete and calling his name, 1.1 miles from the plaque gallery at the Hall of Fame, it was right about then that you could get a sense, a realization, that maybe this right here was as close to a Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony as Pete Rose will ever get.

Chapter 23

Petey

O
N WEEKENDS sometimes, when Petey was still in Bristol, Shannon and the kids would drive the 300 miles south from Cincinnati and spend a few days with him as he managed the team. Petey and PJ would play catch on the field—each clad in black-and-white number 14 Bristol Sox uniforms—and in sudden, playful moments Petey would break off and start chasing Isabella down the foul line. During games, Shannon and the children would sit together in the front row beside the dugout, clapping and cheering and calling out encouragement to the players by name. Afterward, PJ would come into the locker room and change next to Pete Jr., the two of them pulling their jerseys over their heads at just the same time. PJ was seven years old and, says Tim Hayes, the
Bristol Herald Courier
reporter, “It looked like the kid had just finished managing the game too.”

Petey says that one of the many reasons he has stayed in baseball so long is so that PJ could have moments like this. “It’s not the big leagues, but it is still baseball. It is still the same game with a lot of the same routines. I wanted my son to experience this, to get what I got.”

When Pete Jr. and Shannon started talking about having children, in the early 2000s, he determined, and she offered no resistance, that their first son would carry on the name, Peter Edward III. “It is the greatest name in the world,” says Pete Jr. “And now there are three of us.” At the same time they decided that the boy would be known as PJ from the start. Not Pete or Petey or Pete Jr. Just PJ. The reason being, Pete Jr. explained then, “So that he does not have to go through what I’ve gone through.”

The Bristol Sox are perennially a dreadful team. Since bringing home the Appalachian League championship in 2002, the Sox have produced only one winning season and over Pete Jr.’s two years the club was especially unsuccessful, going 43–90. As fans there have come to accept, the mission in Bristol—as well as for the Great Falls Voyagers, the short-season A ball team in Montana where the White Sox assigned Petey in 2013—is not to win games but to develop talent. These are often competing goals. Bristol’s team is typically laden with players young even by Appalachian League standards and the White Sox, more so than many organizations, move their prospects quickly through the system. As soon as anyone starts to play well, they are gone, pulled up a level or two. Rose Jr. often gets to deliver the good news.

“We’ve decided you’re not going to make your last start of the season,” he told Todd Kibby, a tall lefthander with high strikeout numbers, in late August of 2012. Kibby looked surprised, then hurt. Rose Jr. waited solemnly for effect, then blurted: “That’s because you will be pitching in Kannapolis!”

Managing in a developmental league, Pete Jr. can’t freely strategize, or have any real control over many of the machinations of a game. The idea is to give the young players exposure. You almost never walk anyone intentionally in these leagues, and you rarely pinch-hit. A relief pitcher gets summoned in to a game not because Rose Jr. thinks he can get the next guy out, but in accordance with an innings-pitched plan devised by White Sox player development heads. The concept is something that Pete Rose Sr., who spent less than three seasons in the minor leagues and whose evaluation of just about everything hinges upon who comes out on top, cannot quite grasp. “How is your bullpen shaping up?” Pete Sr. might say when Petey calls him. Once after the doormat BriSox improbably swept a doubleheader in the summer of 2012, Pete Sr. called and said “Two in a row! They’re going to make you manager of the year!”
¹

For Pete Jr. reaching the major leagues as a manager is something “I know I can do and will do. It’s part of me. I can relate to a player and help him through something, a slump or what have you. As for running a game, well, my dad always taught me that if you watch a game of baseball, really pay attention to all that’s going on, then it will tell you what to do. The game makes the decisions for you,” Pete Jr. says. “It is the same game here as in the majors. It’s just that in the big leagues you make more money and more people see you. When I get up there, my wife can quit her job, and my family can come with me wherever I am.”

The White Sox have used Rose Jr. as a coach at Triple A Charlotte in the spring and summer months before Bristol’s short season begins, and he has left his impression there as well as in Bristol. The circumstances around Pete Jr.—his roots in the game, his history, his perseverance— confer upon him a particular kind of valor among baseball men. Buddy Bell, the White Sox vice president and assistant general manager (that is, Pete Jr.’s boss), sees in the manager what he years ago saw in the boy and in the player. “He is respectful of the game and the people around the game and he has got a crazy passion for it,” says Bell. “We all have it but Petey seems to just have a little more. You see how he talks to the kids, how he teaches the game.…He and his dad are similar—great teammates, generous teachers and all about baseball.”

Patrolling the field before games in Bristol, Petey often carried a tapedup black fungo bat resting on his shoulder. A tool of his trade. At the end of the bat one afternoon hung a small baseball glove (truly tiny, smaller than Joe Morgan’s), lending Rose Jr. the look of a country boy carrying a tree branch with a kerchief tied as a sack on the end, and wrapped in that kerchief some clothes, a harmonica, worms for bait. Even in his 40s, Pete Jr. still has plenty of Opie Taylor in him. Although he says that he is getting “a little big” to go by “Petey,” other coaches call him that all the time. The little glove, which he later used while playing catch with Greg Briley, Bristol’s hitting coach and a former big leaguer, belongs to PJ. “It’s new and I’m breaking it in for him,” Pete Jr. explained.
²

Now country music strums out of the sound system at Boyce Cox Field as Pete Jr. swats fly balls with the fungo bat, calling out to the Bristol outfielders and telling them where the throw should come in. His left knee, the worse of the two, is lightly wrapped. The country songs tell about long roads and busted trucks, hard times and belief in better ones, songs about America.

Pete Rose Jr. does not blame his father for the difficulties of his own life, not for all the heckling he endured, nor for the baggage attached to his name; not for any of the things that have made his minor league journey so much harder than it might have been. He does not blame his father for the fact that the two of them couldn’t be together in the clubhouse at Pete Jr.’s major league debut in 1997. Long before that debut, as Pete Jr. recalls now, Pete Sr. “sat me down and told me that he had bet on baseball and started to say he was sorry. I cut him off. I said, ‘You don’t need to tell me you’re sorry. We all make mistakes.’ ”

For years after that conversation—and it was rare, almost unprecedented for his father to open up to him in such a way—right up until Pete Sr. officially came clean in 2004, Pete Jr. did not betray his father’s guilt. Gambling, says Petey now, was never a problem in the years that his father and mother lived together, and his father has never spoken to him about the trouble to which gambling might lead.

Through his early childhood memories, and then later ones from the time in Philadelphia and when Pete came back to Cincinnati and then later still as the father and son began in brief and fitful attempts to make up for the time that was forever lost, his father’s sins—of neglect, mainly, of indifference—are for Petey forgotten and forgiven. “I am the only one he ever threw batting practice to,” Rose Jr. might volunteer. “No one else can say that.”

He regards the parameters of his life as a gift—
the greatest name in the world
—and he does not ever take his father’s name in vain. (“He is an incredible mentor, and the best part about it is that he’s my dad.”) The fact that as a boy and a younger man he resented his father’s distance (for example, lamenting his father’s absence during his early years in the minors by saying, “It’s hard to catch him. He’s always playing golf”) now seems to Pete Jr. the product of youthful ignorance. He says that these days he speaks to his father “all the time.” He is keen to the extraordinary opportunities that he received by being Pete Rose Jr. Sometimes, talking about his father, he will call him the Hit King throughout a conversation.

It is true that Pete Sr., even as he leads a life in Las Vegas and California, has in recent years attached himself more firmly to Pete Jr. and his family. Rose is in his 70s, after all, and the grandchildren have a softening effect upon him. Isabella and PJ call him Papa. He will come to Cincinnati and show up at one of PJ’s ball games—the boy plays baseball, football and basketball—or take him to a Reds game at the Great American Ball Park, or to see a WWE Raw event when it’s in town. Or the two of them, PJ and Papa, will sit together on the brown couch in the den of Petey and Shannon’s home on the West Side, watching baseball on a flat screen. Papa doesn’t stop talking about what is happening in the game. “Like how he did it with me,” says Petey. Shannon and Petey have in their kitchen cabinets a stack of leftover plastic cups adorned with the logo from Pete Rose’s Ballpark Cafe in Boca Raton and Papa and PJ might drink iced tea out of them as they watch. This is a side of Big Pete that Petey says he wishes everyone could see.

“He’s just a normal dad, and I am just a normal son,” Pete Jr. likes to say. “The only difference is that my dad has more hits than your dad.”

When Petey gets to PJ’s little league games—or to Isabella’s, as she has begun playing too—he watches not from behind home plate like most parents but from far down the leftfield line. And at times seeing PJ out there in his uniform pounding his tiny glove in the field or stepping into the box, a talented little hitter, becomes more than Petey can stoically bear.

“What are you crying about?” Shannon will ask him. And for Petey it is too much to explain exactly what he sees and feels: all the promise and the memories; what really was and what might have been; Sept. 11, 1985; fatherhood; the fears of a life manqué. He cannot get all that out, or any of it, and keep his calm. He is given to crying, he allows; he gets emotional. So he will simply shrug his shoulders and raise a hand, pointing out toward the scene blurred now in front of him—little PJ Rose swinging a bat on a neighborhood ball field, West Side of Cincinnati— and say to Shannon, “Look.”