People have been asking me to write about Pete Rose, but there’s nothing I feel I must add to my Official Cincinnati Sportswriter Statement on Pete Rose of 2017.
If you’d like to think on Pete’s career from a sports magazine perspective, go here.
#TooSoon
So what I’m going to do is discuss the reaction to the action. I shut down my social media not long after the news of Rose’s death broke because it became an argument about the Hall of Fame real quick. It wasn’t just #TooSoon– it was depressing.
But it’s understandable that the subject should rear up. After all, 99% of the country doesn’t live with a bronze Pete Rose sliding eternally into home all day every day. They don’t talk about it.
We talk about it all the time. We have to. He’s here, and we knew long before he died that he’d remain here long after he left us in body.
“Unless you ____”
I’m almost never a “unless you _________, you can’t have an opinion on _______” person, but the events of this past week force me to it: Unless you are a lifetime Cincinnatian, the game handed down to you generationally, and unless you were in Cincinnati at the time of the Rose denials and suspension, you can’t talk about Rose and the Hall of Fame before you first acknowledge a whole entire crapton of nuance, stipulations, and terms and conditions.
This was our OJ trial, we’re still litigating it, and outsiders must respect our both-sides bristling over the matter. I cannot overemphasize the nasty bag of emotions the news of the betting gave us–the shock, the disappointment, the humiliation. And the outrage. Whether you were outraged at Pete or the Commissioner or both, there was outrage and nowhere to go with it.
So there needs to be a mandatory course on the depth and emotional interplay of the entire Rose saga that people must take before they post, talk, or reply to the matter of Pete Rose and Cooperstown, and that course should be created by a native Cincinnatian who can materially prove to have stood before the play of Rose as well as Mike Moustakas. Have you personally and on multiple occasions witnessed Joey Votto draw a walk with a cheese coney in your lap? No? Then I don’t want to hear it.
Ours
Some might say that Pete Rose belongs to baseball and therefore all of humanity, but he was ours. For better or for worse, we produced him, we cheered him, we enabled and defended him. I drive past the ballfield where he played as a child at least once a week. One of his ex-wives, so I’ve heard, used to work down the street from where most of the West Side gets its propane.
There’s a three-bridge span over Pete Rose Way on the river’s edge, the side we show the world. Cincinnati gets to claim him, but we also have to answer for him.
We get a say. Some might argue the most lasting one.
Realistic Representation
Perhaps the most fitting aspect of Rose’s legacy is that he left behind a giant, infuriating argument instead of a universal raising of a glass. At a time when everyone should’ve praised his greatness, his unabashed love of baseball, and hard-charging demeanor, we were instead agonizing over what we knew and what the outsiders didn’t– the good and the bad.
Maybe that’s a more realistic representation of a life. When I go (please God many decades from now), nobody’s going to stand around talking in hushed tones about my C in high school chemistry. It’s going to be, “Okay yeah, she could type but… remember the time she got lost in the cul-de-sac where she grew up?”
One Dimension
The gift/curse of sabermetrics means that we can argue over measures of greatness as long as we care to update them. They serve as a no-nonsense measure of a man. Sports icons are typically viewed from a single dimension.
But that’s never the full story. The world at large knows, for example, that Joe DiMaggio was a baseball great, but only the diehards are aware of his heartbreaking estrangement from his only child. Joe could hit, but he could also hurt and was hurt in return. Do you think of him differently now, knowing this?
And the fact about Pete Rose is no matter whether or not he is enshrined in Cooperstown, there will long exist historians and baseballists who continue to argue about whether or not he belongs there. That is his full bequest to the people of Cincinnati: Pete Rose was a no-doubter, and then he himself planted the doubt.
A Golden Quill
The most tragic aspect of Rose’s full story is that he insisted upon outlining the dark final chapters with actions that convulsed the very game he said he’d wear a gasoline suit through hell to play. It’s as if he snatched the pen from a loving biographer writing the story of his life with a golden quill: “Just a legend?” And then he scrawled the finale with a black, indelible Sharpie.
And nobody gets to live happily ever after.
The post Baseball Is Life: What’s Already Been Said appeared first on Redleg Nation.