Tuesday 10/1/24
Pete Rose died yesterday, the day before the baseball playoffs begin, which feels oddly fitting.
In 1975, Pete Rose was thirty-four-years-old and married with two children. He had sex with a woman--who in actuality was a girl--he later said he believed was sixteen, because he waited until she was sixteen--the age of consent in Ohio, where Rose was a member of the Cincinnati Reds--to have sex with her.
She was not sixteen anyway, he was obviously going to try and do what he wanted to do regardless of her age, and she was allegedly not the only girl with whom Rose had sex. She was the one he was basically forced to admit to. If someone wants to say, "If sixteen is legal, then he did nothing wrong"--never mind that she wasn't even sixteen--then that person, like Pete Rose, is a true scumbag.
Several years ago at a Phillies--with whom Rose won a title in 1980--reunion, a reporter asked Rose about the allegations. His response was, "It was fifty-five years ago, babe."
"Babe."
Now, if you were a person being accused of rape and the rape of a minor--a child--would you flippantly throw a "babe" into your rebuttal?
Those are some pretty strong true colors, are they not?
For decades now, the subject of Pete Rose is like the subject of politics. Everyone has an opinion, and it is the baseball topic that comes up the most, by far. Every day on the internet, there are thousands and thousands of debates about Rose, who was never even that good. He was good. But he wasn't great.
His career OPS+ is 118. That means as a hitter, he was about the same as Carlton Fisk, a catcher. He played for a long time. He had no pop. His greatest value as a ballplayer was his ability to hit doubles. Pete Rose was great at hitting doubles. He was the third best player on his own teams--and he was way back behind the top two--that won back-to-back titles.
But every day, someone posts a photo of Pete Rose, and the idiotic discussion about the Hall of Fame begins anew. A lot of screaming old men, but also people of all ages. Many times I've seen this career .303 hitter, with no pop, that 118 OPS+ (which ties him for 465th place all-time), his career OPS under .800--bet you didn't know that--touted as the best hitter ever. Pete Rose is not one of the 200 best hitters ever.
The hustle thing was more in line with brand building than on-field reality, because plenty of guys hustled as much as Rose did, and plenty do now. You know why people thought he hustled so much? Because Rose would do things like slide into a base where there wasn't even a fielder. He'd just do it. On-brand Pete.
That's bad baseball. An outfielder could misplay a ball and you wouldn't be able to advance because you were doing your showboating headfirst slide into second base.
The catch of the ball that popped out of Bob Boone's glove? Only someone with no understanding of baseball would venerate that play because it was the first baseman's ball, not the catcher's. So if Rose was doing what he should have been doing, Boone wouldn't have been attempting the play in the first place.
Rose was a winning ballplayer. He was adept at making contact. He turned singles into doubles. The Big Red Machine wouldn't have been one of the best squads ever without him, even if Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench were far superior ballplayers. Despite his two Gold Gloves, Rose was never a strong fielder, but he was defensively useful because he could play as a regular at a number of different positions (it's hard to think of him now as a second baseman, but he was).
Reputationally, he got far more out of not being in the Hall of Fame than being in it. As for the ban, I never had strong feelings regarding it, unlike everyone else. Baseball is hypocritical. MLB and shoves and shoves gambling in your face. But there was always a thing above all things you couldn't do, and that was bet on the game as someone in the game. That was baseball's version of, "Don't eat that apple." He ate the apple. He knew what it meant. Then he lied a lot. This isn't someone who ever deserved the benefit of any doubt.
The worshiping of Rose the ballplayer speaks to how little people understand things and can process information and how loath they are to get information. It speaks to how appearance can best reality. If I just gave someone the stats--.303 career average, season high of 16 home runs, season high of 82 RBI, career OPS of .784, career WAR just under 80--that person, allowing that they have any knowledge of how stats work, would think, "That guy had a nice career." They wouldn't think that was an all-time great.
Rose's all-time greatness claim--in terms of actual evidence--stems from his longevity. He was skilled at health. He didn't miss games. That's a big thing that gets underrated. If you're not out there, you're not helping the team, unless your play would have been costing the team and someone can do the job better than you.
Good contact hitter, good batting eye, twenty years of health and being good enough to be out there, and there's your all-time hits record. But what was the player's peak? What was he at his best? If you take Rose's best season, where does it stack up among the all-time best seasons? Does it crack the top 1000? Top 500? There's no way it cracks the top 500. I'd have to give it more thought as to whether it was in the top 1000. It doesn't help him to adjust for position, either. Not as an outfielder, a third baseman, and a first baseman.
The reason people fight about politics is because they're uninformed, and when you have one uninformed person arguing with another uninformed person everything becomes injurious. It's insults, slights, putdowns, anger, the anger that comes with being unable to say what one wishes to say because we are so limited with our language, promises of never talking again, long periods of silence, etc.
Politics is in front of everyone's faces. If Windex was in front of everyone's faces, it'd be the same. People don't go out and find things to learn and care about, and in life, there are a handful of things that everyone sees which you can't help but see. That's not what is the best Grateful Dead show from 1970 or the role of time in nature with wellness or what's the most insightful poem.
If people were educated and intelligent and moral, they would disagree far less about politics. It's not the topic that makes people brawl. It's their own stupidity. The topic is ancillary, save that it's always front and center. It's the backdrop against which people project their stupidity and shortcomings.
Pete Rose is the ultimate sports version of that. More than anything, that's his legacy: Making ignorant people fight. And I would say, being a child rapist, but people don't know about that--as easy as it is to know about it--and they really don't care, most of them, for all of their holier-than-thou attitudes.
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