Against All Odds: Pete Rose

Cardinals were cure to what ailed rookie Pete Rose

October 7, 2024 by retrosimba

A month into his rookie year with the 1963 Reds, Pete Rose was struggling to hold on to his job. Then he played the Cardinals for the first time and got his career back on track.

Making a leap from the Class A level of the minors to the big leagues, Rose won the starting second base spot with the Reds at 1963 spring training. Once the season began, the player who would become baseball’s all-time hits king looked feeble at the plate.

Rose was batting .158 for the season when the Reds opened a four-game series against the Cardinals on May 3, 1963, at Cincinnati. Cardinals pitching turned out to be the remedy for Rose’s slump. He produced seven hits in 14 at-bats and drew five walks in the four games. He also totaled four RBI and scored three times, helping the Reds win three of the four.

After that, Rose thrived and went on to win the 1963 National League Rookie of the Year Award. The switch-hitter eventually totaled 4,256 career hits.

The Cincinnati Kid

A Cincinnati native, Rose was 19 when scout Buzz Boyle signed him for the Reds.

Boyle said most clubs overlooked Rose because he only weighed 150 pounds in high school. “Knowing his family and seeing the kid and knowing his ambition, I felt he was well worth the chance,” Boyle told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “I don’t think he can be a mediocre player.”

Though he wasn’t on the Reds’ 40-man roster, Rose was invited to their Tampa spring training camp for a look in 1963 after hitting .330 for manager Dave Bristol’s Class A Macon (Ga.) Peaches the year before.

Don Blasingame, a former Cardinal who hit .281 for Cincinnati in 1962, was the Reds’ incumbent second baseman. Blasingame had a strong connection with Reds manager Fred Hutchinson. He was the second baseman when Hutchinson managed the Cardinals (1956-58) and again when Hutchinson led the Reds to a National League pennant in 1961.

Conventional wisdom had Rose ticketed to start the 1963 season at Class AAA San Diego but he took advantage of the spring training invitation with the Reds.

“The most exciting young ballplayer in the Cincinnati camp this spring is Pete Rose,” Si Burick of the Dayton Daily News proclaimed. “He gives the club added speed, enthusiasm, drive. He wants to play. Hutchinson has become so fond of the youngster, he doesn’t want to let him out of his sight.”

Hutchinson said to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “You’ve got to like a kid like Rose. He’s the winning type of player that a manager looks for.”

Reds third baseman Gene Freese told the newspaper, “Pete is another Nellie Fox, with power.” (Fox, a future Hall of Famer, was the all-star second baseman for the White Sox.) Before a spring training game, Hutchinson and Phillies manager Gene Mauch watched Rose take his cuts in the batting cage.

According to Si Burick, Hutchinson said to Mauch, “This boy came to play. He runs to first when he draws a walk and we’ve timed him going down to first on a pass in 4.2 seconds.” The newspaper noted Rose was “nicknamed Charlie Hustle by his teammates.”

Asked by Si Burick why he ran hard to first base when issued a walk, Rose replied, “When I was a little kid, my dad took me to (Cincinnati’s) Crosley Field to see the Reds play the Cardinals. I saw (Enos) Country Slaughter run to first on a walk and I figured if it was good enough for him it was good enough for me.”

Bumpy beginning

As spring training neared an end, Hutchinson sought the advice of his coaches on whether Rose should be the Reds’ second baseman. According to Ritter Collett of the Dayton Journal Herald, Hutchinson asked them, “Do any of you think we’d hurt our chances by giving him a trial? Is there any of you who feels he hasn’t earned it?”

The answers to both were no.

Si Burick reported that on the day before the Reds’ season opener, Blasingame shook hands with Rose and said, “Kid, good luck. You’ve got a chance to make a lot of money in this game. Don’t do anything foolish to waste your chance.”

Rose told Burick, “You have to respect him for that.”

In the Reds’ season opener at home against the Pirates, Rose, batting second, was the first Cincinnati player to reach base (on a four-pitch walk from Earl Francis) and the first to score (on Frank Robinson’s home run). He helped turn three double plays. Rose also struck out looking and booted a routine grounder. In explaining the error, Rose told the Dayton Daily News, “I was still cursing myself for looking at that (third) strike. I wasn’t thinking about my job in the field.”

Hutchinson said to the newspaper, “He’ll learn that all this is part of the game … If you brood about a mistake and it leads to another mistake, you can’t make it in this game.” Asked whether he was nervous in his debut, Rose replied to the Dayton Journal Herald, “Sure, I was nervous, but not scared. There’s a difference.” Boxscore

Hutchinson started Rose in the first six games (he batted .130), then benched him for Blasingame. As the Reds headed on a trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco, there was speculation Rose “probably will be dropped off at San Diego” to join the farm club there, the Journal Herald reported.

Instead, after Blasingame made eight consecutive starts at second and batted .160, Hutchinson restored Rose to the starting lineup on April 27.

Power hitter

When the first-place Cardinals (15-7) arrived in Cincinnati on May 3 for a weekend series with the ninth-place Reds (7-11), Rose was in a funk. He had one hit in 15 at-bats since regaining his starting status and was “perilously close to a return to the minors,” according to the Dayton Daily News.

The task didn’t figure to get any easier against the Cardinals’ Game 1 pitcher, Ernie Broglio. He was 3-0, and two of the wins were shutouts.

In his first at-bat against Broglio, Rose grounded out, but the next two turns at the plate were spectacular. Rose drove a Broglio pitch over the head of George Altman in right for a triple. Then he slammed a Broglio fastball for a two-run home run, “a prodigious blast that soared high over the center field wall,” the Daily News reported.

The homer, RBI and multi-hit game all were firsts for Rose as a big leaguer.

(According to the Daily News, after the home run, Rose crowed, “Sixty more and I tie [Roger] Maris.”

Overhearing the remark, Hutchinson barked, “Don’t let that homer give you the idea you’re a slugger.”)

Facing Diomedes Olivo, 44, in the ninth, Rose, 22, grounded to short and nearly beat the throw to first. According to the Daily News, the brash rookie turned to umpire Jocko Conlan, 63, and said, “I need those close ones, Jocko. I’m only hitting .170.” Conlan replied, “I don’t care if you’re hitting .470. You’re still out.” Boxscore

Going against Gibson

In Game 2 of the series, Rose was perfect, with two singles and three walks in five plate appearances. He had a single and two walks against starter Bob Gibson, and a single and a walk versus Ed Bauta. Rose’s one-out walk against Gibson in the third ignited a four-run outburst from the Reds, who won, 6-0, for the second day in a row. Boxscore

In his 1994 book “Stranger to the Game,” Gibson said, “For a singles and doubles hitter, Pete Rose carried himself with a big man’s swagger and could give a pitcher a hard time just through his sheer will to make something happen.” (Gibson versus Rose was the ultimate in competitiveness and intensity. For his career against Gibson, Rose had a .307 batting average and .385 on-base percentage, with 35 hits, 12 walks and three hit by pitches.

In 1967, Gibson and Rose were involved in a brawl. Another time, Gibson said in his autobiography, “I thought for sure I was getting to Pete Rose when I knocked him down and he got up and spit at me. When he got back to the dugout, though, I saw [manager] Sparky Anderson say something to him. I heard later Sparky advised Rose never to show me up.”)

On the way

The series ended with a Sunday doubleheader. Rose had two walks (one each against Ray Sadecki and Ron Taylor) in the opener, a 5-4 Reds triumph, and three hits (two versus Curt Simmons and one against Bobby Shantz) with two RBI in the finale, a 7-4 victory for the Cardinals. Boxscore and Boxscore

Steadied by his performances against the Cardinals, Rose produced consistently the remainder of his rookie season. On May 24, Hutchinson moved him into the leadoff spot and kept him there. In July, Blasingame was dealt to the Senators.

Rose played in 157 games for the 1963 Reds, batted . 273 and led the team in runs scored (101). He also ranked second on the club in hits (170), doubles (25), triples (nine) and walks (55). Rose remained a thorn against Cardinals pitching. In 18 games against St. Louis in 1963, Rose had a .373 batting mark and a .435 on-base percentage.

He had more hits (28) and more RBI (eight) versus the Cardinals than he did against any other club that year. In nine games at St. Louis in 1963, Rose hit .419. Before the last of those games, the season finale, Rose shook hands with Stan Musial near the batting cage. Playing the final game of his career, Musial smacked two singles, both past Rose at second and into right field.

Musial’s 3,630 hits were the National League record until Rose broke the mark 18 years later in 1981. Boxscore

Rose, who went 3-for-6 with a walk in Musial’s last game, finished his career with a .299 batting mark versus the Cardinals. Following the 1978 season, after he became a free agent and left the Reds, Rose considered an offer from the Cardinals but opted to sign instead with the Phillies. Source Cardinals were cure to what ailed rookie Pete Rose | RetroSimba

Special spot where Pete enjoyed a 9 minute standing ovation and became the “Hit King”

Rest Easy, #14.

The Story of Baseball’s Hit King – RIP Baseball

JUNE 2, 2015; Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader Pete Rose walks through his boyhood neighborhood,

Sedamsville, – Search with Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty, Tuesday, June 2, 2015, in Cincinnati.

Classic Pete Rose – Search

Pete Rose is the boy with humble upbringing from Braddock Street

Paul Daugherty, Cincinnati Enquirer
Sun, Jun 26, 2022
·
Editor’s note: With columnist Paul Daugherty retiring this month, we are revisiting some of his classic columns from his time at The Enquirer.

This interview with Pete Rose at his boyhood home in Riverside appeared in print on June 14, 2015.

Pete Rose walks up a familiar hill in Riverside and back 60 years.
The walk into his past isn’t easy. Pete Rose hobbles back in time to his boyhood home, because his knees ache and he’s put on a few pounds and because he is 74 years old. Baseball is youth and Pete Rose was baseball, but all that’s in the past now.

“This was all clear, through here,” he is saying. Pete points to a wall of green, a mess of weeds and overgrowth that now defines the view from the front of the house on Braddock Street in Riverside, where he grew up. Pete’s not a man seeking his past – I asked him to bring me here – but he’s still a bit beholden to it. And in peculiar awe.

“It doesn’t look the same,” he says.

I ask him to knock on the door. He demurs. “Don’t want to inconvenience ’em,” Pete says, so we walk around to the backyard instead, where a basketball hoop once loomed not five feet from the kitchen window. Just up the hill, Pete and his friends had carved out a makeshift ball field. The hoop is gone. Nature has done its work on the ball field. “When I lived here, it was kept up,” he says.

Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, reminisces with Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty as he walks

around the front of his childhood home in the Riverside neighborhood of Cincinnati, on Tuesday, June 2, 2015. Weeds own the view. Trees have grown tall, overgrowth covers the path where 8-year-old Pete would sled ride, all the way down to Schulte’s Fish House.

From the front porch, you could see the Ohio River nearly half a mile away. Now?

“I don’t remember everything being so cluttered,” Pete says.

The All-Star Game is coming in a few weeks and with it, memories of a less fettered Pete Rose. His life was a whole lot simpler with a bat in his hand. He won three world championships, he passed the great Cobb, he managed the young Reds to the brink before Lou Piniella took them over the top. We all know what happened next.

With age come complications.

Things get cluttered, for better or worse. Pete Rose, once as simple a personality as existed, kept the extraneous noise at bay for a very long time, until it gathered in one mighty wave and swept him away. What’s left is a lingering, low-grade tragedy, in the person of a man whose view was perfectly clear for such a long, glorious time.

“You gotta remember,” Pete says, “all we did was play ball. That was all we had.”

A lot to live up to
Harry Rose wouldn’t let Pete go to the movies. There was a theatre across River Road from BoldFace Park, as Pete recalls. This was the late 1940s, when attending Saturday matinees was a rite of school-age passage. Harry worried about his first-born son’s eyesight. “He wanted me to be a hitter,” Pete says.

Pete Rose photographed with his parents, Harry “Big Pete” and LaVerne Rose,

before his Major League debut with the Cincinnati Reds on April 8, 1963.

Harry worked at a bank downtown, crunching numbers. It was just a job. His passion was sports, specifically semi-pro football. At home and work, Harry was polite and unassuming. On the gridiron, he was an abject load.

His Riverside Athletic Club team might draw a weekend afternoon crowd of 5,000. Harry’s grit was legendary. He was a smallish man (about 5-foot-8, maybe 175 pounds) playing a large man’s game, and owned a competitiveness not often seen.

Harry once appeared on a TV show where he was asked to demonstrate proper tackling technique. He launched himself at a director’s chair, sending splinters all over the set. “I saw him break his hip, then crawl trying to make the tackle,” Pete recalls. Little Pete was a ball boy and waterboy at his dad’s games. He’d pass around the hat at halftime, for money to pay the referees. “I saw him get a (knot) on his elbow as big as a softball. He put a bandage on it with some ice, then intercepted a pass and ran 70 yards for a touchdown the next play.

“Every once in a while, someone in (Las) Vegas will come up to me and say, ‘My dad played against your dad, and he was a son of a b—-. Which he was.”

Harry Rose was not the prototype helicopter dad, but he wanted things done a certain way. He had Pete switch-hitting at age 9, a skill Pete perfected over the years, using the wall of Schulte’s as a backstop. Pete had a broom handle, his younger brother Dave a rubber ball.

“I’d let him get as close as he wanted,” Pete says. “The closer he got, the harder it was to hit. Hour after hour, he’d try to strike me out. I wore that wall out.”

The family never went on summer vacations, because summer was when Pete played ball, and Harry made deals with all of Pete’s coaches:

If they agreed to allow Pete to bat left-handed versus right-handed pitchers, and vice versa, Harry would guarantee his son’s attendance at every game and practice. “He didn’t think it was fair to the team, for one of the star players to go on vacation,” Pete says.

Harry Rose tested himself. Maybe it offered a break from the sedentary monotony of the bank. Or maybe it was Harry being Harry. Every day at close to 5 p.m., he’d get off the public bus at River Road and Cathcart Street. Cathcart slopes steeply uphill, not 45 degrees, but close.

Harry would sprint up Cathcart in his patent-leather work shoes, make the right onto Braddock and sprint to his house at the end of the lane. Every day. “Who does that sound like?” Pete asks.

Pete recalls that on Sundays, Harry would visit his mother, who lived up River Road maybe a mile and a half. Harry would leave his house, take the Anderson Ferry across to Kentucky, walk several miles upriver, cross a bridge back to the Ohio side, then visit his mother. “Just for the exercise,” Pete says.

When Pete was in the minor leagues, all of Harry’s letters ended, “Love, Dad. Keep hustling.”

In 1953, a reporter for one of the local papers wrote of Harry, “He is 41 years old, father of four, still can run 100 yards in 10.5 seconds.” When Harry was 58, he challenged 29-year-old Pete to a 40-yard dash, while both were at Colerain High School for an offseason Reds charity basketball game. Harry won. Two weeks later, Harry died of a heart attack. Pete got the news from his sister while he was across the river getting a haircut.

“If he wasn’t like he was, he might have lived longer. My dad was never sick. He never missed a day of work,” Pete says. Harry felt sick that day, though. Pain in his chest. He didn’t ask for help. He caught the bus home, made it to the top of the steps, saw his wife and died.

Boldface Park in Sedamsville.

A lot lived on
Lots of Pete lived on through Harry. We are at BoldFace Park on a recent afternoon, sitting atop a massive stone structure that once contained changing rooms for the park’s two swimming pools, long since filled in. We climb a flight of steps to the top. Pete looks across the park, its two softball fields neat and recently groomed.

“I lived over there in the summer,” he says, pointing to a three-story, red-brick row house on the opposite edge of the park. That would be his grandmother’s place. Eva Sams lived on the third floor, alone but for a pet monkey named, yes, Pete. “The meanest SOB,” Pete Rose says. “It would bite everybody, then hide in the rafters.”

Pete lived with Eva, because the baseball wasn’t very good four miles down the river, where Braddock Street was. Pete (and Harry) wanted Pete to play against the best. So his Knothole summers were spent with grandma.

“I was pretty lucky we had all this,” he says. “I developed right here, just by playing. If that field was open, we were on it. I just walked across the street. I had my bat, my glove and my ball.”

Life didn’t move a lot in those summers. It lolled, like the river. It might have been boring for anyone not named Pete Rose. His singleness of purpose afforded no time for boredom. Even when he left for Geneva, N.Y., and his first minor-league season, Rose returned to Braddock Street at season’s end, swinging a lead bat 150 times every night, each side, left and right, before he went to bed.

The whir of the bat would wake up Harry.

“My uncle (his mother’s brother and part-time Reds scout Buddy Bloebaum) told me it would make my arms bigger.”

After a while, Rose surveys BoldFace Park and declares, “I don’t miss this place. I can’t play any more. The pools are gone. At 3:30 this afternoon, there won’t be any kids playing” on the tidy fields below. When we walk down from atop the stone building at the edge of BoldFace Park, Pete takes each step sideways. He limps some.

Back up on Braddock, Pete kicks at the gravel-and-grass front yard, and wonders where the big tree went. “I used to climb that tree,” he says. He’s not nostalgic, he’s not romantic, so there is no point in asking Peter Edward Rose if he ever wishes he could go back and do it all over again, armed with what he knows now.

I want to ask him this, though, because the answer would be essential to who he was and who he has become: “Pete, with everything good you took from this place, and from the father that raised you – your jaunty attitude, your endless passion and striving, your regular-guy appeal – how could you possibly have ended up in the place you’re in now?”

Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, reminisces with Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty

at BoldFace Park in the Sedamsville neighborhood of Cincinnati on Tuesday, June 2.

An uncluttered man, whose virtue was his focus, is now burdened by regret, and by a frayed legacy that will never be what it should have been, what he intended so long ago, while slamming switch-hits past his brother in the parking lot at Schulte’s.

But I don’t. I don’t ask Pete this, because he will never give me the answer I’m looking for. Rose is candid. He isn’t introspective. There’s a life’s worth of difference.

Instead, I ask: “What would your dad say to you right now, if he were standing with us in front of this house where he raised you?”

“He’d say, ‘How come you’re not up there working with your grandson, teaching him how to hit’?”

Pete looks down, kicks some gravel, changes the subject.

“I can’t believe all these trees grew in 40 years,” he says.

“Forty years is a long time,” I say.

“It is,” says Pete Rose.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Pete Rose interview at childhood home in Cincinnati, Boldface ParkSource:

Classic Doc: Pete Rose is the boy from Braddock Street

Pete Rose Career hits leader – Search

Pete Rose played in 3,562 games and won 1972 in Major League Baseball (MLB)1. He has the most wins of anyone in major league history. He was a switch hitter and is MLB’s all-time leader in hits, games played, at-bats, singles, and outs 1. Rose played most prominently as a member of the Cincinnati Reds lineup known as the Big Red Machine for their dominance of the National League in the 1970s 3.

Pete Rose timeline: How MLB’s all-time hits leader got on and off the ineligible list – Yahoo Sports

From 1963 On: The Highs, Lows of the Historic Career of Pete Rose – On and Off Field