by Kevin Burton
One day I answered the phone and instead of a typical getting I heard, “Your boy’s in jail.”
Baseball was one of the few things that my father and I could talk about peacefully. But we had a disagreement about Pete Rose.
I loved Rose, who died Sept. 30 of hypertension and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. My father couldn’t stand him. He said Rose was a rally killer who got all his hits with two outs and nobody on base.
I admired Rose for his fiery competitiveness, his consistency and as a part of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine.
But Rose didn’t exactly walk the straight and narrow in life. If you considered him as flesh and blood, he didn’t look nearly as good as he did on a baseball card.
Earlier on the day Dad called me, Rose had entered the minimum-security Southern Illinois Prison Camp at Marion, Illinois, having been found guilty of federal income tax evasion. Dad wanted me to know about it and he cut to the chase.
Look, I don’t measure such things, but it seems to me that Greater Facebook is taking longer to honor Rose than it usually does for celebrities who die. Obviously this could just be me. Maybe I’m the one having trouble moving on.
At one time Rose was a sort of talisman for baseball, and not just for us Reds fans. His face was everywhere from newspapers and magazines to TV commercials. At that time my head was in baseball just about all the time. Without my really realizing it he became one of the moorings of my early life, at least in a pop culture sense.
In my early beep baseball playing days with Columbus I used to spike the ball in the pitcher’s area on the way to the bench, if I had fielded the third out of an inning. I did that because I saw Pete Rose do something similar.
Also with Columbus, when we got a new player named Carl Rose, I made sure he got the number 14. Can’t remember why I was able to do that. I wasn’t the coach.
I do pay my taxes though. So the Rose emulation only goes so far. It pertains to my times in uniform only.
Rose received a lifetime ban from baseball because he bet on the sport while managing the Reds. Somebody on Facebook asked, now that he is dead, is the lifetime ban over? In other words, can he be considered for the Baseball Hall of Fame?
Well, I’m against it.
Don’t get me wrong, if baseball’s powers that be do include him in the hall it will be a thrilling and proud moment for me as a Reds fan. But I think it would send the wrong message to youths and everybody else really.
Remember when the all-century baseball team was announced? It was after Rose’s ban, but he was allowed to appear at the ceremony. He got the biggest ovation of any player when his name was announced.
I also remember that day for what a small man, reporter Jim Gray, did to Rose.
In an on-field interview Gray grilled Rose about gambling, rather than allow the man to enjoy the moment.
He was exiled from the game he loved. Yes, as a result of his own actions. But this moment was about all he was ever going to get.
How hard would it have been to let the man have his night, then resume a journalistic pursuit of the truth, the next day.
I hated Jim Gray before that. Something about him never felt right to me. After that Rose interview I really despised him. He seems to have crawled off into some hole, because I don’t see him around sports any more.
On the day before Rose died he appeared at a baseball card show in Nashville with former team mates Dave Concepcion, Tony Perez, George Foster, and Ken Griffey, Sr. He signed autographs for hours, then as the day was wrapping up he told one of the event’s organizers, “I’ll be back next year.”
We know better now. God fills out His lineup card. As September turned to October, Pete’s name was no longer on it.
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