September 11, 1985—When the nearly 60-year-old career-hits record held by Ty Cobb was surpassed, it was done by a player, Pete Rose, fully the equal of “the Georgia Peach” in desire to excel—but also, it would turn out in a few years, a match for the Hall of Famer in a tendency not only to exceed yardsticks of excellence set on the diamond but also in codes of conduct off the field.
Rose lost no time in beating Cobb’s record of 4,192 on this evening. Latecomers to the game might have been annoyed that the Cincinnati Red legend slapped a hit (characteristically, it was a single) off the San Diego Padres’ Eric Show in the first inning.
Rose lost no time in beating Cobb’s record of 4,192 on this evening. Latecomers to the game might have been annoyed that the Cincinnati Red legend slapped a hit (characteristically, it was a single) off the San Diego Padres’ Eric Show in the first inning.
Unlike, say, Alex Rodriguez, Rose never showed nervousness. In this case, he didn’t have to, anyway: as player-manager, he could keep writing his name on the lineup card, not having to worry that he might lose his position to a younger, better player.
The evening was treated as one of the great moments in baseball. Rose received a Corvette, along with a phone call from President Ronald Reagan. It was all in keeping with a carefully burnished public image with few if any public dissenters.
As I indicated last year in a post marking Rose’s banishment from baseball, the man who broke Cobb’s record for hits was “an irresponsible, skirt-chasing, records-obsessed, gambling-addicted, felonious has-been.” That conduct was present from the beginning of his career, as were the well-springs of Cobb's behavior.
What were the sources of each man’s competitive fury? One incident spurred Cobb in particular: three weeks before he made his debut in center field with the Detroit Tigers, his mother accidentally shot and killed his father. (The pathologically jealous William Cobb was sneaking around the house, hoping to catch his wife in the act with a lover, when she, suspecting the silhouette near the window was an intruder, shot and killed him. She would be acquitted of murder seven months later.) "I did it for my father,” Cobb admitted later about what drove him. “He never got to see me play ... but I knew he was watching me, and I never let him down.”
Young Cobb, like young Rose nearly 60 years later, provoked the anger of team veterans. Some took the rookie hazing beyond the acceptable limits because they wanted him off the team. Tiger manager Hughie Jennings permitted the razzing to proceed until, convinced that Cobb had the guts not to back down, he finally passed the word that it had to stop.
Rose survived his own hazing in 1963. Reds veterans, annoyed that manager Fred Hutchinson was benching second baseman Don Blasingame—who’d hit .281 and played creditable in the field the year before—in favor of the 22-year-old Rose, gave the youngster the business.
Rose’s attitude didn’t help matters. His competitive drive—notably, sprinting to first base after a walk—was so comically histrionic that sharp-tongued Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford had already christened him “Charlie Hustle.” Whatever latitude teammates might have given him for brashness (the same confidence meant he’d hit anybody under any circumstances) quickly vanished when they realized something else almost immediately about him: he felt the unwritten rules of the game didn’t apply to him.
Years later, pitcher Jim O’Toole remembered an incident in Pete Rose: Baseball's Charlie Hustle, by Mike Towle: During spring training, the Reds had gone to Mexico City. At one club, Rose had called a stripper over to the table “and bingo, he had her down on the table doing something no one should be doing in public….I broke in a few years earlier than that, and if I had done something like that as a rookie, I would have found myself right back down in Double-A. But Pete got away with a lot of stuff that normal players couldn’t have gotten away with. He was just different.”
The evening was treated as one of the great moments in baseball. Rose received a Corvette, along with a phone call from President Ronald Reagan. It was all in keeping with a carefully burnished public image with few if any public dissenters.
As I indicated last year in a post marking Rose’s banishment from baseball, the man who broke Cobb’s record for hits was “an irresponsible, skirt-chasing, records-obsessed, gambling-addicted, felonious has-been.” That conduct was present from the beginning of his career, as were the well-springs of Cobb's behavior.
What were the sources of each man’s competitive fury? One incident spurred Cobb in particular: three weeks before he made his debut in center field with the Detroit Tigers, his mother accidentally shot and killed his father. (The pathologically jealous William Cobb was sneaking around the house, hoping to catch his wife in the act with a lover, when she, suspecting the silhouette near the window was an intruder, shot and killed him. She would be acquitted of murder seven months later.) "I did it for my father,” Cobb admitted later about what drove him. “He never got to see me play ... but I knew he was watching me, and I never let him down.”
Young Cobb, like young Rose nearly 60 years later, provoked the anger of team veterans. Some took the rookie hazing beyond the acceptable limits because they wanted him off the team. Tiger manager Hughie Jennings permitted the razzing to proceed until, convinced that Cobb had the guts not to back down, he finally passed the word that it had to stop.
Rose survived his own hazing in 1963. Reds veterans, annoyed that manager Fred Hutchinson was benching second baseman Don Blasingame—who’d hit .281 and played creditable in the field the year before—in favor of the 22-year-old Rose, gave the youngster the business.
Rose’s attitude didn’t help matters. His competitive drive—notably, sprinting to first base after a walk—was so comically histrionic that sharp-tongued Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford had already christened him “Charlie Hustle.” Whatever latitude teammates might have given him for brashness (the same confidence meant he’d hit anybody under any circumstances) quickly vanished when they realized something else almost immediately about him: he felt the unwritten rules of the game didn’t apply to him.
Years later, pitcher Jim O’Toole remembered an incident in Pete Rose: Baseball's Charlie Hustle, by Mike Towle: During spring training, the Reds had gone to Mexico City. At one club, Rose had called a stripper over to the table “and bingo, he had her down on the table doing something no one should be doing in public….I broke in a few years earlier than that, and if I had done something like that as a rookie, I would have found myself right back down in Double-A. But Pete got away with a lot of stuff that normal players couldn’t have gotten away with. He was just different.”
Veterans took extreme exception to a rookie assuming such prerogatives for himself. The only way Rose survived that season was because of an outlet that would never have occurred to the racist Cobb even if it had been open to him: assistance from African-American veterans. Vada Pinson and Frank Robinson, who knew all about snubs because of the color of their skin, made sure they took Rose under their wing. They not only made him feel accepted, but taught him some of the niceties of the game.
In another sense, they could only get so far with him. New York Met fans still seethe over the fight Rose picked with shortstop Bud Harrelson during the 1973 playoffs. Less understandable, because it occurred with no high stakes involved whatsoever, was Rose’s home-plate collision with catcher Ray Fosse during the 1970 All-Star Game—although it’s the type of play that Cobb, who sharpened his cleats (the better for stealing bases), might have appreciated.
One other similarity between the two players: involvement in gambling. Rose’s is well-documented—and finally, after 15 years of stonewalling after his banishment from baseball, confessed. Cobb’s is far murkier.
A former Tiger teammate, Dutch Leonard, claimed after the 1926 season that he, Cobb, and two Cleveland Indian players, Tris Speaker and Joe Wood, had conspired to fix a game in the 1919 season. The matter eventually came to the attention of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who eventually exonerated the accused players.
But ever since then, many have wondered if Landis was trying to contain another potentially damaging baseball gambling scandal on the order of the “Black Sox” series of 1919. A scandal involving a future Hall of Famer (or, in the Cobb-Speaker affair, two) would have wounded America’s pastime as much in the 1920s as it did 60 years later. Cobb--who, like Rose later, had been serving as player-manager for his longtime team--moved on from the Tigers in his last two years in the big leagues, playing for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics.
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