PHILADELPHIA >> In an effort to be more fan friendly and cash in at the same time, the Phillies continue to pump up their annual team alumni celebration, which is always highlighted by honoring the one man of the hour who is inducted into (onto?) the Phillies Wall of Fame.
It just doesn’t get any more exciting than that.
What began in 1978 with a little ceremony and a pair of plaques bearing the likenesses of Phillies great Robin Roberts and Athletics icon Connie Mack (note: The Phildelphia A’s haven’t been part of this thing for a long time now) has grown into full weekend celebration of bringing back the old guys from the powder-blue uniform days and beyond, and surrounding them with a full slate of cold-beverage events.
So when Pete Rose shows up for his personal coronation in August, the Phillies will surround him with old teammates from the World Series team of 1980, and play the feel-good marketing game with him as guest of honor. That would include Rose’s induction into (onto?) the Wall prior to an Aug. 12 home game against the Mets.
Be there or bet square.
Rose, in case you don’t remember, used to be known as Baseball’s Hits King … which he still is and almost assuredly always will be. Don’t believe me? Well, believe this:
“I don’t think that record of hits will ever be broken,” Larry Bowa said Monday about his old teammate’s mark of 4,256 career hits. “First of all, teams aren’t going to have enough money to pay guys to get 4,000 hits. That’s an incredible record, (playing for) 20 years and (getting) over 4,000 hits. … He didn’t consider himself a superstar, he considered himself a blue-collar player that had to work for everything.”
That’s what the Phillies will be honoring Rose for during that Alumni Weekend celebration, for the way he not only brought the moniker of Charlie Hustle with him to Philadelphia in 1979, but for the way he lived up to the name here, just as he had done in his 16 previous seasons playing for his hometown Cincinnati Reds.
The Phillies were one of the most disappointing teams in the league after they had made free agent Rose the highest paid player in the game (all of $800,000 a year). Yet Rose hit .331 that summer, and he still ran out everything – especially ball four – while running his mouth when he felt the need. And he had no favorites when it came to directing his motivational speaking, like the budding manager he was destined to be.
“He did that in the clubhouse,” Bowa said. “He did it to me once. I didn’t lay down a bunt and he said, ‘You’ve got to get that ball down.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ Back then you could get on guys and they didn’t take it personally. They took it like you were trying to help them; took it as constructive criticism.
“You probably couldn’t do that now, because some guys would probably call their agents. … But that’s how he was; he wasn’t afraid, and if he didn’t do a job he’d be the first one to say, ‘That was a bad at-bat by me.'”
Unfortunately for Rose, what drove him to be the hardest working man in baseball and one of the most competitive people on the planet when he was in his heyday would eventually work against him. He was the ultimate honest player, but after he was made to stop playing the game his monstrous pride and ego simply didn’t allow him to abide by a loss.
Not to opposing teams, and certainly not to a guy named Bart Giamatti.
When Giamatti, the new commissioner of baseball, negotiated a settlement of sorts with Rose on the charges that Rose, as manager of the Reds in the years following his 1985 retirement as a player, had bet serious sums of money on baseball. The agreement was simply that Rose would be banned from the game indefinitely.
“Charlie Hustle” now had a different connotation. Still does.
But the Pete Rose who will be coming back to Philadelphia won’t have to be that guy. He turns 76 on Friday, and even a monstrous ego like his tends to dim with age. He ended 15 years of denying the evidence that he’d bet on baseball, but that only came via his 2004 autobiography. Even then, he asserted he never bet on the Reds.
Whatever.
He has sold books and bartered autograph prices and hosted sports talk shows and professional wrestling circuses and is paid to growl and goof off on Fox baseball broadcasts. Through it all, it’s easy to see the angst of the baseball ban precluding him from Hall of Fame consideration still burns. The ego doesn’t abide by the truth on that topic, either.
But the Phillies don’t have to worry about any of that.
For reasons that were his to own, Rose’s moment in the Phillies’ spotlight is way too belated. Of his Phillies contemporaries, Steve Carlton went up on the wall in 1989, the year Rose was kicked out of the game. Mike Schmidt went up there in 1990, Bowa in 1991. Several more World Series heroes went up afterward. Rose was a persona non grata when it came to Wall consideration.
Finally, nearly 27 years after Giamatti dropped the ax on the Hits King – then unfortunately dropped dead nine days later – Cincinnati welcomed Rose back and inducted him into the Reds Hall of Fame. In his speech to his hometown fans during Pete Rose Weekend last June, Rose said, “To date, this is the biggest thing ever to happen to me in baseball.”
So it will be.
So get your tickets for what surely will be a sold-out Citizens Bank Park Pete Rose show on Aug. 12. Go cheer him for the memories. No harm, no foul.
Like Pete Rose’s life after baseball, it’s going to be another sellout. Just not quite as sad.
To contact Rob Parent, email rparent@21st-centurymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @ReluctantSE.
