Life is funny. This week we learned that President Carter turned 100 and Pete Rose died at age 83.
Some of us are old enough to remember the late 1970s and how often Carter and Pete were on the front page.
Pete spent the 1970s playing and winning in the World Series. He was playing 3rd when Carlton Fisk hit the famous extra inning home run in game 6. Pete then got a big hit in game 7 to win the title.
Specifically, the summer of 1978 brings back the failing Carter presidency and the Rose 44-game hitting streak. For over a month, Pete kept a lot of baseball fans checking the late news or the early morning papers to see if he got another one.
We didn’t have internet back then and ESPN was in diapers. So many of us actually tuned in WLW out of Cincinnati to catch up with the streak. It’s hard to explain that to my sons today, but we did use transistor radios back then to catch games. The signal was clear at night and that’s how some of us kept up with what was going on in baseball.
It was not DiMaggio’s 56 but 44 is the next one on the list. Here is a bit of that streak:
Rose set a National League record for recording a hit in 44 consecutive games in 1978. The streak came to an end on August 1 when Gene Garber of the Braves struck out Rose in the ninth inning of a game in Atlanta.
But for fans who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, no player was more exciting than the Cincinnati Reds’ No. 14, “Charlie Hustle,” the brash superstar with the shaggy hair, puggish nose and muscular forearms. At the dawn of artificial surfaces, divisional play and free agency, Rose was old school, a conscious throwback to baseball’s early days. Millions could never forget him crouched and scowling at the plate, running full speed to first even after drawing a walk, or sprinting for the next base and diving headfirst into the bag.
A 17-time All-Star, the switch-hitting Rose played on three World Series winners. He was the National League MVP in 1973 and World Series MVP two years later. He holds the major league record for games played (3,562) and plate appearances (15,890) and the NL record for the longest hitting streak (44). He was the leadoff man for one of baseball’s most formidable lineups with the Reds’ championship teams of 1975 and 1976, with teammates that included Hall of Famers Johnny Bench, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan.
But no milestone approached his 4,256 hits, breaking his hero Ty Cobb’s 4,191 and signifying his excellence no matter the notoriety which followed. It was a total so extraordinary that you could average 200 hits for 20 years and still come up short. Rose’s secret was consistency, and longevity. Over 24 seasons, all but six played entirely with the Reds, Rose had 200 hits or more 10 times, and more than 180 four other times. He batted .303 overall, even while switching from second base to outfield to third to first, and he led the league in hits seven times.
“Every summer, three things are going to happen,” Rose liked to say, “the grass is going to get green, the weather is going to get hot, and Pete Rose is going to get 200 hits and bat .300.”
Well, he got 200 hits often and hit .300 forever. It was automatic.
Of course, we can’t talk about Rose and the lifetime ban. I think that Major League Baseball should have cancelled the ban in 2014, 25 years late, and brought him to sell the game. No one sold the game better as a player than Rose did.
So RIP Pete Rose. I grew up admiring him and it’s hard to believe that he is gone.
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