Thursday, July 11, 2002
All-Stars could learn a lot from Rose
Pete Rose hit Ray Fosse like rain hits the pavement. Rose's passion and shoulder met Fosse just up the line from home plate. You know the play. Everyone knows the play. Rose scored the winning run of the 1970 All Star Game by knocking Fosse into next week.
“I didn't care if I hurt myself,” Rose said then, “if we could win.” Early Wednesday morning, baseball commissioner Bud Selig listened to Bob Brenly and Joe Torre, the managers in the 2002 All Star Game, tell him why he should stop the game after 11 innings, even if it stayed tied, 7-7. Someone could get hurt, they said. Actually, players would have a better chance getting hurt hauling their wallets from the nightstand to their back pockets. But never mind. Selig decided the players could stop playing. “I had no choice,” he said.
I wanted to ask Rose about that. I needed to ask him, if only to listen to someone, anyone, who'd remind me for a minute why I loved baseball back then. And why I couldn't care less about it now. Hemingway couldn't have topped the metaphor baseball made for itself Tuesday night.
“He called me,” Rose's agent, Warren Greene, was saying. “Right after it happened.” Rose was in an air plane Wednesday, flying from Florida to California. “Did you see what they just did?” Rose asked Greene Tuesday night.
“They don't want their pitchers to pitch.”
Rose was incredulous. By now, the rest of us shouldn't be.
All we really want is that ballplayers care about the game as much as we do. Not about the money, the fame, the freebies, all the ancillary goodies that accrue to people of privilege. But about the game. The pride, the passion, the pounding in your gut. Pick your clichi. Baseball had a chance Tuesday night to show it felt about the game the way its fans do. Baseball doesn't.
Selig had a choice. He could have told Brenly, the NL manager, to shove his last available pitcher Vicente Padilla from the dugout to the mound, to start the 12th inning. Padilla said he was stiff. He'd pitched two innings. He's a starting pitcher, accustomed to pitching six innings or more.
If you are Selig, you tell Brenly to tell Padilla he doesn't care if Padilla throws fastballs or cotton candy. He can roll it up there if he wants. But the game is tied and games don't end that way. Take the ball and pitch it.
Instead, Padilla took the ball and went home. They all did, game and fans be damned. Typical. Pardon me while I wipe baseball's spit from my face.
“Don't tell me it's an exhibition. If I play a charity soft ball game for nothing, not a dime, I go all out. That's the only way I know how to play,” Pete Rose said, in 1970. It was a very long time ago. Only baseball could celebrate itself with a work stop page.
Only baseball, which hasn't tripped over its arrogance enough yet, could stop its All Star Game because the players and managers didn't feel like playing any more. Maybe Tuesday night was a trial run for August or September, or whenever it might be the players decide their rights are in mortal peril and they must strike to preserve them.
“Take away the dollar amounts and we're just like any other union out there,” decided Boston's Nomar Garciaparra. Sure. Workers of the world, unite.
Pete Rose's collision with destiny occurred in overtime, too. In the bottom of the 12th inning. That's an inning later than the kids quit Tuesday night. “A couple aggressive ballplayers, doing their jobs” was how Ray Fosse viewed his crash with Rose. The ballplayers did their jobs Tuesday night, too. We saw how that turned out.
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: All-Stars could learn a lot from Rose
