Great article, can't wait to see the reception on Saturday.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5553785
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5553785
I never saw a man enjoy his work more than Pete Rose. He played every game like he'd been let out of solitary confinement for the day. He didn't read books, never went to college and was unfit for cocktail parties. He was 99-44/100 percent baseball, from that butcher-block head to his endlessly tapping feet.
He would sprint to first on walks, slide face-first into second and slam baseballs into the AstroTurf on third outs.
He could compute his average on the way to first. He knew which were strike umps, ball umps, high umps, low umps, hitters' umps and pitchers' umps. Rose even knew which ground crews were bunt-friendly.
"He thinks about baseball day and night," Sparky Anderson once said of him. "He can't sit five minutes in a chair and talk to you about something else. He'll get up. Baseball is all he thinks about. He'll never leave the game."
Instead, the game left him. Banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling on it, there was never a crueler punishment devised for one person. It was like taking beer from Norm or mirrors from Demi Moore.
Which makes this Saturday night in Cincinnati that much more delicious for him.
Rose has been granted one evening's pardon by MLB commissioner Bud Selig to re-create base knock No. 4192, the one that made him the undisputed hit king. It will be 25 years to the day at Great American Ball Park. And it will be the first time he's stepped foot on a Reds infield in 21 years, a kind of solitary confinement in itself....(continued in link)
He would sprint to first on walks, slide face-first into second and slam baseballs into the AstroTurf on third outs.
He could compute his average on the way to first. He knew which were strike umps, ball umps, high umps, low umps, hitters' umps and pitchers' umps. Rose even knew which ground crews were bunt-friendly.
"He thinks about baseball day and night," Sparky Anderson once said of him. "He can't sit five minutes in a chair and talk to you about something else. He'll get up. Baseball is all he thinks about. He'll never leave the game."
Instead, the game left him. Banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling on it, there was never a crueler punishment devised for one person. It was like taking beer from Norm or mirrors from Demi Moore.
Which makes this Saturday night in Cincinnati that much more delicious for him.
Rose has been granted one evening's pardon by MLB commissioner Bud Selig to re-create base knock No. 4192, the one that made him the undisputed hit king. It will be 25 years to the day at Great American Ball Park. And it will be the first time he's stepped foot on a Reds infield in 21 years, a kind of solitary confinement in itself....(continued in link)
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