Little Stories: Pete Rose, Witnessing a Record, and Me
How a very flawed big league ballplayer taught me an important life lesson.
Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption.
Pete Rose died yesterday. I grew up watching him play, long before the gambling scandals and other misbehavior that would taint his legacy. And for a while in 1978, I was particularly obsessed with him.
That was the year Rose had a very long hitting streak. It began on June 14th, and by the All-Star break it had reached 25 games. Joe DiMaggio’s MLB record of 56 games was still a long way off, but the National League record — 37 games, set by Tommy Holmes in 1945 — was within reach. People on the radio and TV started saying that if Rose continued to play every day, he’d be on pace to break Holmes’s record when his team, the Cincinnati Reds, came to New York in late July to play the Mets — my favorite team.
It occurred to me that I’d never seen anyone set any kind of record before, which suddenly seemed like a huge life deficiency that needed to be addressed. I talked to my father about it, and he agreed that if Rose’s hitting streak was still intact when the Reds came to town, we’d go to the potential record-breaking game on July 25th.
Of course, this plan was dependent on Rose continuing to get at least one base hit each game. I quickly became the world’s biggest Pete Rose fan, rooting for him to keep the streak alive. There were a few close calls (Game 32 was particularly dicey, as he had to resort to dropping down a bunt single with two outs in the ninth inning), but Rose persevered and tied Holmes’s National League record on July 24th, leaving him poised to break the record on July 25th against the Mets. My father, true to his word, drove us out to Queens that night.