Holmes: Pete Rose and the challenge of forgiveness

Carlos Holmes is the director of news services and the historian for Delaware State University, as well as a lifelong fan of Major League Baseball.

It was spring 1971. At age 13, I was ready to move up to the Senior Division of the first Dayton Little League, in the southwest Ohio city of the same name.

I was excited. I wasn’t a great player, lacking a strong throwing arm, decent bat-to-ball coordination and questionable catching ability. But I could run, and the Senior Division was the level in which base runners were permitted to take a lead off the base, as opposed to the younger divisions, in which a runner had to keep his foot on the base until the ball was hit into play.

It didn’t start well for me. During a tryout game, after working a walk, I took my first lead off of first base and promptly got picked off. Nevertheless, I was selected by a team. In a practice game before the regular season started, I once again drew a walk, determined that I would not be picked off and that I was going to steal second base.

I took off on the first pitch, and the catcher proceeded to throw the ball over the covering infielder and into center field. Immediately bouncing up from my slide, I took off for third base, and on my approach to the bag, I did something I had never tried before in the previous division — I went into a headfirst slide.

Miscalculating my dive into the dirt, I came to a clumsy stop about 6 feet from the base. Fortunately, the ball was still rattling around in center field, enabling me to crawl the rest of the way to third. Collective guffaws erupted from my new teammates in the dugout on that side of the field, and one of the players chortled, “Well, look at Pete Rose out there.”

The name stuck. Pete Rose was my nickname throughout the remainder of my three years in the Senior Division.

I began paying attention to Major League Baseball in 1969. Between my dad periodically taking me 60 miles south of Dayton to old Crosley Field to watch the Cincinnati Reds and my passion for collecting Topps baseball cards, I became an avid fan. My first professed favorite player was the Reds’ home run-hitting first baseman Lee May (no doubt chosen because his name was similar to the legendary Willie Mays).

However, upon being dubbed “Pete Rose” by my teammates, I began paying closer attention to him. Lee May was traded to the Houston Astros after the 1971 season, and Peter Edward Rose was promoted for good to my favorite player status.

I cannot say that following him made me a good player, but it made me a better one. His playing style taught me the virtue of hustling and doing my best in all aspects of the game; I developed a reputation as a base stealer, and I recall being thrown out once during those three years.

It was an exciting time to be a fan of the Big Red Machine, and Pete Rose was an essential part of the team — one of four future National Baseball Hall of Fame players (Tony Perez, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan being the others). I admired not only his batting skill but also his openness to change positions for the good of the team (second base, outfield, third base and later, with the Philadelphia Phillies, first base). As an African American, I was especially proud to learn how, shunned by the veteran White players in his early Reds years, he befriended and hung out with the Black and Latino players, such as Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson and Chico Ruiz.

Following him from the Reds to the Phillies, his brief stint with the Montreal Expos, his return to Cincinnati as a player-manager and his unrelenting march to pass Ty Cobb by amassing a record 4,256 base hits was a heady time for any Rose fan. His 24-year playing career included National League and World Series MVP titles (1973 and 1975, respectively), an NL-record 44-game hitting streak, three batting titles, 17 All-Star nods and more.

But, oh, how the mighty Charlie Hustle fell from seemingly immortally high baseball standing to the pit of ill repute. As the evidence that he bet on baseball reached mountainous proportions, like comedian Bill Cosby’s immoral misdeeds decades later, there was far too much smoke to deny the inferno that would ultimately incinerate his chances for the Baseball Hall of Fame and ban him from baseball for good.

For me, however, Pete Rose is like a black sheep of the family, one who was abjectly disappointing but nevertheless a loved member. For all his arrogance and lack of contriteness, he was who he was — an all-time great baseball player and a disgraced gambling addict.

And now, he is dead at age 83. But I had already forgiven him years ago. Others have done so, as well, but many have not the capacity to look beyond the major failing of his life. For me, as my imagination looks down at him in his casket, while I contemplate the lessons learned from his terrible misdeed of betting on baseball, I moreover choose to dwell on the thrill-laden career that fed my love for baseball more than any other, which effectively enables me to meet the challenge of forgiveness his story confronts us with.

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