anymore. But it looks like you are.”
To which Pete cackled, “Hah. This ain’t work! Loading boxcars, that’s work.”
Rose’s talk—which is, in some ways, the essence of the man—is an eternal spatter of language, a ragtime of quips, anecdotes, jokes and memories ever unfolding. Baseball, horse racing, Cincinnati, his wife, his son, a remembrance of running out of gasoline 50 years before, the Los Angeles Lakers, the idiosyncrasies of some small American town, dugouts, clubhouses, breasts, Mike Schmidt, Bud Selig, infield dirt. He has a great talent for humorous detail so that even in rendering one of his stock stories, and by this point in Pete’s life there are many, he projects the sense of newness. In banter, Rose has a bright face with bright things in it: a joker’s mouth and a rascal’s eyes.
For all the goings on, Pete does not ramble, but rather pauses at the end of an observation, takes a cue, and then is off again on a new verbal jaunt tethered loosely to the topic at hand, his salted words rendered in the same yip-and-yap fashion with which he left his mark upon ballplayer after ballplayer from the start of his baseball career to the end. The entire weekend in Cooperstown, indeed the entirety, more or less, of Rose’s public life, might be defined as one streaming, bouncing, never-ending, ever-entertaining, rarely filtered conversation—a conversation that Rose has been having here there and everywhere, in some form or another, with those around him and with the world at large, for as long as anyone can remember.
Chapter 5
----
Black and White and Red All Over
S OON THERE would be baseball again in Cincinnati. The frigid winter had given way to a warm March and now, sweet springtime, the date that Cincinnatians from West-wood to East End, from Sayler Park to Indian Hill, had long since circled on their calendars was nearly at hand: Opening Day, April 8, 1963, a Monday, the first game of the major league season, a tradition there since 1876. As the Reds’ yearbook of the previous season had crowed, “Many cities are famed for their particular celebrations—New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Inauguration in Washington, Philadel phia’s Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day, etc. But none is more universally accepted than Cincinnati’s Opening Day.” The yearbook’s cover was a design in three colors: red, white and blue.
Down in Florida, manager Fred Hutchinson, in his 11th year running a big league club, looked around him and said, just as the Reds prepared to come north, “This is the best team I’ve ever managed. Yes, even better than 1961.” Those ’61 Reds had won their first National League pennant in 21 years before losing in the World Series to the Yankees. So if Hutch thought this ’63 team was better, fans reasoned, there was only one way to go. The Vegas oddsmakers had the Yankees (and really, who else?) as the 1–3 favorite to win the American League and the Dodgers at 2–1 in the National League, but the Reds were right there at 4–1, and among the baseball writers they were a popular choice.
The newspapers ran diagrams of the newly finished parking lot at Crosley Field—room for 2,600 more cars—and ruminated, with sketches and analyses, about the traffic that would jam the streets on Opening Day. The city had put up 41 temporary new road signs to help guide folks around. A neighborhood group close to the ballpark, composed of folks living on Sherman, Liberty, Wade and Wilstach, petitioned the City Council to reroute the game-day buses that unloaded and later loaded scores of giddy passengers in front of their homes. For two years running, and this was something that was measured at the time, Crosley Field had led the majors in attendance per capita. Baseball fan per geographical inch was another way to look at it.
“I thought about Opening Day like it was the biggest start of the year, and that’s how I prepared,” recalled
To which Pete cackled, “Hah. This ain’t work! Loading boxcars, that’s work.”
Rose’s talk—which is, in some ways, the essence of the man—is an eternal spatter of language, a ragtime of quips, anecdotes, jokes and memories ever unfolding. Baseball, horse racing, Cincinnati, his wife, his son, a remembrance of running out of gasoline 50 years before, the Los Angeles Lakers, the idiosyncrasies of some small American town, dugouts, clubhouses, breasts, Mike Schmidt, Bud Selig, infield dirt. He has a great talent for humorous detail so that even in rendering one of his stock stories, and by this point in Pete’s life there are many, he projects the sense of newness. In banter, Rose has a bright face with bright things in it: a joker’s mouth and a rascal’s eyes.
For all the goings on, Pete does not ramble, but rather pauses at the end of an observation, takes a cue, and then is off again on a new verbal jaunt tethered loosely to the topic at hand, his salted words rendered in the same yip-and-yap fashion with which he left his mark upon ballplayer after ballplayer from the start of his baseball career to the end. The entire weekend in Cooperstown, indeed the entirety, more or less, of Rose’s public life, might be defined as one streaming, bouncing, never-ending, ever-entertaining, rarely filtered conversation—a conversation that Rose has been having here there and everywhere, in some form or another, with those around him and with the world at large, for as long as anyone can remember.
Chapter 5
----
Black and White and Red All Over
S OON THERE would be baseball again in Cincinnati. The frigid winter had given way to a warm March and now, sweet springtime, the date that Cincinnatians from West-wood to East End, from Sayler Park to Indian Hill, had long since circled on their calendars was nearly at hand: Opening Day, April 8, 1963, a Monday, the first game of the major league season, a tradition there since 1876. As the Reds’ yearbook of the previous season had crowed, “Many cities are famed for their particular celebrations—New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Inauguration in Washington, Philadel phia’s Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day, etc. But none is more universally accepted than Cincinnati’s Opening Day.” The yearbook’s cover was a design in three colors: red, white and blue.
Down in Florida, manager Fred Hutchinson, in his 11th year running a big league club, looked around him and said, just as the Reds prepared to come north, “This is the best team I’ve ever managed. Yes, even better than 1961.” Those ’61 Reds had won their first National League pennant in 21 years before losing in the World Series to the Yankees. So if Hutch thought this ’63 team was better, fans reasoned, there was only one way to go. The Vegas oddsmakers had the Yankees (and really, who else?) as the 1–3 favorite to win the American League and the Dodgers at 2–1 in the National League, but the Reds were right there at 4–1, and among the baseball writers they were a popular choice.
The newspapers ran diagrams of the newly finished parking lot at Crosley Field—room for 2,600 more cars—and ruminated, with sketches and analyses, about the traffic that would jam the streets on Opening Day. The city had put up 41 temporary new road signs to help guide folks around. A neighborhood group close to the ballpark, composed of folks living on Sherman, Liberty, Wade and Wilstach, petitioned the City Council to reroute the game-day buses that unloaded and later loaded scores of giddy passengers in front of their homes. For two years running, and this was something that was measured at the time, Crosley Field had led the majors in attendance per capita. Baseball fan per geographical inch was another way to look at it.
“I thought about Opening Day like it was the biggest start of the year, and that’s how I prepared,” recalled
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