Recalling Pete Rose's last MLB at bat (2024)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hi friends. I’m out in Minnesota at the SABR National Convention - the Society of American Baseball Research. Fun! Talking baseball, which I did all day and some of the night. Since I have a new baseball book due out on March 4 called “Diamond Duels” (Cover shown below; you can pre-order!!) the SABR convention seemed to be a wonderful place to chat about the book as well as my prior baseball book - “Last Time Out.” That book is available now on Amazon or if you live around Tallahassee, it’s in several book stores - Midtown Reader, Barnes & Noble, Hearth and Soul, Books A Million and My Favorite Books.

Since Pete Rose’s name still seems to come up - there’s a series about him on HBO right now - and sitting around the tables here at the SABR meeting, we’re still talking and debating about Rose, baseball’s all-time hit leader and whether or not he belongs in Cooperstown, in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Some say yes, some say no.

Since we’re only 10 days from the 38th anniversary of Rose’s final appearance in a major-league box score as a player, this seemed to be an appropriate time to offer a chapter from my 2022 baseball book “Last Time Out.” My updated edition (cover shown below) tracks the final major-league appearances of 43 all-time greats, from Babe Ruth to Cal Ripken, Mickey Mantle to Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter to David Ortiz, Roger Clemens to Nolan Ryan and closes with my son, John’s first major-league game. It was a fun way to wrap up the book.

So here’s the Pete Rose chapter from “Last Time Out.” Rose’s final plate appearance occurred on August 17, 1986 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, pinch-hitting in the bottom of the ninth against Hall of Fame reliever Rich “Goose” Gossage. It didn’t go well.

He got up from his spot in the dugout and went to the bat rack in the bottom of the ninth. Nobody said a word. Here it was, mid-August, and Pete Rose’s fourth-place Cincinnati Reds were trailing the San Diego Padres, the worst team in the National League, 9–5. It didn’t look as if things were going to improve any time soon. Padres reliever Rich “Goose” Gossage was in his second inning of relief and still throwing aspirin tablets.

Looking down the dugout, it was hard to find any volunteers. Earlier in the game, Rose, in his second year as player-manager, had already made some moves. He’d already sent Tony Pérez and John Milner up as pinch-hitters. He was running out of choices. With the top of the order coming up here in the ninth, he needed somebody else to get on base. Why not him? Nobody else was offering.

The dog days of August were setting in, and Rose’s Reds seemed to be going nowhere. They were already 10 1/2 games behind Houston, five games under .500. Following Rose’s encouraging second-place finish last year—he took over the team after being dealt from Montreal in midseason—many thought this year’s club would win it all. But the year was a bust. Rose was on the disabled list when the year began.

The Reds couldn’t sort out their pitching, dropped 19 of their first 25 games, and for months, couldn’t seem to get rolling. Worse, Rose, now 45 years old, couldn’t step in and help. He’d played in just 72 of the team’s first 116 games and seemed relegated to pinch-hitting and playing the occasional day game after a night game. At the start of the month, Rose’s skidding average had bottomed out at a miserable .204.

Had he not been the manager, there’s no doubt he would have been shamed into retirement. This was not the way a Hall of Famer ought to go out.

Yet Rose had one surprise left. One marvelous Monday night, Rose turned back the clock for the last time. He found his stroke and went 5-for-5 (including the final extra-base hit of his career, his 746th double), off three different San Francisco Giants pitchers—Mike LaCoss, Mark Davis, and Frank Williams. While Rose’s five hits mattered little in a 13–4 San Francisco win, how could you not write about Pete Rose?

Author Roger Kahn, at work on a book on Rose, was there to document the scene. It was like feeding drugged canaries to a manic cat. A sportswriter asked Rose if he knew how many five-hit games he’d had.

“That would be 10,” Rose said. What about the National League record, someone else asked? “I got it now, if I’m not mistaken,” Rose said. “The old record was nine. Belonged to Max Carey.” “And the major-league record?” came a third voice. “Again, if I’m not mistaken,” Rose said, “that would be Cobb. You guys remember Cobb. Supposed to have been a mean guy, but he got a lot of hits.”

A reporter asked what this achievement meant to him. Rose smiled. “A slightly larger stone on my grave,” he said. It was his first five-hit game since April 28, four years earlier. It raised his average to a grand .218. The Reds were still 10 games out.

Fueled by his big night, Rose kept himself close to the bat rack for what would be his final active week. Tuesday night, Rose sent himself up as a pinch-hitter against the Giants’ Scott Garrelts in a 2–1 loss and grounded out. He did the same thing the next night in an 8–6 win. Yet as he sat in his office, making out his lineup every night, it was beginning to be hard to know when to play and when to sit. When does a manager bench himself?

Both Joe Torre (with the Mets) and Frank Robinson (with the Indians) took a brief shot at playing and managing at the same time. But neither one lasted many games. As a manager, there were too many distractions. And Rose found he was sensitive to criticism. He knew that not everybody recognized all that went into his job, but handling the second-guess, that was a pitch he wasn’t ready to foul off.

He explained as much to a visiting writer over batting practice one afternoon, after receiving a particularly nasty letter from a fan. “Guy’s writing that I should have brought in Ron Robinson to replace Ted Power,” he said, “Well, I didn’t have Ron Robinson to bring in. He couldn’t pitch but the guy writing it 1,200 miles away doesn’t know that.

“Same as the people who wrote that I put Ty Cobb’s record ahead of the team last year. I play in only 119 games, but I’m second in the league in walks. I don’t start myself against left-handers and I hit .354 against them. And I’m putting myself ahead of the Cincinnati Reds? I don’t let that stuff annoy me but, man, I don’t understand it.”

As this final week finished, Rose collected what would be the final hit of his career. Facing the Giants’ Kelly Downs and reliever Greg Minton, he batted second, played first base, and had three hits as John Denny threw a three-hit shutout against the Giants. Rose even drove in the game-winning run with a fifth-inning single.

By the weekend, something changed in the clubhouse and in Rose’s mind. His old pal Tony Pérez, back with the Reds, had already announced he’d retire at the end of the season. He wanted to play first. Rose also had promising Nick Esasky, a strong right-handed power hitter, in the dugout too.

With just 50 games to play, Rose knew he had to do something to get the Reds’ attack rolling. In Friday’s twi-night doubleheader vs. the Padres, Rose did pinch-hit and make an out in the first game, a 7–2 win, then played first base against his old pal Eric Show, the Padres pitcher who had surrendered Rose’s 4,192nd hit to surpass Cobb the previous summer, and went 0-for-4.

He played on Saturday against Ed Whitson and Lance McCullers in a 4–1 Reds win. But his 0-for-4 dropped his seasonal average to .219 and his career average to .303. The guy who’d won four National League batting titles, three of them with averages over .330, well, that guy wasn’t stepping into batter’s boxes these days.

With another out or three, he’d be below .300 for his career, just like Mickey Mantle. He’d been at this for so long now. There were so many other things to deal with as a manager. And distractions away from the field too. After all this time in fame’s fast lane, Pete Rose wasn’t about to stop taking chances.

But the batting average? That was history. You didn’t screw with that. There were other things tugging at Rose now, not just age. The fans could sense it, perhaps, but still hoped their hero would come through. They didn’t realize the gambling fever was taking over.

Rose, like a lot of other baseball people from Rogers Hornsby all the way to Don Zimmer, loved to spend every spare moment at the track. It wasn’t hard to figure why. They liked the action, the excitement, anything that got the adrenaline going. But there were rumblings that this wasn’t just gambling there. It wasn’t only wagers on college football and basketball. Or the NFL.

If the talk was right, this was more serious. There was talk that Rose was betting on his own sport, baseball. There would be talk that when the Riverfront Stadium out of town scoreboard was out of action for a couple months, Rose had a pal in the stands keeping tabs on all the other games Pete had supposedly bet on.

Supposedly, the two exchanged signals throughout the game so Pete could keep tabs on his bets. Gambling on baseball is a sore subject in Cincinnati. It was the underdog Redlegs who were the beneficiaries of the 1919 World Series title supposedly thrown by the Chicago “Black Sox,” and the town has understandably been sensitive on the subject ever since.

But if there were any questions about Pete’s off-the-field behavior when he played for the Reds or when he came back to manage, nobody said a word about it. He was a folk hero in Cincinnati. When Rose let it be known he wanted out of Montreal in 1984, Cincinnati president Bob Howsam got a call from Rose’s agent Reuven Katz and the two talked about Rose becoming manager.

There were problems. One was Rose’s $500,000 salary, which was more than the Reds could afford, Howsam said. The other was Howsam didn’t think Rose could hit anymore. Rose, never one to back down from a challenge, knew what he wanted to have happen.
Like he explained to writer Roger Kahn some time later, Rose knew how to get things his way. “There aren’t many things I back away from,” he said. “If they wouldn’t let me play back home in Cincinnati, then I was damned if I was going to manage. I’d hang in at Montreal and take my chances, as a free agent, it looked like, the following year.

“But I wanted to come home to be with the Reds when they won a pennant. I wanted to come home like a kid who forgot his school lunch somewhere and is standing in the yard smelling his mother’s cooking through a window. . . .”

There was another problem. The Major League Players Union has an across-the-b board rule that no player’s salary may be reduced more than 20 percent at one time. Howsam was offering Rose $225,000, less than half his salary in Montreal. But Rose really wanted to come home. He applied to the union for a dispensation and they agreed.

The next day, Rose was in uniform and in his very first at-bat against the Phillies’ Dick Ruthven, ripped a single to center field. When the ball was misplayed, Rose came around second and flew into third with a wonderful belly whomping, headfirst slide. Yesssssireeeee. Pete Rose was back. That was two years earlier.

A lot can happen in two years. Rose looked around at the middling crowd of 27,175. There was no huge reaction from the crowd when he was announced. He’d stayed long enough to be overlooked. Rose walked up to the plate, took his familiar crouch in the left-hand batter’s box against Gossage, and got ready for his 14,053rd and final major league at-bat. Zing. . . . Gossage’s fastball blistered past Rose’s feeble swing. Home plate umpire Ed Montague signaled strike one. Gotta be quicker, he thought. Damn. Quicker. Gossage wound and with that wild, tottering delivery, fired again. Zing. . . . Rose swung through another fastball. Goose was bringing it.

Rose stepped out of the batter’s box. I’m not going to catch up with that, he thought. Nobody had gotten a hit off Gossage yet. Or a walk. Didn’t look like anybody would. Rose peered out at the mound in that crouch, his chin tucked behind his right shoulder, trying to pick the ball up out of Gossage’s windmill motion. He saw Gossage rock and let the ball go.

There was no way, just no way to get a bat on it. He swung and missed and the ball popped into catcher Bruce Bochy’s glove. He never batted again.

A week later, the Reds rolled into Chicago and Tribune columnist Bob Verdi asked him why he wasn’t playing. “Want to get Esasky in there,” Rose said. “My decision to retire or not depends on how I finish up and how we finish up. There’s no hurry. I don’t want to make it before the season ends so I can have a night in Riverfront. I’ve had enough hullabaloo in my career.”

So there would be no Pete Rose Farewell Tour? “If I knew that was going to happen to me, I would have done that,” Rose told Kahn. “But I didn’t know and I had my philosophy. You see, play, or manage, I was going to the ballpark every day. I was putting my uniform on. It was not like I was going to be away from it.”

Besides, as we would find out later, Rose had many other problems at the time. Concentrating on managing and hitting and keeping up with all the off-the-field nonsense was too much.

Years later, Rose explained his sudden benching to author Roger Kahn this way. “My buddy Tony Perez had shared first base with me. Tony was in his last year. He had announced his retirement. He was a couple of home runs behind Orlando Cepeda as the most productive home run hitter of all the Latin players. “He did end up tying that record,” Rose said. “As a matter of fact, in the last week of the season Tony played and he was player of the week in the National League. I let him play the whole month of September because he was swinging the bat good and I wanted him to get the record.”

But Rose’s term as manager was short-lived. The off-the-field stuff escalated to the point where it became scandalous. A Sports Illustrated story blew it wide open. Three years and one week later, he was sent away from the game for good.

Four months after it was alleged that Rose had been betting on baseball (among other things), then-commissioner Bart Giamatti ended a long investigation with Rose signing an agreement that would permit him to step away without admitting to gambling. Then Giamatti made an announcement.

“The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode,” Giamatti said. “One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. . . .”

In the press conference afterward, Rose felt double-crossed. Giamatti and he had agreed on a deal, that the commissioner’s office wouldn’t say that Pete Rose bet on baseball and that Rose himself would leave quietly. Yet when a reporter asked Giamatti if he believed that Rose bet on baseball, the commissioner said he believed Rose had.

Nine days later, Giamatti was dead of a heart attack. Rose stuck to the statements he made after the lifetime ban—namely, that he never bet on baseball. As the ban pushed on, Rose, baseball’s all-time hit leader, could see his chances for Hall of Fame induction vanishing. A player remains on the Baseball Writers Association ballot for 20 years. Since Rose was confident that many of the writers were in favor of him being elected to the Hall, if he could get himself off the permanently ineligible list and on their ballot, they might vote him in.

If the writers didn’t put him in, it’d be up to the Veterans Committee to select him and Rose wasn’t sure how that would go. Many of those players are on record as being against Rose’s induction. Some have even threatened to boycott future induction ceremonies if he’s elected. So Rose found someone to float the word confession to the commissioner’s office: his old teammate, Joe Morgan.

Back in November of 2002, he was summoned to a meeting with then-commissioner Bud Selig in Milwaukee. Selig asked Rose the question he finally understood he had to answer.

As recounted in Rose’s 2004 book My Prison without Bars and excerpted in Sports Illustrated’s January 12, 2004 issue, the meeting went like this: “Mr. Selig looked at me and said, ‘I want to know one thing. Did you bet on baseball?’” “Yes,” Rose said. “I did bet on baseball.” “How often?” Selig asked. “Four or five times a week,” Rose replied. “But I never bet against my own team and I never made any bets from the clubhouse.” “Why?” Selig asked. “I didn’t think I’d get caught,” Rose said.

—

That was the chapter. And, well, as we know now, Pete did get caught. And while he hasn’t exactly been honest about everything he did, there are those die-hard Rose fans who still think what he did on the field should make him a cinch for the Hall of Fame. Others know he bet on baseball (actually lost money) and there can be no forgiveness for that.

Like Shoeless Joe Jackson, another peerless player kept out of the Hall by his off-the-field behavior (taking part in the 1919 fix), Pete Rose will continue to be talked about, even all these years since he last swung a bat. It is a legacy, for sure. Not the one he was hoping for.

Here’s the new baseball book, that’ll be out in March

Here’s “Last Time Out” - available now on Amazon. Thanks, everyone!