The public passion for Pete Rose leaves me dumbfounded. Not only did Rose commit the unpardonable sin of betting on baseball–at least in the judgment of then commissioner Bart Giamatti in 1989–he was not a very great player. It’s ludicrous to count him among the game’s immortals, even as the all-time hits leader. So Rose amassed 4,256 hits in his 24-year career, topping Ty Cobb’s 4,191 (4,189 by the count of the revision-minded Total Baseball); he did so by playing more games, batting more times, and making more outs than anyone else in baseball history. If he prided himself on any one statistic it was batting average, yet he barely finished his career over .300–his .303 ranks him well out of the top 100 on that all-time list. It’s as if someone suggested that Agatha Christie was a better mystery writer than Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett simply because she wrote dozens of books to their handfuls.
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Rose won the most valuable player award in 1973, the year he won the last of his three batting titles, but he never hit 20 homers, never drove in 100 runs, and walked 100 times in a season only once. Only once did he lead the league in on-base percentage–in the pitching-dominated year of 1968, when he walked only 56 times–and only once did he steal 20 bases. These are curious numbers for a player who spent much of his career as a leadoff man. Twice he won a Gold Glove as an outfielder, but that award is notorious for going to hitters who field their positions moderately well, and Rose was never considered a great fielder at any of the four positions he played: second base, third base, outfield, and first base. In his 1986 Historical Baseball Abstract, stats expert Bill James considered Rose the best multiposition player in history and ranked him the 22nd-best player of the century overall; but for “peak value” he was 97th, and James kissed him off with the label “least gifted great player ever.” His great strengths were consistency and determination, but even by those measures his worth was dubious. Total Baseball didn’t put Rose among the top 25 players from 1961 to 1992 (the Pittsburgh Pirates’ great-fielding second baseman Bill Mazeroski was 22nd, I might add, and the Cubs’ Ron Santo 15th), and his 20.0 career rating makes him, in Total Baseball’s eyes, the 269th best player in baseball history. It’s worth noting that from 1980 through his final year of 1986, when Rose was chasing Cobb and then having one last self-congratulatory glory tour around the league, he was considered a below-average first baseman five of those seven seasons. For the last two-plus of those years he was also the Cincinnati Reds’ manager, and wrote his name into the lineup with the knowledge that most days he was giving up an advantage at that position to the opponent.
Baseball got what it deserved when Rose made the team and received a roaring ovation at the presentation, just as Rose got what he deserved when NBC on-field reporter Jim Gray turned the occasion into an opportunity to grill Rose on the betting-on-baseball charges that ended his career in the game ten years ago. Gray got what he deserved, too, as public sentiment immediately turned against him.
That was the truly unfortunate thing about the Rose-Gray situation, that it upstaged the World Series–not that this wasn’t a series worth upstaging. The Atlanta Braves were greatly overrated and came into the series with a number of holes in their team that the New York Yankees exploited. For all the high praise Atlanta general manager John Schuerholz has earned over the years, he failed to recognize two key trends of the 90s: the increasing importance of the bull pen and of the leadoff man, especially in postseason play. A team with a starting staff like the Braves’ can win 100 games year in, year out, but in the playoffs a team with a good bull pen not only has more arms ready to meet any contingency but also has better-rested starters. Look at the way the high-kicking, deep-breathing, sidearm-slinging Orlando Hernandez has performed in the playoffs the last two years. He’s won five of six starts, and he shut down the Braves in the series opener aside from a home run by Chipper Jones, an advantage the Yankees eventually overcame when they scored four in the eighth inning off a weary Greg Maddux and an all-too-human John Rocker. Likewise, Schuerholz went into the season knowing he didn’t have a decent leadoff man and did nothing to address the deficiency, leaving woeful Gerald Williams at the top of the order in the series. No matter how good a player Jones is, the Braves didn’t gain full advantage of him because they didn’t put enough players on base in front of him. By contrast, Chuck Knoblauch and the great Derek Jeter (an early contender for the next all-century team) always seemed to be on base for the heart of the New York order. In a short series, a team with a high on-base percentage usually overcomes a less consistent team with more power.
