AWKWARD ALL-STAR
Rose not exactly embraced
In 1999, the beleaguered, oft-criticized Major League Baseball All-Star Game had one of the greatest moments in its 82-year history.
Fenway Park, perhaps the game’s most hallowed stadium, hosted for the first time in 38 seasons. The event, the one day of the sports calendar the sport has all to itself, had something special planned.
MLB had announced its all-century team earlier that season, and many of the game’s most prominent players were on hand.
But the big star was the man most considered the greatest living baseball player, and the best hitter who ever lived: Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter.
Williams, 80 at the time and quite feeble, was carted out from the right field exit-way to roars from the Fenway faithful. In a game specifically constructed to honour its best, no one was more revered than the ornery Williams.
The most moving moment was when the current all-stars — alltimers like Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey Jr., Derek Jeter, Cal Ripken and Mark McGwire — surrounded Williams at the mound and, one by one, shook his hand. It was the ultimate tribute to the ultimate baseball player, and no one who was there will ever forget it.
This has since become an honorary obligation for baseball’s alltimers when the all-star game hits their city. In 2007, Willie Mays received the San Francisco tribute; in 2009, President Barack Obama was in St. Louis to bow to civic icon Stan Musial.
This year’s game, however, has a bit of a wrinkle: It’s going to honour someone who has been banned from the game for life and might be baseball’s most lasting pariah. Pete Rose is about to get the Ted Williams treatment.
The minute it was announced that Cincinnati would be hosting the all-star game at its Great American Ball Park, the question arose: How big a part would Rose play? Famously banned from base- ball for life by commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti back in 1989 ( just eight days before Giamatti, father of Paul, died of a heart attack) for gambling on baseball while he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds, Rose has been the ghost haunting the game for 25 years now.
He has become a cause celebre for a certain type of baseball fan, particularly in a PED age, who loved Rose as a player for his hustle and grit and who believes that Rose’s crimes were done more out of a desire to win than any sort of gambling addiction or disrespect of the game.
And a large number of those fans are in Cincinnati.
It has put Major League Baseball in a strange, uncomfortable spot.
On one hand, it doesn’t want Cincinnati to have to pretend its most famous, beloved player isn’t part of the city’s grand showcase.
On the other, Rose has a tendency to take over whatever event he’s at, and new commissioner Rob Manfred, who has come under extra pressure to reconsider Rose’s reinstatement to the game, doesn’t want this to become The Pete Rose Game.
Rose will be on the field before the game, honoured as part of this year’s MLB Franchise Four, run by MLB.com, in which fans vote on the four players who best represent the team. For Cincinnati, Rose is joined by Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and Barry Larkin.
Rose has said he hopes the game will be a springboard to potentially being allowed back into the sport, or, perhaps more urgently for the 74-year-old, into the Hall of Fame.
There was a time when some considered this a possibility under Manfred, who has hinted at being more open to Rose’s annual reinstatement application than predecessor Bud Selig.
That Fox Sports 1, a financial partner of MLB, hired Rose as an analyst this year was thought to crack open the door too; if he could show that he could behave himself — never an easy thing for a rogue like Rose — the MLB brass could be more sympathetic.
That all went out the window last month, when ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported that not only had Rose bet on baseball as a manager (which he had admitted), he had also done so as a player — and on Reds games to boot.
Rose had denied this fact for years, but, as John Dowd (the author of the Dowd report that got Rose banned in the first place) put it, “This does it. This closes the door.”
For those who believe Rose shouldn’t have been allowed back in the game in the first place, the report was a relief: The goodwill that would have been generated by a Rose appearance at the all-star game couldn’t sweep away that hard evidence.
But it won’t stop Rose from actually being there, and the Cincinnati fans screaming their lungs out for him. It’s going to lead to quite the odd scene. Baseball’s biggest event, its holiday to shine, being taken over by a man who was banned by baseball for its most heinous, unforgivable crime.
When Williams was honoured, everyone even slightly associated with baseball rushed to get their picture with him.
With Rose getting his one last moment to shine, one suspects there will be no commissioner, no luminaries, no public figures in sight.
He accepts one final ovation. But likely, he will do so alone.