Rose finally having a ‘hall’ of a time

Pete Rose joked about his hair and his age. He reminisced about all those wins with the Big Red Machine.

There was one thing, however, the hits king was determined not to do when he was inducted into the Reds’ Hall of Fame on Saturday.

“I’ve already cried on the field one time,” Rose said, referring to the time he got his record-setting 4,192nd hit. “That’s enough.”

The 75-year-old Rose kept his composure during a pregame ceremony honoring him as the 86th player to go into the team’s hall. Many of his former Big Red Machine teammates — Hall of Famers Johnny Bench and Tony Perez among them — were on hand to join in the humor and the honor.

“He’s the most dissatisfied person I’ve ever known,” Bench said. “Every day he was unhappy until he got four hits. He was never, ever happy with three hits. He wanted four.

“The greatness of this man was that he was never satisfied.”

Rose set baseball’s hits record at Riverfront Stadium in 1985 against the Padres, who also were the Reds’ opponent Saturday. When he reached first base on his single, he wound up crying during a nine-minute ovation from the fans. As he was introduced at Great American Ball Park, fans chanted, “Pete! Pete!” and gave him a one-minute ovation.

When he got to the podium, Rose used a towel to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He noted that he was allotted only five minutes to talk when he could spend days recounting what the fans meant to him.

“I was hitting for you,” Rose said. “I was trying to score runs for you.”

The start of Saturday’s game was delayed six minutes because the ceremony went long. LOS ANGELES Hernandez 2b Howell p Turner 3b Seager ss Thompson cf Gonzalez 1b Puig rf Van Slyke lf c-Pederson ph Ellis c Maeda p Blanton p Baez p b-Kendrick 2b TOTALS PITTSBURGH 34 1 8 1 .189 .000 .245 .297 .239 .263 .254 .200 .238 .206 .125 — — .242