Pete Rose
1941 - 2024
One of the greatest professional baseball players who ever lived passed away today at age 83.
 |
| June 26, 1991 - Municipal Stadium - West Palm Beach, FL |
Pete Rose is a controversial figure in the sport for several reasons that I'm not going to discuss, but he'll always be one of my favorite ballplayers and not just because of his incredible career, or the fact that he helped lead the Phillies to their first World Series Championship in franchise history. I met him just a few days before my 11th birthday at a minor league game between the West Palm Beach Expos and the Sarasota White Sox. He was in attendance to watch his son who was playing for the Sarasota at the time. This is not only a special memory for me because I got to meet one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, but because this was the first ballgame that I ever attended. You can't ask for a better memory than that.
My dad took a photo of us with my 110 camera. Unfortunately, there was something wrong with the lens and every picture on the roll came out blurry like this one, but that's me on the left in a Miami Heat shirt holding the program from the game, and the man to my right in the sunglasses is baseball's all-time hit king.
Mr. Rose was extremely nice when we met him. The red and white thing that I'm holding in my right hand in that photograph is this 5x7 card. He had a small stack of them that he had autographed ahead of time, and he was giving them to every kid who came up to him. There may have been some adults who got one too, but I'm pretty sure it was just something he did for the kids. I still have this card in a frame on my bookshelf to this day.
The fact that he is MLB's all-time hits leader (4,256) is the most well-known of his accomplishments, but it's far from his only line in the record book. When he retired after the 1986 season, he had the highest career fielding percentage for a right fielder (99.14%) and the highest National League career fielding percentage as a left fielder (99.07%). He still holds the career record for most at-bats (14,053), plate appearances (15,890), games played (3,562), and winning games played (1,972). He's the only player in baseball history to have played at least 500 games at five different positions (first base, second base, third base, left field, and right field). He has the most career singles (3,215), and the most runs (2,165), doubles (746), walks (1,566), and total bases (5,752) by a switch hitter. He also still holds the National League record for career runs (2,165), doubles (746), and games with five or more hits (10), and he has the longest consecutive-game hitting streak in the National League in the modern era (44). He won Rookie Of The Year in 1963, NL MVP in 1973, World Series MVP in 1975, and is a 17 time All-Star with three World Series championships, including the Phillies first championship in what was their 97th year in existence.
There will never be another Pete Rose.
