Last Goodbye to Glory

By Tom Callahan

Pete Rose retired from playing baseball on Aug. 17, 1986, but neglected to acknowledge the fact to anyone, including himself, for 16 months. Still the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, entitled to go on sporting his old uniform, Rose skipped the valedictory. At the owners' meetings a few weeks ago, as casually as can be, he let the information drop: "I just won't be running, throwing or hitting anymore."

Along with Rose, Tom Seaver, Phil Niekro and maybe Reggie Jackson are approaching this New Year's Day with that same thought. "Usually," says Niekro, 48, meaning every year of the past 24, "my blood starts flowing as soon as the holidays are over. I don't know how I'm going to feel a month from now, or when the summer starts to get hot, or when the World Series comes around. I wonder what it's going to be like, never again seeing that look in the batter's eye with the bases loaded."

Seaver took a stab at holding on last summer by playing in the minors, and lately Jackson has been waffling on his announced plans to leave. They are 43 and 41 years old, respectively. "The compulsion to play this game is something," Niekro says. "I don't know how many letters I've got over the years, how many strangers have dropped by my hotel, how many fathers have offered to pay me money to teach their boys the knuckleball. 'Can you at least show me how to grip it?' they say. But I'd have to take them all out singly to a little patch of ground in the backyard, back to the coal-mining fields in Ohio." By way of a video, he is contemplating doing just that.

Imagining Rose in a perennially clean uniform is more than a little strange. Though he is approaching 47, he denies having any pangs about quitting. "Managing has been so involving, I feel like I'm almost playing," he says. "Anyway, it wouldn't be fair for me to say I'm going to miss hitting the ball, because I got to hit it more than anybody." Just as Henry Aaron's 755 home runs seem somehow more difficult to keep count of than Babe Ruth's 714, Rose's 4,256 hits will take a while displacing Ty Cobb's 4,191 as a mystical number in the record books. "Maybe if I was second in hits, games, at bats, doubles, runs scored, five-hit games, I'd feel differently," Rose says. "I just wish I'd made it to 2,000 winning games. I'm 28 short."

Numbers have always consoled him. In his final appearance in the batter's box, at twilight in Cincinnati, Rose struck out on three fastballs from Goose Gossage ("I had two strikes on me before I could get the doughnut off the bat"). He also struck out in his second-to-last try. But in the final three games that Rose started, he was 8 for 13, including his tenth 5-for-5 game, one of 13 records he set that day alone. "People wonder why I didn't pinch- hit myself last season for a ceremonial goodbye, but a manager can't play a guy unless that particular guy's supposed to be playing that particular game, that particular inning, that particular situation. Besides, if all the people who supported me for 25 seasons came to the park one last time, it would have to be Yellowstone Park."

If Pete Rose has a regret, it is that his second son will not remember him as a player. "Ty" Rose recently observed his third birthday.