This Rose is a rose who’s served his time

By Billy Johnson

Saturday, April 4, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose sat in the dugout along the first-base line in Louisville’s Cardinal Stadium before one of the last preseason games of the 1989 Major League Baseball season. He watched his club take batting practice.

I walked behind the batting cage, down the dugout steps and sat to his left. I had to ask him if he would do local media interviews about the fledgling dust-up about some betting-on-baseball allegations.

I had met him earlier in the day, and so he knew I had some official capacity with the AAA Louisville Redbirds. He also probably picked up that I was an awkward early 20-something kid with the street smarts of toddler.

Right off, Rose asked where he needed to be for the interviews.

He knew why I was there, and he relieved me from making any rookie mistakes. I sort of apologized for being the messenger, as I recall. While I don’t remember his reply, I know it wasn’t what I had expected.

A controversy, after all, was blowing up around him and this was one of the first stops for what would become the circus. By agreeing to do the interviews and saving me from having to tell the reporters they would have to go away empty-handed, Rose saw that I wasn’t trampled by the elephants.

He was a superstar and what made this encounter memorable was that this awkward kid, me, grew up 90 miles from Cincinnati. The Big Red Machine caused my 10-year-old self to pick up a newspaper every day and listen to the play-by-play on the radio most summer nights.

Kids throughout the region adopted Rose’s batting crouch throughout backyards around the neighborhood to blast tennis balls into neighbors’ above-ground pools. We couldn’t afford replica jerseys back then, but we could have Pete Rose’s hitting crouch.

I had neither; I was as athletic as a whooping crane. I once tried the Joe Morgan batting stance that featured the chicken wing elbow flap. I’m pretty sure I tore a labrum.

As a kid in 1977, on the night Elvis Presley died, I watched Rose play third base from one of the highest rows somewhere behind the left field foul pole at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. And on this day in 1989, I was sitting next to him on the "Green Mile" and I was Tom Hanks — delivering him someplace where a process of shame laid in wait. Of course, it really wasn’t like that at all. But when one is young and innocent, well, it feels like that.

Recently, more than a quarter of century later, I walked into The Blind Pig here in Las Vegas for a lunch and stumbled across Pete Rose. The seat to his left was occupied this time, but Rose still wore a Cincinnati Reds cap.

Last month, Rose made a formal request to Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred to lift his lifetime ban from MLB.

Since that day in 1989 our paths have crossed in weird, recurring ways. Glancing shots really — nothing that would imply that we know each other. We don’t, but we would have some things we could talk about.

During 26 years in sports, I have known people who played baseball and hockey. I have met other people’s heroes and idols. Nearly all of them seem to be really fine people. But I have also dealt with the less gracious.

I have seen the pill poppers and steroid takers. There have been the cheaters and misogynists. There have been racial undertones in clubhouses. I have written the occasional check to those who have abused and manipulated a workman’s compensation system in ways that only hurt our games, their fellow players and fans.

There were the lazy and the wasted talent. There have been the unaccountable. The selfish have racked up personal statistics over team wins. And I have heard secondhand stories about a few of our sports heroes and idols that on the way to someone’s adoration and hall of fame would make Lance Armstrong blush.

Well, perhaps not Armstrong.

But I give that sampling — which in no way should be taken to represent the norm in sports — only to write this: As Alex Rodriguez returns to the diamond for the New York Yankees after a one-year suspension for cheating, I assure you I will only remember him as a cheater. And there are others, enough in fact that this whole Pete Rose expulsion now seems almost petty and personal and from a time when the Hatfields and McCoys had to pack muskets.

I still don’t remember Pete Rose because of the rules he broke, and my first thought upon hearing his name isn’t even a personal encounter as he himself was facing a musket firing squad in 1989.

I only remember Pete Rose for the way he played. Head first, helmet flying. Always hitting. Always sprinting. Always playing. He was dubbed Charlie Hustle for a reason. With a little sense and a 20,000-foot view from Major League Baseball, I hope to remember the day Rose was reinstated to Major League Baseball.

Manfred suggests he is going to review the Dowd Report and what not, which is all fine and dandy if it helps him check a box of due diligence. But a punishment has been handed down and served, and even our worst get a chance at parole.

Besides, after 26 years in exile and a life and career in baseball lost, Pete Rose still wears the cap — just like a real ball player would.

Billy Johnson is a longtime Las Vegas resident who has been contributing commentary to lasvegassun.com since 2011. The former president of the Las Vegas Wranglers hockey team, Johnson now is the director of the University Medical Center Foundation.