Until the Phillies landed Pete Rose in free agency, I didn't know it was possible to love someone I hated.
I hated Pete Rose my first 8 years watching baseball. I kind of admired how insanely competitive he was, dating back to seeing him barrel over Ray Fosse in an all-star game and effectively ruin a guy's career for no good reason, but I couldn't stand the guy: his sprints to first on a walk, his little boy's haircut, his aggressive crowding of the plate, the headfirst slide... He was the heel on an otherwise fairly admirable dynasty known as the Big Red Machine.
The Phillies and us fans were desperate after a 3-year run of hard-earned excellence that kept getting snuffed out in the postseason, first by the Reds then the pretty-boy Dodgers with their goombah turncoat Philly-area born manager Tom Lasorda. As Rose went on his free agency tour, milking it for all he could - even doing a Twitter-worthy troll move of being photographed wearing the hat of about 6 suitors, we were willing to sell out and make this annoying guy one of our own.
Until the Phillies landed Pete Rose in free agency, I didn't know it was possible to love someone I hated. He warmed me up for the Phillies' acquisition of Lenny Dykstra, years later. By the time Bryce Harper was on the market, I was fully accepting of the love-hate dynamic that fans of certain kinds of rom-coms eat up. (My hatred of Jonathan Papelbon. I want on the record, never dissipated.)
Rose became a Phillie. Suddenly, all the things I hated about him I loved. I even started crouching over the plate. I loved how he validated all the sparkplug/gnat tendencies of Larry Bowa. I loved how he took the leadership-star pressure off Mike Schmidt. I loved how he got under other teams' and their fanbases' collective skin. He was our heel. He was our guy who was willing to end another player's career to give our team a chance to finally win a World Series. And we did.
Soon enough, he was out of Philadelphia and picking up with his badwill tour of major league cities. He would become the Hit King, then all the gambling accusations came out.
To this day, such a large part of me wants everyone to say, "F--- it!" and have him carted into Cooperstown. He was a baseball savant. A true warrior on the field. Yeah, I get it: no one's perfect and he was of his time, blah, blah, blah. But you know what? Plenty of other people were of their time at that time. There were women trying to raise families on their own who knew his type too well. There were men who screwed up and found it within themselves to have some remorse. All it would have taken was a 12-minute interview with Barbara Walters, sitting between 2 ferns and shot through a fuzzy lens. "I'm so sorry for how I disgraced the game and myself." [Voice cracks. Pete wipes a single tear.] That's it. He serves a 1-year suspension and is eventually carted into Cooperstown.
It would have been nice to have a guy who epitomized certain strange and powerful competitive qualities inducted into his sport's Hall of Fame. Sure, he would have disgraced himself another dozen times over, but he could have gotten in there. Oh well, it's just a museum. On baseball terms alone, I will cherish the guy's career. As a human, nothing doing.
It's weird, but I wish similarly disturbed and disgraced Philadelphia sports columnist Bill Conlin could come back from the dead to write Pete's obituary.
