When I first started watching baseball, Pete Rose was the biggest name in the sport, so popular that fans of opposing teams loved him, so admired among sportswriters that they couldn’t constrain their prose, so likeable that he did ads for Jockey underwear and Aqua Velva and Swanson’s Hungry Man Dinners and Zenith televisions.
The great Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray dedicated an entire chapter in his autobiography, published in 1993, to Rose. “He was what the game meant to be — or how we perceived it be,” Murray wrote. “Rose was a ballplayer right off the Saturday Evening Post cover. Norman Rockwell invented him. Pete was as uncomplicated as a summer day, as instinctive as a hound dog. He was born to hunt, or, in his case,…
