The seamed and arid face, a slowly eroding riverbed, is as wide open as a gap-toothed grin.
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The burly body remains respectably taut, a gunnysack full of cantaloupes and cannonballs. The kneesprung crouch has lost barely a trace of temper. The brush-cut hair that blew to bangs and billowed to bouffant has been tamed and dyed. Rose is baseball.Ĭoiled to the left of home plate, he has scarcely stirred from the position he staked nearly 23 major league seasons, almost 4,192 hits, ago. By the numbers and beyond them, he is what he does. It took Pete Rose two decades and more, just a blink and a nod on the eternal baseball schedule, but he has come to both a paramount moment in his game and a place of moment in any enterprise. He has reached back into it to play with Cobb. This beguiling summer, the most single-minded baseball player since Ty Cobb has done better than play with time. And the spectators know that the struggle represents no less than a simple love of life. But for a 44-year-old ballplayer, the end is more than just perceivable. In an ordinary profession, the 40s may be a disquieting, though far from a disqualifying age. He is 44 years old but seems both younger and older, sort of timeless too, and he is still thriving at the major league level.
In a cover story on Rose that August, TIME explained why the veteran star’s chase meant so much to fans: Later, in reflecting on the achievement, Rose claimed to have seen Cobb’s ghost up in the stands. 11, 1985-in the first inning of the Cincinnati Reds win over the San Diego Padres, Pete Rose whacked his 4,192nd career hit, surpassing Ty Cobb’s career record.Īs TIME noted, the new mark was set 57 years to the day after Cobb’s final major-league at bat (although there has since been debate over whether Cobb’s record was slightly inflated). The 1985 baseball season was nearing its end when the moment fans had been waiting for finally happened.
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