Baseball: A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose

To the annoyance of a great many and the appreciation of a great many more, baseball takes some time to play. No specified amount of time, like 30 sec. in the huddle or 24 sec. to shoot, but a good deal of time, a suspension of time, almost an absence of time. Last week's interruption, blessedly brief, was not a time-out but a time-in. The labor leaders were starting a clock in a timeless place. One baseball season is a novel that develops into a chapter that dissolves into a sentence and ends up a phrase. A career can be that way too. Even an era. But anyway, a season is the minimum span of any meaningful attention to baseball.

In football and basketball, say, Gale Sayers' and Elgin Baylor's full splendor may be inferred from a single move. But a rooftop homer might have sprung from anyone who ever hit a home run, or from Henry Aaron, who hit 755; and while making one swan dive in the outfield, even Tommie Agee or Ron Swoboda of the Mets is the equivalent of the Giants' Willie Mays. Baseball players plainly cannot be known at a glance. "Every player, good or bad, at one time or other has played like a Hall of Famer and a Hall of Shamer." This is an old ballplayer speaking, one who by the way contends, "Baseball is just about the best thing this country has going for it." So consider the crackle in his voice. "But we're all old ballplayers, that's the point," he says. "Who doesn't play baseball? How many girls play football?"

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 an ordinary profession, the 40s may be a disquieting, though far from a disqualifying age. Mortality's half time. But for a 44-year-old ballplayer, the end is more than just perceivable. The fight to hold it off is well on. And the spectators know that the struggle represents no less than a Simple love of life. This beguiling summer, the most single-minded baseball player since Ty Cobb has done better than play with time. He has reached back into it to play with Cobb. 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. By the numbers and beyond them, he is what he does. Rose is baseball.

Coiled 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. The brush-cut hair that blew to bangs and billowed to bouffant has been tamed and dyed. The kneesprung crouch has lost barely a trace of temper. The burly body remains respectably taut, a gunnysack full of cantaloupes and cannonballs. The seamed and arid face, a slowly eroding riverbed, is as wide open as a gap-toothed grin. It is the map of an obstinate man with 737 doubles who still flings himself flat and breaststrokes like a gopher into second base.