The September 11th I choose to remember happened in 1985.
My family had gathered at my aunt's house in southwest Ohio suburbia to celebrate my grandfather's birthday. The television in the living room showed a Cincinnati Reds baseball game; we huddled around it to watch the special moment America had been waiting to see.
And then it happened. Four thousand one hundred and ninety two. Eric Show of the San Diego Padres sitting on the mound. Ty Cobb's unbreakable record broken. The man with the bad haircut holding his #1 finger in the air. Red Corvette driving around the concrete cookie cutter that was my childhood heaven.
Though I was only eight years old, my Reds fandom had already been well established. When my mother, my sisters, and I moved to Ohio a few years earlier, I ate up the mythology of the Big Red Machine like religious folks eat up Sunday School propaganda. I knew the batting average for every year of a flappy-armed second baseman's career. I watched a 43 year old Cuban hit .328 in 207 of some of his final plate appearances. I saw the waning light of a star catcher shining dimly in the outfield in a losing battle with time.
My sisters and I were given "Pete's Back!" t-shirts when another fading star returned to a hero's welcome in his hometown, one that he had left for and because of that other American pastime - greed. These stars had made a good fortune winning championships for their master, but he would not share the spoils, and free agency had signaled the end of the era of glory for the city of Cincinnati. The return of the hero was a nod to nostalgia that almost seemed like an apology by ownership. It would prove to be a blight on a once proud baseball club and the people who adored it.
The industrial city had been hit harder than most by the recession of the 1980s, with unemployment hitting 10.5% in 1982. Companies that were institutions in Cincinnati began to shutter their doors for cheap labor in Asia and other parts of this rock on which we live. The population declined as people fled the city for opportunities anywhere else, and rumors swirled that the beloved baseball club would follow them out.
The city needed Pete Rose.
I remember the homecoming, young as I was, because it was that important. It was the zeitgeist of Zinzinnati. If you can believe it, that man with the bad haircut gave people hope when it seemed all those shuttered factories had shipped Pandora's box overseas with the jobs and the rest of their cargo. People were happy to wear that red hat with the wishbone C again, the one that represented a city and a region and the baseball club that was part of its identity.
The Reds traded for Rose in 1984, fired their manager, and made him a player-manager for the last two months of the season. If you're a baseball fan, you know how weird that is. After being screwed in 1981 (having the best record in baseball but not making the playoffs because of the labor stoppage and the stupid way they split the season), the Reds finished 6th, 6th, and 5th before Rose took the helm for a full season. For the next five seasons, they finished in 2nd place, even in that fateful year of 1989. The sense that Pete had saved baseball in Cincinnati is real and not unwarranted.
No one could know what the outcome of the 1919 World Series would have been had the Black Sox not conspired to throw the series for a payout, but most agree that it almost destroyed professional baseball. It was a time of unbridled greed and corruption in America; until now we haven't come near to that. That series triggered MLB; even whispers of gambling were treated seriously. No one could know the extent of what Rose did, either, but his acceptance of a lifetime ban was in essence a plea deal to prevent other information from coming out. What else did he want to hide?
I don't know what would have happened to the Cincinnati Reds Baseball Club had they not, by some miracle, won the World Series in 1990. Fresh off the ban of the fallen local hero and in the midst of investigations and eventual ban of a racist owner who was proud to own Nazi memorabilia, that 1990 band of misfits not only being in first place for the entire season but also sweeping the defending champion and heavily favored A's was so improbable that it seemed like the deities thought the city of Cincinnati had finally had enough misfortune and chose to gift it some respite from its woes.
I never knew what to think about Pete Rose during the investigations and the subsequent lifetime ban he accepted, or even the prison time he did for tax evasion. This junior high kid wasn't entirely sure why gambling was illegal, even if I did know about the Black Sox Scandal (which was clearly wrong). I honestly believed then as I do now that Pete always bet on the Reds to win, because he was so damn competitive and hated to lose. I guess you could call my feelings about the matter "indifferent."
What I know is how I felt during the 1999 All Star Game when they announced the All-Century Team and Pete Rose was allowed on a Major League Baseball field for the first time in a decade, and I thought he belonged there, too. In my twenty-two year old eyes, he had done his penance. For the next 18 years, I believed he belonged in the MLB Hall of Fame. In 2016, I went back to Ohio to see his number retirement ceremony at Great American Ballpark and his Reds Hall of Fame induction ceremony. I was excited to see it. I thought he was finally going to be reinstated into Major League Baseball, and I thought that was justice.
Over those 18 years, I had a long line of interesting and unique experiences, partly because of my personality but I'd say mostly because of fate or coincidence or luck or because the universe just decided that I should be in those places at those times with those people. Beirut was one of those places. The time was one when the brutal 15 year "civil" war had been over long enough for something resembling stability to take hold but before the instability that came later. The people were some women who would have been my friends in a fair and peaceful and just life and a piece of shit sex trafficker who I had to pretend to be nice to so I could learn about the trade and try to help those women he basically owned. I won't get into the details here but I will tell you that there are only three crimes I believe should be punished by death - treason, beating a child to death, and sex trafficking.
It shouldn't take meeting victims of sex trafficking to be so adamantly against it, but I just didn't understand the extent of it until I met them. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the chattel slave trade. I can't believe the world puts up with it.
When the news came out that Rose's bookie also trafficked young girls to Rose, that was the end of it for me. I put away all Rose related memorabilia. The fact that they came to an out-of-court settlement is akin to an admission of guilt; after all, this is a country that thinks rape is fine, with less than 2% of rape cases ever being prosecuted. The known liar even admitted to having sex with a girl he "thought" was 16, which disgustingly is the age of consent in red state Ohio. Everything else was brushed under the rug. What do you expect from a country with a legal system that continues to strip women of their rights and half of the population cheerleads it?
At least the Phillies had enough class to scrap plans to honor him because of it.
How important was Pete Rose to baseball? The stress of banning him for life killed Commissioner Bart Giamatti. (To this day his very good actor son Paul Giamatti blames Rose for his father's death.) But I don't ever want to see that piece of human excrement in the MLB Hall of Fame and I am not sad that he passed. The world needs fewer Pete Roses in it.
