UsainJolt

I think sports are funny sometimes because it creates a morality tale out of things that can radically flip later on — younger me, in my baseball adolescence would have ABHORRED today. Even the me of a few years ago, at best, would be completely apathetic. Today, with time and age, I almost view Rose as a tragic figure, though I reserve the right to change my mind on that (I had never heard of the statutory rape until now, for instance). He seemed like a victim of himself as well as his own tormentor, never having a personality that wasn’t his baseball accomplishments, never able to figure out that Pete Rose, the person, and Pete Rose, the man, could be two separate entities. Pete Rose made Charlie Hustle his entire psyche — always the underdog, always trying to get one over, always the little dog in the fight; but once you take baseball out of that equation for 30 years, what do you have left except the husk of a man? He wasn’t a great businessman or an investor and wasn’t a magnetic personality; he made baseball his end-all, be-all. Instead, he hangs on far longer than he probably should have were he not managing himself with Ty Cobb’s record being his sole focus because baseball was literally all he was and all he knew. Add to that a hero complex that you see in a lot of professional athletes where everything they touch turns to gold/create an aura of infallibility around themselves that gets reinforced by everything around them, I can see easily how a guy would fall victim to his own vices. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, that player turned manager turned personality begins facing legit criticism and consequences for maybe the first time since adolescence, where he previously could do no wrong. Furthermore, it comes from the very game that he’s surrounded his entire life around. It makes him do actions that seem illogical to someone with a normal sense of self, but to someone like Rose, so absorbed in the accomplishments of his past that he never had to think about of a future without baseball, it’s the only thing that makes sense. So he attacks; he lies; he twists the truth into something that makes sense to his worldview, even as he paints himself into a corner, so far is he in his own head that it’s better to play a malicious gadfly than an apologetic screwup. He tries to play the all-conquering titan to the people, who more and more view him as just another flawed mortal, so he buries his head in the sand further. Even eventually coming clean with his involvement, I don’t think there was ever contrition or true apology there, being mostly a transactional reaction of “if I apologize, maybe I’ll get something back”, which I feel like forced him further into a spiral of near-irrelevancy outside of a few very dedicated superfans and a small yearly mention during the HOF votes every season…though that could be my own biases from the past showing. As an aside, I feel like we’re living a lesser version of this in the constant soap opera of late career Aaron Rodgers right now — a guy who for so long controlled his own destiny, suddenly not being able to confront the fact that his own athletic skills are waning and being too stubborn to adjust to a new present that he can’t reconcile with his past, and not being able to confront a future without controlling the present on his own obsolete terms. I don’t pity Rose, the person, too much, just like I have very few thoughts to spare on Rodgers making his own bed and then complaining about the knives he hid in it poking him through the sheets — we’re all responsible for our own actions regardless of the factors that lead us to our decisions, and personally, Rose always came off as smug and all-knowing, which is usually not a healthy vibe to give if you ever want to be considered a creative or interesting person — but I wonder if things would have ended better for him if he’d ever internalized any sort of validation for who he was as a person, divorced of anything athletic-related, or if he by nature was always set for this kind of rise and burnout.

On a sidenote, I like how Sammon is still reporting and being credited on NYT/Athletic stories regarding the Brewers sphere despite having been in New York for two years and change now. I quit my sub to them after we went the rest of 2022 without a beat writer, but I’m assuming their Milwaukee coverage hasn’t gotten any better since.

Reminds me of our neighbors to the south, post-their two deep playoff runs. It seemed like everyone came out tight after that and, combined with players getting old and injury-prone, the burden of expectation made the next few seasons a slog for them once the slogan went from “try not to suck” to “how the hell did we lose game 163 to a team spending 2.5x less than us”. I’m sure they wouldn’t trade any of the last few years of rebuild for 2016, mind you, but they’re definitely a cautionary tale of what happens when you have a core meeting expectations, and then suddenly the “then what?” questions start adding up. European soccer teams rotate their cores up quite a bit to avoid that hangover effect — keeps the players hungry when the youth on your squad have something to achieve. There’s something to be said, I think, for the ethos a teams radiates when they play the underdog role, even in their own heads (glares at Mets), and I think you often lose a lot of that momentum once you reach the plateau, and suddenly the target is directly on you, permeating from the players to management to the fans itself.