Before he became the Hit King, Rose once bloomed in Macon

He sported a crew cut beneath his 1962 Macon Peaches baseball cap. It was the style of the day. As they might say in golf, it was a good 3-wood lie.

The inside of his cap was lined with a plastic shell. He wore it for protection from high fastballs when he stepped to the plate at Luther Williams Field because batting helmets were just being introduced into professional baseball. He kept it on all the time, even when he dug his cleats into the infield dirt at second base.  

His name was Pete Rose, and he went on to have more hits (4,256) than any player in major league history. 

He was 83 when he died Monday and took a piece of Macon with him. 

It has been 62 years since ‘62, when Rose rented a room at the downtown YMCA, hung out at the local VFW and drove an aqua-colored Corvette around town.

He had a sweetheart in Macon, a young lady named Carol, and he gave her his class ring from Western Hills High School in Cincinnati.

Ask anyone from the generations who watched him play — from the old-timers in the bleachers under the tin roof to the knothole kids along the outfield fences — and they will tell you he was something special.

He must have been. Otherwise, the ’62 Peaches would not have had sellouts almost every night. By the end of the season, 100,035 fans had passed through the turnstiles at what is now the second-oldest minor league baseball park in the country.

They called him “Charlie Hustle’ because he played like a guy with his pants on fire. He slid headfirst into the bases. He rarely stopped or slowed down. He was the original Pistol Pete.

He batted .330 that season, scored 136 runs and collected 178 hits, including nine home runs, 31 doubles and an astonishing  17 triples. The only reason he wasn’t named as the league’s Most Valuable Player was because his teammate, Tommy Helms, hit .340.

Along with Mel Queen, Art Shamsky and Gus Gil, Rose and Helms were the five players on the ‘62 Peaches roster who made it to the big leagues. Their manager, Dave Bristol, was born in Macon and later managed the Atlanta Braves in 1976-77. 

Rose was the leadoff hitter for Macon, and those who had a front-row seat to his greatness still talk about the time the Peaches scored 32 runs in a legendary game against Greenville, and Rose batted eight times in nine
innings.

Those are just some of the stories pasted in scrapbooks and embedded in the record books.  But thousands of individual memories have been shared and re-shared on the timeline… like the day he was spotted walking on Cherry Street or the night he was seen eating a steak at the Saratoga restaurant. 

No doubt Rose got a chuckle if someone told him a man named Simri Rose — no relation — was one of the city’s founding fathers. (Rose Hill Cemetery is named after him.)

Rose was still listed on the Macon roster when he went to spring training with the Cincinnati Reds in 1963. The Reds, of course, decided he was ready for prime time, and he went on to be named the National League Rookie of the Year.

He played on three World Series champion teams, won three batting titles and made the all-star team 17 times. 

And then there was the dark mark. He was suspended from baseball in 1989 for betting on games when he was the Cincinnati manager and later declared ineligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. For 25 years, it has remained a hot-button topic in baseball.

Rose returned to Macon for an appearance in 1971, and was given a symbolic “key to the city.’ He came back to speak to the Macon Dugout Club in the 1980s and threw out the first pitch at a minor league game on “Pete Rose Day” in 2003. He was the featured speaker at the “First Pitch Classic” at Mercer in 2014.

Macon never forgot him. It’s safe to say he never forgot Macon.