Michael Sokolove wrote a book “Hustle” about the life of Pete Rose. It obviously dealt with the character flaws that drove Rose from the game he loved. But is also gave great insight into why the non-athlete was able to compete at a high lever over a long period of time. Here are some of those thoughts.What Shamsky remembers about Pete Rose from 1960 is not so much how he performed in games, but how he practiced. Even then, Rose has something that many major leagues, even good ones, never achieve: a realistic view of his strengths and limitations. If he hit a home run in the previous night’s game, he did not imagine himself a power hitter. The next day in batting practice, Rose would watch and cheer his teammates on as they swung from the heels, trying to reach the fences. Ball players, even on the major-league level, never grow tired of playing home-run derby. Then Rose would step in the cage and calmly, repetitively, stroke ball after ball up the middle. When he was through with that he would work on his opposite-field stroke.
If he was slumping at the place, he didn’t attribute it to the vagaries of the long season, as many players do, or invoke the baseball cliché that every player goes through slumps. Instead, he crunched the baseball after baseball in the batting cage, sweating and grunting and working until the slump was dead. It nothing for Rose to take two hundred swings.
Rose didn’t take off days during the season. When there was no game scheduled, he came to the ballpark and found someone to pitch to him. Sometimes he had to pay a teammate to do it. “The year he broke Cobb’s record (1985), we practiced every day,” recalls Bill DeMars, Rose’s hitting coach for the last decade of his career. “He didn’t take one day off. On off-days, he took a minimum of forty-five minutes of batting practice. We have guys hitting .210 and .215, and I couldn’t get them to come in on a day off. But Pete was there.”
Rose studied the mental makeup of opposing players and took advantage of their weaknesses. He knew, for instance, that after a bad plate appearance certain outfields sulked in the field and didn’t hustle after batted balls. When the time was right, he tried to take an extra base one them. He rarely guessed wrong.
The bigger the game, the more press attention, the greater the potential distractions, the keener was Rose’s concentration.
More often than hitting home runs, Rose did the little things that won games. But he had a knack for making those subtle plays at incredibly dramatic moments.
“Pete had this incredible ability to focus,” said Larry Starr. “I’ve been involved with greater players, with great intensity but eventually you there’s other things on their mind. One day they come to the ballpark and something’s bothering them, usually a problem from home. And it affects their play. It has to. With Pete, you never saw that. Nothing every bother him to the extent that he took it on the field with him.”
As a ball player, Rose was highly analytical. After each game, he checked his bats for marks to see where the ball had come into contact with the wood. Then he rubbed them down with alcohol so they would be clean and he could make the same check after the next game.
