A climactic impact at plate forever melds Rose, Fosse

By Steve Fainaru, Globe Staff, 07/11/99

The day before the 1970 All-Star Game, Pete Rose invited Indians pitcher Sam McDowell for a night out in Cincinnati. McDowell asked if he could bring along his young teammate, catcher Ray Fosse, and the three players, along with their wives, spent a cheerful evening eating, drinking, and talking baseball until about 1 a.m.

Rose and Fosse came together the next night under different circumstances: the most memorable collision in the history of the game. In the bottom of the 12th, Rose scored from second by essentially turning himself into a projectile, running over Fosse a split-second before the catcher received a throw from center fielder Amos Otis. The National League won, 5-4.

The concussive play, which in its time was replayed as much as the Rodney King beatings, set off a brief national controversy and changed the lives of both men. Fosse, who was 23 and, to many, as promising as Johnny Bench, was never the same, and his 11-year career is still remembered for a single moment in which he was flattened before 60 million people. Rose used the play to burnish his hard-nosed reputation, but the raw violence of it seemed to hint at a dark side to his competitiveness that few had previously seen.

John Dowd, the investigator who later helped drive Rose out of baseball on gambling charges, was once asked about Rose the player. "I did not care for the hurting of Ray Fosse," Dowd said. "I thought it was completely unnecessary."

Fosse suffered a fractured and separated left shoulder that went undetected until the following spring. For years, he believed the play had been clean. Rose, he thought, had started to go into a head-first slide. But Fosse was straddling the third-base line and Rose had nowhere else to go. Fosse believed that Rose's momentum as he tried to pull himself out of the slide had led to the collision -- a hard play, but a fair one.

But later, Rose was quoted as saying that he couldn't have looked his father in the eye if he had done it any other way. "Besides, nobody told me they changed it to girls' softball between third and home," he said in his 1989 autobiography with Roger Kahn. Rose also embellished the story of his night out with Fosse, conveniently forgetting to mention that he actually had invited McDowell and that the players' wives had been present.

Fosse came to believe that Rose had gone after him with malice. Reading Rose's comments about not wanting to let his father down, he said, "probably was the worst day of my life, to read a statement where a guy said he intentionally tried to do that, without me being able to see him coming. He essentially blindsided me."

"It doesn't set well with me," said Fosse, a longtime Oakland A's broadcaster. "I'll be honest with you: I don't have anything to do with Pete. All I know is my left shoulder continues to bother me; I have a constant reminder of the play because of my left shoulder. I'm not to the point where I see him and don't say hello, but you have to be honest about what happened."

McDowell, a licensed psychologist who serves as a consultant to Major League Baseball, said he still thinks Fosse believes that deep down the play was clean. "I'm speaking as a therapist, and knowing and understanding Pete Rose, I think the water has been muddied solely because of Pete's false bravado. Pete never had a very healthy ego. And when he started making statements that can only be described as bravado, it soured everybody's view of Pete. Once the false bravado started the [expletive] hit the fan and people started taking sides."

The setting for the play hardly could have been more dramatic. Riverfront Stadium was two weeks old, President Nixon was in attendance, and the rosters were filled with the giants of the era. The National League boasted four members of The Big Red Machine -- Rose, Bench, Tony Perez, and Joe Morgan -- as well as Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, and Hank Aaron. Tom Seaver was the starting pitcher. The American League had Frank and Brooks Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, and Carl Yastrzemski, who was the game's MVP, playing seven innings in center field, five at first base, and going 4 for 6 with three singles and double. Jim Palmer was the AL starter.

Rose was a natural choice to make the NL squad: a hometown kid who had won two straight batting titles and hit .323 in the first half.

Fosse was less obvious. It was his first full season, and he was blossoming into a star despite the Tribe's ineptitude. Cleveland sportswriters had to lobby for him by writing open letters to the AL manager, Earl Weaver. He entered the All-Star break hitting .313 with 16 homers and 45 RBIs.

Fosse had replaced starting catcher Bill Freehan in the fourth inning and was still in the game when the American League took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth. Giants catcher Dick Dietz who, like Fosse, was nicknamed Mule, came to the plate.

"Hey, Mule, I'll see you next spring," Fosse told him.

Dietz promptly homered off Catfish Hunter and the NL scored two more runs to tie the game before Rose struck to end the inning.

In the "unfortunate 12th," as Fosse now calls it, Rose started the two-out rally with a single to center off Angels lefthander Clyde Wright. He moved to second on a grounder up the middle by Dodgers third baseman Billy Grabarkewitz. With the count 1-0, the Cubs' Jim Hickman drilled another single to center, and Rose, followed down the line by screaming third base coach Leo Durocher, tore for the plate.

In the replay, Rose is out of control, careening, stumbling as he prepares to dive. "I saw Fosse's shinguards; if I slid head first, I woulda broken both collarbones," he said later. At the last moment, realizing that Fosse stands solid in his path, Rose pulls out of his slide, lowers his shoulder, and plows into the catcher, who tumbles backward. For an instant, Rose stands over the fallen man in apparent concern, but he is swept up by his victorious teammates.

McDowell was standing in the dugout runway, where he had been asked to wait in case he was named MVP. "You could literally hear it, even down the runway where I was," he said. "It was just like you hear on TV in the NFL, only there were no pads."

Rose declined through his agent to be interviewed for this article. In his autobiography, he said: "I only play baseball one way. The way my father taught me. I play hurt, I play tired, I play hard as hell. Don't tell me it's an exhibition or it's spring training. Don't tell me to take it easy between the lines. That's not me. That's not my dad. If I play a charity softball game, for nothing, not a dime, I go all out."

Fosse said he had expected Rose to slide around him. "My job as catcher was to position myself where the ball was coming," he said. "The ball started to tail up the line. I moved up a couple feet and was not trying to do anything other than catch the ball, find the runner and make the tag. As I was stretching for it I was smoked."

Rose missed the first three games of the second half because of a deep thigh bruise -- three of just 10 games he missed the entire decade. Fosse took an ambulance to the hospital, but X-rays failed to detect the fracture because the swelling was so severe it camouflaged the injury. When he went out to take batting practice before his first game back, he found he could not lift his left arm above his head. Tentatively, he told manager Alvin Dark about the injury.

"That's OK, just handle the pitchers," Dark told him.

Fosse stubbornly played two more months before breaking his index finger on a foul ball. He hit just two more home runs that season and only 39 over the next seven years.

In ensuing years, his career took on a tragic quality. He broke the index finger on his throwing hand three straight seasons. In Yankee Stadium one afternoon, someone hurled an M-80 from the stands and it exploded next to his spikes, burning a hole in his foot "the size of a dime." In 1974, after he was traded to the A's, he shattered a vertebrae trying to break up a fight between Reggie Jackson and Billy North.

He remains one of the most respected men in the game. His only regret, he said, is not knowing the answer to the question: "Would I have been a 25-30 home run a year hitter? But that's the only thing." He is grateful for winning two Gold Gloves, for playing in two All-Star Games, for winning two world championships with the A's.

"I'm happy to have had the opportunity," he said.