On Deck For The Big Knock

"You got to spend some time with Pete," says Sparky Anderson. "He's not like the rest of us. Nobody will ever know him completely. Can't know him. He thinks about baseball day and night. He can't sit five minutes in a chair and talk to you about something else. He'll get up. Baseball is all he thinks about. He'll never leave the game. He'd die first."

Rose's affair with baseball has meant that he hasn't had much time to spend with his daughter, Fawn, 20. His son, Petey, 15, had the good sense to be a boy and thus has spent much of his life with his father in clubhouses. But, as Rose says, it was harder with Fawn. "I couldn't bring her to the ball park at two o'clock. What's she going to do all by herself at the ball park at two?"

Though Fawn believes she and her father have become closer in the last year, she wonders what price he paid to become baseball's most durable player. "That's why I'll be so happy for him when he breaks this record and becomes the best of all time," she says. "Because he sure had to give up a lot to get it."

SEVEN P.M.—THE BIG SHOCK

MacNeil-Lehrer. "You've often been called Johnny Hustle. Are you proud of that?"

Rose: "Johnny Hustle?"

Nolan Ryan is throwing for the Astros and, because Ryan is a righthander, Rose will start at first base. Against lefthanders, Rose, although a switch hitter, yields to youth—Tony Perez, 43. Perez is hitting .320. This is the happiest coupling of senior citizens since On Golden Pond.

If you wonder if Rose should be given a contract for 1986, consider this: When Rose has written his own name on the lineup card in '85, the Reds have gone 42-34. Although he's hitting only .266, 39 points below his career average, he ranks third in the league in on-base percentage and eighth in walks. He is the quintessential No. 2 hitter. (For moving the runners up, nobody beats the manager.) And guess who leads the club in hit-by-pitches?

Still, when Rose's average sagged to .236 in late April, Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Tim Sullivan suggested that he might help the team if he forgot to pencil his name in the lineup more often. Rose politely disagreed. He attributed his low average to the revolving door full of press that had descended upon his home. And it was true. Rose was going home at 1 a.m., rising at eight for photo shoots, posing and interviewing until one, then hurrying to the ball park.

To prove Sullivan wrong, he raised his average to, at one point, .301. "Pitchers think they can blow the fastball by me and they can't," Rose says. "But they're trying, just like when I was coming up."