Pete's Record

Never to be beaten?

Pete's Record

This image popped up on my Facebook feed the other day:

Apologies that I don’t know the source of this. I’m guessing that the image likely came from a FOX Game of the Week sometime in 2011, but I don’t know who put this together or inserted the comment above.

But this got me thinking. If Jeter was past Rose in terms of base hits at age 37, and yet finished his career a whopping 800 base hits short of the record (3,465 to 4,256), what sort of player would it take to finally topple Rose?

Now, before you start throwing your calculators at me, let me be very clear. I know that base hits alone don’t really mean anything. I know full well that hitting for power is more important to an offense than just collecting base hits. And, shocking as it may sound, I do know that Pete Rose was largely overrated as a player in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s.

But it’s still a crazy record.

It’s a crazy record not just because 4,256 is a high number. No — it’s crazy because of the longevity required to hit it.

Jeter’s career hit a snag in 2013, his age 39 season:

Even though 2013 wasn’t all that long ago, details on precisely what injury Jeter ran into are a bit obscure and aren’t easy to research. In fact, the slow death of newspapers means it’s harder to do this research for modern seasons than for older seasons, believe it or not.

It’s clear that Jeter was injured at the beginning of the season with a broken ankle dating back to the 2012 ALCS:

From Daily News (Bowling Green, KY), April 20, 2013, page 58

It seems that Jeter then came back for a single game before coming up with a different injury:

From Calgary Herald, July 13, 2013, page E2

In fact, it seems that Jeter was plagued by a series of injuries all year, resulting in the sort of season that would convince anybody to consider giving up the game:

It feels strange for me to say that, by the way. 39 is old in baseball years, sure. However, I’m past 39, and I feel as young as ever.

I say that because I honestly can see why somebody like Pete Rose would just go on indefinitely.

You see, Rose’s age 37 season came in 1978. Yes, that’s right — 1978, which is before he signed as a free agent with the Phillies, before his brief stint in Montreal, and a whopping six years before he became Cincinnati Reds manager and started gambling on games.

And the crazy thing is that Rose remained more or less healthy through his entire career, playing what were basically full seasons up until 1986, when he was a whopping 45 years old:

Of course, any self respecting manager would have taken Rose out of the lineup in 1984. You don’t want a 43 year old holding on just for the sake of breaking an individual record to be your full time first baseman, after all. Dan Dreissen, Rose’s old teammate who wound up going to the Expos the same year Pete went back to Cincinnati, was only 32 years old and was having a relatively productive season for Cincinnati. Replacing Dreissen’s offense with Rose’s insistence on breaking the hit record doesn’t seem like a great recipe for success.

Sticking a 43 year old in your daily lineup also isn’t great for youth development. Nick Esasky wound up eventually holding down the first base position for the Reds when Rose finally left the lineup. Esasky had been playing left field in 1985; meanwhile, the Reds brought up a good looking 22 year old named Paul O’Neill that September, giving him some time in left field. Imagine if Rose had hung up his spikes: perhaps O’Neill’s .333 average and 106 OPS+ in 12 plate appearances keeps him in the big leagues in 1986, giving the Reds an extra season from what would eventually be a key offensive player.

That’s the tricky thing about this analysis, of course. Change one bit of history, and you wind up with a chain reaction that gives you something entirely different from what you started out with. This is why so many OOTP projects end up deviating from real life to such a large extent.

Anyway — the first key to understand about Rose’s record is that he had to stay relatively injury free. Remember: he was able to set the record despite the 1981 strike, which cost him at least 50 games. He basically played every game at ages 38, 39, 40, 41, was still a full time player at 42 and 43, and, for all intents and purposes, could also be considered at least a starter at age 44.

The second key? The second key is that Rose was making his own lineup decisions at the very end in Cincinnati.

As we continue to wade through the old Baseball Abstracts, we’ll start to notice how Bill James would dog on Pete Rose and his weak bat near the end of his career. The truth is that Rose, ever the competitor, wanted nothing more than to beat out Ty Cobb and set that record. He was going to put his bat in the lineup to get a shot at the record no matter how the team fared. And that’s precisely what he did.

So what would you need from a modern player hoping to break Rose’s record?

• He’d need to start young — and we’re talking coming up at age 22 or earlier. Looking at the current crop of young players we have, this pretty much means you’d need a Jackson Chourio, a Jackson Holliday, or a Jackson Merrill type rookie — a great looking young kid who could become a full time player early. Note that Pete was a full time starter in 1963, something that is really rare for someone that age today.

• He’d need to stay injury free — for the most part, at least. Jeter was able to keep pace with Rose despite missing time in 2003. The amazing thing about Pete Rose’s career is how healthy he kept himself. He wasn’t quite like a Gehrig or a Ripken, but he was awfully close, and seems to have never needed more than a day or two off here or there to deal with an ailment.

• He’d need to play long past his peak. I simply don’t see that happening. This article notes that there were no active players left in 2024 that were playing in the majors in 2004, the year Jackson Chorio was born. If you started as a full time major leaguer in 2004 at age 22, you’d be 42 in 2024 — pretty advanced in age, I suppose, but still nowhere near the level Rose was at. Pete still had two full seasons left in him.

• He’d need to be in charge of the lineup. This is a major point, and is probably the reason why nobody will break Pete’s record. No self respecting manager is going to stick some 44 year old with a big ego into the lineup to let him get a few slap singles. And since we live in the days of increased front office interference with day to day mangerial decisions, you’d need to convince all the eggheads and analysts that your raw base hit total is more important than their advanced metrics. It’s simply not going to happen unless you’re the decision maker — which is what Rose was.

• Finally, he’d need to be the right kind of hitter. Somebody criticized the selection of Ichiro on the first ballot the other day, saying that he didn’t draw “enough” walks. See, to actually break Pete’s record, you’d need to be precisely that kind of hitter: somebody who tends to get base hits instead of walks. You’d need to be the kind of hitter who gets 200 or more hits per season every season for well over 20 years to even stand a chance. Not even Barry Bonds at the height of his steroid use managed to get 200 hits with 150 or more walks in a season. And Jeter, despite his famous patience at the plate, was still not hitting that 100 walk mark. The problem, of course, is that modern scouting emphasizes the lessons of sabermetrics, which tend to (rightly) emphasize on base percentage over just getting base hits. You’d need a player who somehow slips through the cracks and makes it to the big leagues despite not being a sabermetrican’s dream.

Is it possible? Anything is possible. After all, nobody thought Ty Cobb’s record could be broken.

But I seriously don’t think we’ll see Pete’s record be broken. Not unless there is a fundamental change in modern baseball strategy, and not unless some guy is able to convince the manager to keep penciling him in the lineup far past his prime.