I am a 51 year old baseball fanatic. Pete Rose was the best player on a diamond I ever saw. His hustle and sheer drive was enough to overcome the fact that he was drafted by the Reds not because of his talent, but as a favor to his Uncle, who was a scout for the Reds. He was not the most talented baseball player ever. He was the best, because he had enough talent, and realized if he combined that with hustle and determination, he could be a big league ball player.

He also was not bashful, most professional athletes are not. But that was the second reason why I loved The Hit King. He worked hard, and he told the truth. The following are 24 quotes I selected, one for each year he played in the Major Leagues.

“Sliding headfirst is the safest way to get to the next base, I think, and the fastest. You don’t lose your momentum, and there’s one more important reason I slide headfirst, it gets my picture in the paper.”

 “I don’t have the average thirty-eight year-old’s body. I know my face looks old, but if you slid head first for sixteen years you’d be ugly too.”

“Whoever said “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” is full of it! Winning makes all the difference in the world. Winning is fun. Losing is not. Losing sucks.”

“Every time I step up to the plate, I expect to get a hit. If I don’t expect to get a hit, I have no right to step into the batter’s box in the first place.”

“You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possibly be – in baseball and in life.”

“You’d be surprised how many shortcomings can be overcome by hustle.”

 “It’s easy to practice something that you are good at, and that is what most people do. What’s tough is to go out and to work hard on the things that you don’t do very well.”

“Somebody’s gotta win and somebody’s gotta lose and I believe in letting the other guy lose.”

“Once you accept defeat, it becomes ease to lose. If defeat comes, face it and take it, but don’t accept it.”

“I’m just like everybody else. I have two arms, two legs and four-thousand hits.”

 “When you step into the batter’s box, have nothing on your mind except baseball.”

 “I was born on the day Lincoln was shot and the Titanic sank.”

 “It’s a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit it square.”

“There is an old saying that money can’t buy happiness. If it could, I would buy myself four hits every game.”

“If you have someone equal in ability to me I will beat him every time because I will try harder.”

 “When you play this game twenty years, go to bat ten-thousand times, and get three-thousand hits, do you know what that means? You’ve gone zero for seven-thousand.”

 “The only book I ever read cover to cover was The Pete Rose Story. I read half of The Lou Gehrig Story and then made a book report on it for four straight years.”

“You know what God told the Cubs? Don’t do anything until I come back.”

 “Baseball is an individual game, but it should never be a personal game.”

 “I played with 11 Hall of Famers and played against 52 Hall of Famers, and I don’t know any of them linked to steroids.”

In 1978, at the age of 39 the Philadelphia Phillies made Pete Rose the highest paid player in Major League Baseball. But, according to Rose, even though the Phillies upped their offer to make him the highest paid player, their offer was still the lowest offer he had received. He signed with the Phillies because he wanted to play for a contender, and he had many friends on the team. In 1979 the Phillies finished 14 games out of 1st place in the division. In 1980, they won their first World Series Championship. Rose’s contract was a 4 year $3.2 Million contract, which means he made $800,000 a season. As a comparison, currently the MLB minimum salary is $740,000. I wish everyone who made “Pete Rose money” felt like Pete Rose did as evidence in the quote below.

“With the money I’m making, I should be playing two positions.”

 “I think that the most important thing to me is fans. Without the viewers, without the fans, we have nothing. So I think the fans are awfully important.”

“I never gave up as a player, and I won’t give up as someone who wants to go to the Hall of Fame, because it’s the ultimate goal for a baseball player or a football player or a basketball player.”

 “The thing I would like most to leave behind is to be remembered for trying hard.”

The above quotes tell a lot of the Pete Rose story in his own words. If Pete Rose, as he has alleged, only bet on his team to win. Then he did off the field what he did on the field. Because every time Pete Rose took the field, he expected to win.

Photo Credits; HBO,WLWT, Facebook

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