4,192: Will Rose Pass Cobb?
Sept 11th, 1985
Jack Buck here with ESPN — let’s play some ball!
This Reds team, very good ball club — they come into this game with four wins plus just that lone road loss last week.
Pete Rose will face Eric Show. Rose sits tied with Cobb atop MLB’s hits list. Just needs that next line shot — he’ll hear that nice SLAP, then he’ll know. Will Rose pass Cobb this game? Stay with ESPN… (fade) …
… We’re back, gang. Rose with zero hits this game, zero home runs, zero RBIs — does have that walk…been tied with Cobb — what sure does seem like some time — four, five days… Bang bang play last time — that ball just beat Rose…
With none down, Show sets… Rose tips, hard foul ball. Nice play from that ball girl…that shot sped past that foul line…
Here goes Show once more…high heat — Rose will back away. Can’t give Rose ball four here… Pete won’t want that walk, he’ll bunt …
Okay — Show eyes Rose — that look says “take your best shot”… once more, Show sets…fast ball — hard line shot into left that will…drop just fair!
Rose will pass Cobb!
4,192!
This game will stop… Show goes over near Rose, nods “well done” — then… sits down?! Good lord…
Well, some have said “All’s well that ends well” — that will sure hold true here. Call Pete Rose “MLB’s Hits King!” Most hits ever — more than even Babe Ruth. What true grit we’ve seen here from Rose this game — what fire! Reds fans — they love Rose. Ohio fans, heck — Mets fans, Cubs fans — they just love Pete Rose.
Will Pete Rose sail into MLB’s Hall? Time will tell. That said, make your bets — odds look very good.
By now, you’ve likely noticed the constraint under which the above story was written. (If not, take another look and count the letters in each word.)
While September 11th now offers us a solemn remembrance, there was a time it commemorated an event as “simple” and “wholesome” as Pete Rose passing Ty Cobb on baseball’s all-time hits list. (Boy, it feels good to use words of any length.) We put those words in quotes because in reality, nothing was quite so simple or wholesome about the people and events described. Rose, of course, would fall from grace in a gambling scandal. Padres pitcher Eric Show — a surprisingly complex character who studied physics and played jazz guitar — met his untimely end at a San Diego drug rehab center in 1994.
Even the record-setting nature of the event itself came into question, when it was discovered a few years later that Ty Cobb’s total erroneously included two hits from a double-counted box score, leaving the accurate number at 4,189 — meaning Rose actually broke the record two days earlier.
But what is, in its way, “simple and wholesome” is the joy of taking a little scrap of an idea — in this case, noticing an abundance of 4-letter word lengths in “Pete Rose,” “Eric Show,” “Cobb,” “Reds,” “hits” — and following the journey of trying to create something natural, surprising, and hopefully entertaining.
We’ve tried to stick to the general flow of events from 35 years ago as closely as possible, though much artistic license was taken: Jack Buck did not announce the game, it was actually the second game of a double-header, etc.
Very quickly, the constraint rears its head — words like a, and, the, he, she, you: all out. Numbers? Only if they’re zero, four, five, or nine. So, we make a list of 4-letter terms related to our baseball topic: home game, road game, foul ball, line shot, bang bang play. And we compile a list of friendly 4-letter phrases like take your best shot, all’s well that ends well, time will tell. (Salt Lake City, Utah was saved for another exercise.) Then we try to sew them together into a coherent narrative, which means using that instead of the, putting will in front of a lot of verbs, and giving up entirely on promising avenues that just can’t be sanded into 4-letter form.
All for a bit of diversion — just like the game itself, and Rose’s quest for hits supremacy. So while the day is a solemn one, and the people and events described are not quite as uncomplicated as they appeared at the time, hopefully some wordplay can deliver a brief moment of purity.
