ROSE & BENCH
It is a New Cincinnati Firm with Growth - Stock Prospects - On and Off the Diamond
By John Devaney
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Pete Rose was sitting in the living room of his lavish new Delhi Hills home outside Cincinnati, munching on an apple and talking about a teammate and good friend. "Johnny Bench is great," Pete was saying. "He has everything--he's got the bat, he's got the arm, he's got the stamina, and he is a good public relations man."
A good public relations man? What has that got to do with playing baseball?
A lot if you want to be a successful baseball player, Rose explained. "This tells you what Johnny Bench is like," Pete said, biting the apple one final time and dropping it into a dish. "When he had that good rookie season~ in 1968, he didn't rush back home to Oklahoma at the end of the season. He stayed here in Cincinnati, making a name for himself and doing baseball some good by going to banquets and making speeches for the Reds. He is not one of those guys who has a good year, then takes off and leaves town. He tries to sell himself, he tries to sell baseball."
Both Pete and Johnny have done extraordinary jobs as salesman for themselves and for baseball-both on and off the field. On the field last season, both had successful years. For the second straight season, the 27-year-old Rose was the National League batting champion, again winning the title in his last game--in fact in his last at-bat, finishing with a .348 average, three points ahead of runner-up Roberto Clemente.
"With about a month to go I didn't think there was anyway I could catch Clemente," Pete said, which was a rare admission for him: Most of the time he believes there are few things he can't do. "I was hitting around .335 and he was hitting .358, .360. Then I got hot and I got up to .340, .342, and Roberto and Cleon Jones came down. When they were about six points ahead of me, I realized that if I kept on hitting in a hot spell, I had a chance for it.
"For one thing I had a lot more at bats than Clemente or Jones. I knew I could afford some oh for four days and I wouldn't go down too much, but they would. I just had to get real hot that last month."
Pete hit around .380 during that last month as the pitching-poor Reds made a courageous but vain run for the western division title.
In the last few weeks of the campaign, Pete kept hoping that the Mets' Cleon Jones, who had been out of action for weeks with a bad hand, would come back into the lineup. Cleon was hitting ..347. "If he stays on the bench and freezes that average," Pete told friends, "it's going to be hard to catch him. If he comes back, after all that time on the bench out of action, he's going to have trouble finding his stroke and his average will drop."
In a doubleheader Pete rapped out six hits in eight at-bats, closing to within a couple of percentage points of Cleon. The next day Cleon came off the bench to play, but Pete had been right: He couldn't find his stroke, collected only two hits in 14 at bats, and his percentage slipped to .340. In the meantime Pete knocked out 18 hits in 39 at bats, raising his average to .347.
Still, even on the last day of the season, the Pirates' Roberto Clemente was hanging close to Pete, just as another Pirate-Matty Alou--had battled Pete down to the final day the previous season.
The Reds were playing Atlanta on the final day of the '69 season. A friend of Pete's was sitting in the stands close to' the field, a transistor radio stuck to his ear. He was getting reports from Pittsburgh on how Clemente was faring at bat against the Montreal Expos.
When Pete came to bat for the fourth time --having gone oh for three -- he heard a shout from his friend: "Three for three for Clemente."
Pete, who is good at it, did some rapid figuring in his head. "We each had one more bat," he was saying this winter. "If I go oh for four and he goes four for four, he wins the batting championship."
There was a man on second base as the switch-hitting Pete stepped in to hit left handed against Atlanta's righthanded Gary Neibauer. The count went to two balls and no strikes.
Pete noticed the third baseman was playing deep. "I would never have thought about bunting in that situation with a man on second base," Pete said. "But we were ahead in the game, and so I said, what the heck, the batting title is on the line."
On the next pitch Pete dropped a neat bunt down the third base line and galloped to first for the base hit. As he stood on first, he knew the batting championship was his for the second successive year. "Roberto would have had to go seven for seven to beat me," he said this winter, the pride ringing in his voice.
That base hit was Pete's 218th of the season and only slap-hitting Matty Alou with 23l had more in either league. It was the fourth season in Pete's seven-year career that he has knocked out more than 200 hits and Pete considers the ability to get 200 hits the true measure of a batter's skill. "Heck," he was saying this past winter, "no one in that other league got 200 hits."
Actually, in the entire history of baseball, only 11 other players have had more 200-hit seasons than Pete, and of those 11, 10 are in the Hall of Fame, so you have an idea where Pete, now only 27, is headed.
Almost certain to join Pete in that august Hall, say most baseball men, is his buddy, Johnny Bench, now only 22 and acclaimed last year not only the best catcher in baseball, but perhaps the best ballplayer in baseball (he got more votes for the NEA's All-Star team than any other player--more than Reggie Jackson, Tony Oliva, Pete, anybody). Ever since John's rookie season of 1968, teammates and opponents have raved about his fantastic arm. His throws--never higher off the ground than the point at which he releases the ball--stings the hands of Red infielders and makes base stealers think twice about running against him.
His bat has been making pitchers also very much aware of young Johnny Bench. In his rookie season he hit .275, 15 home runs and collected 82 "ribbies," as the ballplayers call RBI's. Last season, bothered not at all by any sophomore jinx, he hit .295, banged out 26 home runs, and drove in 90 runs.
What made his batting record especially remarkable was that Johnny Bench caught nearly every Red game from the day he got out of the Army (after a two- week stay) in mid-July until the end of the season. "I know he is tired," said Red manager Dave Bristol during the wild race among five teams for the western division title. "But even if John isn't hitting, he helps the pitchers. They know if a man gets on base, all they have to do is keep the man reasonably close and the runner isn't going to go from first to second and be in scoring position."
Yet Johnny, talking to a visitor in his high-rise apartment in the hills overlooking Cincinnati this winter, said he couldn't be overjoyed by the 1969 season in which the Reds had come so close only to finish third behind the Braves and Giants. "I guess I had a good year," he was saying in his measured, thoughtful way, a touch of Oklahoma drawl in his voice. "But it doesn't really matter when you don't win. It's an old cliche, I know, to say that when you don't win, it doesn't really matter. But when you've worked hard, when you have a good club, and then you come as close as we came, you have got to feel bad."
Pete thinks that John will soon be an even greater hitter. "He will be a tremendous hitter when he learns his own strength," Pete said this winter. "He will realize he can hit the ball to rightfield and power it out of the park, because he is so strong. He just may be the strongest guy on the ball club. Also John is different than most power hitters, because he makes contact a lot more than most of them do: he will hit for average. And he doesn't have bad speed for a catcher."
In the winter of 1968-69, Pete asked John to play on several of the basketball teams that Pete plays for five days of the week. John, an honorable mention All-American basketball-player in high school, said sure.
"We played 50 games last winter," Bench was saying, this winter. "We lost only three games of the 50. In one of those games I wasn't there; in another, Pete wasn't there; and in the third game, neither one of us was there."
Mostly Pete drove to the hoop in his quick, muscular way, while John shot from the baseline with a bulls-eye jump shot and muscled underneath for the rebounds. Using John's fantastic arm, the two devised a play that drove opponents to despair. When his man took a shot, Pete would turn and race for the basket. Catching the ball as it swished through the nets, Johnny would step one foot out of bounds, then fire the ball on a low line the entire length of the court, where Pete would grab it and dunk the ball.
After those basketball games John and Pete talked a lot and Pete introduced Johnny to Hy Ullner, the owner of Hyde Park Clothes, a well-groomed clothing manufacturer who has learned a thing or two in his time about merchandising. Ullner was handling much of Pete's outside business investments, which included some real estate as well as investments in stocks and bonds.
"I could see that Johnny Bench would make a good businessman," Ullner was telling someone recently. "He knew how to ask the right questions and he knew how important it is to sell big ticket items, for example."
It also occurred to Ullner and Rose that Pete, though only in his mid-20's, was at the peak of his career. Ahead were another ten years or so and then he will be through. Bench, on the other hand, will be a star for at least 15 more years. Why not combine the names to double their impact-and for a longer period of time? And so began Rose-Bench Enterprises.
This winter Rose-Bench Enterprises was negotiating to take over a Pontiac agency. "We won't sell cars ourselves," Pete was saying while the negotiations were going on. "But Johnny and I would be on hand to greet customers as they come in, talk to them, make them acquainted with our salesman and our cars."
Beyond the Pontiac agency, says Ullner, there are many other businesses for Bench and Rose. He talks about real estate, restaurants, TV commercials and any other kind of business that deals with the public and could be helped by the magnetic sales appeal of two of baseball's biggest stars.
Johnny is grateful to Pete for bringing him into this triumverate. "It's all very fortunate for someone my age," he was telling the visitor to his bachelor's apartment last winter. "I mean, I miss not going home to see my mom and dad and brothers in Oklahoma. I could get a job there and make some money, which is something the Bench family, never had very much of. But if I am going to make a future--something I can step into when I get out of baseball, it is going to be in Cincinnati because my name is big around here. I don't want to have to leave baseball and say: 'What am I going to do now?'"
Johnny is also aware that his presence will be of considerable help in the future to Bench-Rose Enterprises. "Pete will be a star for a number of years to come,"
Johnny said. "Pete's name will start it off and keep it going and then later, when he is out of baseball, I will be able to take over. It is the people who are currently playing the game who have the charisma, so it will help when Pete is no longer playing and I am playing."
There are many who predict a Hall of Fame future for Bench and though he is intelligent enough to know the future is there, he is also aware of the perils. "A lot of people," he said, "have been awfully kind to me and predicted great things for me," he said. "But your future is not always safe because you can get hurt and you are gone."
Pete Rose, though, is convinced that barring injuries Bench will be an all-time great catcher and be an asset that will make Rose-Bench Enterprises a go-go growth company of the future. What will not hurt is Charley Hustle's own hustling salesmanship. "Hey," he said to a writer from New York this winter, "I got an idea. I formed a basketball team of Red players-myself, John, Jim Maloney, Gerry Arrigo, Jimmy Stuart. What would you think of a basketball game between the Reds and the Mets at Madison Square Garden? The Mets are everything these days, aren't they? I bet it would draw 15,000."
"Well, maybe 5,000," said the writer.
"That would be all right," said Rose, that mathematical mind of his clicking off how much you could make with a 5,000 house.
The two have become so close they dress very much alike--in mod clothes they get free from Ullner's Hyde Park Clothes (Pete is a vice president of Hyde Park and Johnny may soon join as a member of the board). "We both like Edwardian double-breasted suits," Johnny was saying last winter. "We go for the same type of pattern, though I might be a little more daring with flared jackets and things like that than Pete."
The closeness of the two was symbolized in the voting by Red fans late last season for the Reds' player of the year. The winner was Johnny Bench, the runner-up Pete Rose. The contest was sponsored by the Marathon Oil Company, which gave Bench 20 shares of Marathon stock as first prize. One day Rose-Bench Enterprises may be selling shares of its own stock, and if the price of those shares rises on the stock market as fast as Pete Rose and Johnny Bench have risen in the world of baseball, only the sky is the limit (Devaney, 29,60-61).
Story Taken From the Baseball Annual No. 10 (1970) - Pages 29, 60-61.
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