Besides seeing Pete Rose on the ballfield when I was a kid, I had only seen the baseball legend known as Charlie Hustle once in person. He was signing autographs in Las Vegas at a sports memorabilia show in 2005, and the prices were exorbitant. In addition, he wasn’t doing photos with fans, so I bypassed him entirely. But as luck would have it, the opportunity came round once again to get a photo with him in 2011. This time I had home-field advantage, as he was doing signings of his new documentary DVD 4192: The Crowning of the Hit King – along with assorted merchandise related to the movie – at three of our Kroger stores. Gambling issues aside, baseball players don’t get much better than Pete Rose.
I also had friends and co-workers Mandy and Julie in my corner. They gave me the inside scoop on when he was going to be doing some quick meet-and-greets with the store employees before the signings commenced. His first stop on Tuesday, February 22, 2011, was at our Liberty Township store. Originally I was going to try and hit this signing, but my boss called a meeting for that morning. So even though she said that I could leave for the signing, I decided to hit the second signing of the day at our Harrison Marketplace.
The signing was scheduled for 3:30 with the meet-and-greet 15 mintues prior. I hightailed it down there, planning on getting early, but when I arrived at 2:50, I was surprised to see that Pete Rose was already there and ready to head down and begin his signing. I had just enough time to get Julie to snap a photo of us. I brought along a Reds team photo from 1976 that I had had Johnny Bench sign in 1999, knowing full well that he wasn’t signing anything not related to the 4192 DVD – but hoping that I could slide it in during the meet-and-greet. I’ll never know if it would have worked because after our photo, he headed directly down to the sales floor and began the signing early.
Huge crowds turned out to see the Hit King. I actually ended up hanging out for a while, helping security up front of the line with crowd control. In the midst of this, I went ahead and purchased the DVD for a very reasonable $9.99 and had Julie get him to sign it between customers. Having heard some horror stories about Rose being ‘difficult’, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but for the most part he seemed rather nice to the fans – leaving it to his business manager to handle denying folks who wanted signatures on non-4192 memorabilia.
Friends Julie (left) and Mandy (right) assist Pete Rose with his signing
All in all, it was well worth hustling down to Harrison to get a nice signature and photo with Pete Rose.
Return to the February 2011 posting…
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