Pete Rose Sings

I was too young to appreciate Pete Rose's jaw-dropping comedy value when he was actually playing -- I just thought of him as the old guy with the Dorothy Hammil hairdo who kept hitting singles and later got busted for gambling. But as I first learned from Joe Posnanski's book "The Machine" and then later from a long interview I did with Posnanski (here), the dude was simultaneously incredibly revered and acknowledged as a turbo-charged dirtbag during his playing days. That seems somehow too sophisticated for the current culture, but maybe people just better understood the appeal of a man in uniform awkwardly singing a jingle in those days.

This all came to mind because an internet friend emailed yesterday looking for information on Rose's brief and frankly impossible to imagine tenure in Montreal back in 1984. Because the Sports Illustrated Vault is one of the three or four best things on the Internet, I can link to an article about Rose's Francophone interlude. Lots of good Rose-working-out-on-Nautilus-machine stuff for the ladiez in the opening grafs, too. I don't mean this in a gay way or nothing, but...yummy.