Parker’s and Davis’s stories are part of the received lore of many millennial Cincinnati boyhoods. On the Little League fields of Cincinnati, Davis, in particular, held the status of a Greek god. During my own stint as a Little Leaguer, playing on the by-then retired Parker’s Roselawn Cobras, I and most of my teammates knew we’d never have Parker’s cannon-like arm or any of Davis’s myriad gifts—his muscular, sinewy frame, blazing speed, or scintillating power. His looping batting stance—back erect and bat held loose at his waist—was imitated everywhere you looked, however. He was a paragon of cool.
Davis is also one of the game’s great what-ifs. He joined the Reds in 1984, and in his 1986 breakout he became one of just two men in baseball history—oddly the spectacular Rickey Henderson also achieved the same feat that year and the year before—to hit more than twenty home runs and steal more than eighty bases in the same season. The following year, in 1987, he was the first man in major-league history to hit more than thirty-five home runs and steal more than fifty bases in a single season—a record not surpassed until Ronald Acuña, Jr., of the Atlanta Braves bested his numbers, just last year. Davis’s career was marred by a litany of injuries, but there was a moment in the eighties when you looked at Davis and could imagine him becoming what Michael Jordan became in basketball: an incomparable leading light, whose mastery defines an era.
In his moving memoir, “Born to Play” (Viking), from 1999, written with Ralph Wiley, Davis reveals how, at the height of his brief superstardom, he was offered the chance to do an advertisement for Cincinnati’s Provident Bank. This would have made him the rare Black Cincinnati athlete to do a local ad. He was paid one dollar to do so. Davis, knowing advertisement work was difficult to garner for Black athletes in the city, felt that he would help “open doors for the young black players”; someone would need to prove to the city’s business and financial élite, during a decade in which O. J. Simpson sold rental cars to a national audience, that a Black celebrity could sell products in a city where the Ku Klux Klan, for many years, would display a cross on Fountain Square at the holidays.
Davis was, in some respects, the player that Rose could never be, a man graced with physical abilities that few players had ever brought to the game; Rose, on the other hand, had the durability to play twenty-four seasons, never suffering the type of catastrophic injuries that derailed Davis’s career. An inversion of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, they loved each other from the start. “Eric Davis can do anything he wants to do in a baseball uniform,” Rose said of his star-player-to-be, near the start of the 1987 season, and Davis nearly proved him correct. In his memoir, Davis also recalls that Rose predicted that Davis’s sinewy, six-foot-two, hundred-and-sixty-pound frame would struggle to stand up to a full season’s worth of play most years. That turned out to be correct, too. “It all came true,” Davis writes in his memoir. “Pete was just a Yoda-type dude to me.”
Davis had a more complicated relationship with the team’s owner, Marge Schott, a chain-smoking car baroness who became the first woman to buy a controlling stake in a Major League Baseball team when she purchased the Reds, in 1984. In a particularly egregious act, Schott—who would openly refer to Davis and Parker as her “million-dollar niggers” and who was ultimately banished from the game for professing Nazi sympathies—refused to spend fifteen thousand dollars to fly Davis across the country on a medically equipped plane, when he lacerated his kidney in three places while attempting a diving catch early in the deciding game of the 1990 World Series, an injury that initially led doctors to advise him to consider not playing at all during the 1991 season.
When he rejoined the Reds, in 1996, after splitting three seasons between Los Angeles and Detroit and taking a year away from the game following several more catastrophic injuries, a rejuvenated Davis won the National League’s Comeback Player of the Year award. The following year, he moved on to the Baltimore Orioles as a free agent, where he had a magical season, hitting in the .380s well into May, until his life was upended by a cancer diagnosis. He won baseball’s Roberto Clemente Man of the Year award, but perhaps the most impressive thing he ever did in the game came the following year, in 1998. Having continued chemotherapy up to the eve of spring training in 1998, Davis, at thirty-six years old, hit .327 and went on a thirty-game hit streak for the Orioles—still a team record.
Davis’s shameful treatment by the team in the nineteen-eighties stands in stark contrast to Rose’s experience. O’Brien suggests that Rose’s gambling had been an open secret for more than a decade throughout Major League Baseball, and certainly within the Reds organization, but both the league and the media were reluctant to enforce the rules against him. O’Brien’s reporting indicates that the M.L.B. had known about Rose’s gambling since 1978, but it was not until 1989 that the league acted, and only after the F.B.I. had opened an investigation into the matter. In January of that year, Paul Janszen, a gym buddy of Rose’s who placed bets for him, attempted to sell the story to Sports Illustrated in the hope of recouping forty-four thousand dollars in gambling losses that Rose owed him. The magazine declined to pay and sought to report the story itself. When the M.L.B. got word that a piece on Rose’s gambling was in the works from the most venerable athletics magazine in the country, the organization raced to get in front of the situation, summoning Rose to New York for a meeting with the commissioner.
Even then, Rose might have avoided catastrophe: Peter Ueberroth, the outgoing commissioner, had little interest in pursuing the matter against one of the game’s all-time legends. But the sport had just appointed a new commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti—a former Ivy League college president and the father of the actor Paul—whose comportment and class instincts couldn’t have been further from Rose’s. Clad in a suit O’Brien describes as “shiny, like sharkskin,” in which the embattled Reds manager “looked like a mobster,” Rose denied any wrongdoing. Giamatti was unconvinced, and his deputy commissioner, Fay Vincent, pushed to hire John Dowd, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney (and future lead lawyer to President Trump during the Mueller investigation), to look into the gambling rumors. After speaking with Rose’s erstwhile friend Janzsen, Dowd had his smoking gun: betting slips in Rose’s handwriting clearly showing instructions to place money on M.L.B. games.
Dowd’s blockbuster report, in 1989, concluded that Rose had indeed placed bets on Major League Baseball games, including those involving the Cincinnati Reds, and in doing so Rose had violated one of the most stringent clauses of Major League Baseball’s code, implemented in the wake of the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which members of the Chicago White Sox intentionally threw the World Series. The finding, which Rose disputed for fifteen years, ultimately led not just to his lifetime suspension from Major League Baseball but also to his permanent ineligibility for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The Reds’ 1990 World Series victory, a year after Rose’s banishment, was largely won by a set of players—Davis, Barry Larkin, and Paul O’Neill, among others—whom Rose had nurtured as manager. Charlie Hustle watched the team’s World Series victory from jail, having been convicted of tax evasion in the aftermath of his suspension.
O’Brien persuasively renders Rose’s fall from grace as a tale of tragic hubris: he suggests that the same aspects of Rose’s personality that made him such an indefatigable hitter, one of the hardest outs the game has ever seen, were ultimately the seeds of his demise. Here was a man who wouldn’t give in and would fight to the bitter end in every aspect of his life. That he mistakenly thought himself too big to fail is surely the downside of the overweening confidence required to become such a remarkable player with such limited gifts.
But Rose’s story also illustrates how the scaffolding of unyielding adoration by the media, the fans, and the American political establishment which protected Rose from the fallout of his excesses for so long never existed for Black players such as Parker, who saw his reputation-shattering cocaine scandal in 1985 quickly amplified by the baseball media, or Davis, who had a cocaine scandal of his own in 1988 that was wholly fabricated from hearsay. The two were easy scapegoats in a media culture and news environment that often pathologized Black masculinity as deviant and dangerous. Meanwhile, their manager, ostensibly a paragon of white America’s most cherished views about itself, benefitted from a culture of hero worship that blinded his many supporters to his flaws.
Rose’s downfall did not necessarily end the glory days of baseball or of the Cincinnati Reds, as O’Brien’s subtitle suggests, but both the game’s importance on the national scene and the team’s fortunes have waned since the early nineties. The 1990 season marked the Reds’ last World Series win before the evolving economics of the game turned them into a near-permanent also-ran. In baseball’s modern era, the increasingly lucrative local-television deals that large-market franchises garner for their broadcast rights have given them a distinct financial advantage in pursuing the best free agents and retaining their own stars, making Cincinnati a glorified farm team to the glamour clubs on the coasts. The Reds are now on the back half of yet another disappointing season in which ownership sent away two of their best pitchers. The team hasn’t won a playoff series in twenty-eight years, ten years longer than the next longest drought in Major League Baseball. (“Where are you gonna go?” said the current Reds president, Phil Castellini, in 2022, dismissing fans’ concerns about the direction of the franchise. If cities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Oakland, with large working-class and Black populations, were the center of the baseball world in Rose’s heyday—those franchises won seven of the ten World Series championships during the nineteen-seventies and were three of the best teams in baseball when Rose was banished from the game a decade later—it was because they could still afford to be so, and perhaps we shouldn’t find it odd that the game was more popular then, too.
Eric Davis now works as a senior adviser to the general manager for the Cincinnati Reds. He credits Rose with helping him earn a position in the same front office that left him for dead in Oakland. “I picked up a lot from him,” Davis wrote in his memoir. “About everyday particulars of lineups, game strategy, matchups, when to go get a guy. I’m an assistant general manager waiting to happen in another life thanks to the likes of Pete, Parker, and Sparky Anderson.” (Anderson managed the Tigers during Davis’s sojourn in Detroit and the Reds during Rose’s greatest years as a player.)
The Reds’ immediate future will rely heavily on the All-Star shortstop Elly de la Cruz, who has emerged in his first full season as the most exciting player in baseball, just as Davis did thirty-eight summers ago. Davis mentored de la Cruz in the minor leagues; the young star, who leads the major leagues in stolen bases this season, wears No. 44 in Davis’s honor. He will continue to do so, one imagines, until he is eligible for free agency and the Reds can no longer afford his services. ♦