re Rick Barry:

as I recall, he was the only NBA 50 Greatest Players in attendance in Cleveland for All-Star Weekend 1996 or 1997 that was not in a great mood. mainly he just complained that no one - not even his kids (Scooter, Jon, Brent, and Drew) - copied his underhanded foul shooting.

Well, he got the one kid he had with his second wife to shoot underhanded. And he was a really good free throw shooter in college! And all this makes me think: 1) Canyon Barry was born when Rick Barry was 50 years old. That's not exactly a record for a father's age, but I can't imagine the exhaustion of raising a baby when you're 50, and 2) maybe the gene for shooting granny-style is recessive, and only his second wife had this gene.

Is the Pinson/Robinson story above true?

If it's not, it's certainly been repeated a lot. It's in all the bios, I think, and Rose has always told it that way -- when he was a rookie the white veterans treated him like dirt because he was threatening Blasingame's job, but the black players liked him and liked his style, and took them under his wing, to the point that the front office felt compelled to ask him to stop hanging out with them so much. It's why Rose became determined to never treat a young player the way the white vets treated him. Posnanski's book says everybody he interviewed on the 1975 team has a story about how much Rose did for them when they joined the team.

It might be true that he was more popular with the black players than the white ones and that this raised some eyebrows. It might also be true that Blasingame was well-liked and they were mad at Rose for taking his job. But the claim that "They didn’t want a rookie on second base, because they had veterans in all the other positions" is weird and almost certainly wrong. The Reds were a very young team offensively, including Tommy Harper, a rookie, starting in RF.

I got to know who Pete Rose was in the early 1980s, when he was still really famous, but was not much of a baseball player by then. But he was clearly one of the, what, 10 most famous players in the sport...maybe in sports.

I was in the common area of the office building this morning and Billy Joel's Zanzibar, a hit on rock stations in 1979, was playing:

Rose, he knows he's such a credit to the game
But the Yankees grab the headlines every time.
Melodrama's so much fun
In black and white for everyone to see, whoa!