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off-seasons and lived at the house on Braddock Street and worked some odd jobs, at the ferry or packing up boxcars for the UPS or any other work he could find. And then, on account of all those triples and that .331 batting average at Tampa and after a season at Macon in the Sally League during which he hit .330 and showed plenty more of that drive, Pete got called up to the big leagues.
    He still lived in his boyhood room that rookie season of 1963 and Dave, now 15 years old, still slept in that same room with him too. Pete owned a car then, and a better one than the cramped and ancient ’37 Plymouth he’d bought cheap off Ed Blum a couple of years before. This was a ’57 Corvette, plenty of wear on it, and with the Rochester fuel injection that gave the car some giddyup but that also meant Pete could never start the damn thing if the morning was even a little cold.
    He’d wake up Dave, who was still bleary and remembering that it had been just a couple of hours earlier that he’d opened his eyes for a moment and seen Pete standing in their dimlit bedroom, stripped down before the mirror and once again swinging and swinging the lead-weighted bat uncle Buddy had given him. They’d rouse Staaby and maybe another kid on the block, and they’d all maneuver that Corvette, the Green Bean they called it, down the hill onto flat River Road. The teenage boys would push as Pete, in the driver’s seat, popped the clutch and gave some gas until finally the engine caught and with a thanks-buddies beep-beep-beep Pete was off, past the traffic light at the Anderson Ferry Road, and on his way the seven miles or so to Crosley Field, to park in the players’ lot and to play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds.

Chapter 4
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    Cooperstown, 2012
    O N THE Friday morning of induction weekend, 2012, word got out in Cooperstown that Rose, along with his girlfriend Kiana Kim and her two children, would be having a midmorning breakfast at TJs Place on Main Street. TJs, a diner, opened in 1990 and was itself a pioneer in Cooperstown’s rapidly expanding memorabilia trade, selling from its adjoining retail space autographed baseball cards, vintage ballcaps and other items of the ilk. The green dining tables all have sugar and jam caddies on them, and the walls around the eating areas are hung with old-time baseball photographs, as well as colorful Grandma Moses–style paintings depicting what is ostensibly a sunny Saturday scene near Cooperstown: wide rolling lawns in front of clapboard houses, a man pushing a wheelbarrow, fruit trees, kids jumping rope.
    At TJs’ front register, where you can settle up for your eggs and also buy a baseball signed by, say, Bert Blyleven, you were likely (until March 2013 when he sold the place) to find the owner, Ted Hargrove, a large gregarious man in later middle age whose typical outfit includes a tall gray top hat, suspenders and loafers without socks. He knew all the regulars—the locals as well as many of the patrons who come back in on one weekend, induction weekend, each year—and he set a mood with his general joviality.
    Rose would often stop in at TJs for breakfast or lunch when he was in town—“Pete and I have known each other for almost 20 years,” Hargrove says—yet this weekend was different. Normally Rose would just show up. But on this day his table was reserved in an area off to one side and when he and Kim entered the restaurant they were preceded and trailed by a small phalanx of cameramen, directors and assistants, a crew filming an episode for Rose and Kim’s then forthcoming reality series on the TLC cable network. From the start, one of Pete’s set lines about the show was, “We’re just like your family, only we have more base hits.”
    Reality in the case of this television show is a relative expression, a term of art—that is, things are realistic but not necessarily real. When Pete and Kiana first came in through TJs front door the camera people did not get the shot