So, no — this wasn’t an ordinary slide into second base that afternoon in October 1973. “This was intentional,” recalled Mets outfielder Ed Kranepool. “There was no reason for it.” Rose was out by 15 feet. “And he just kept running,” Kranepool said.
On impact, Rose and Harrelson exchanged words, cursed some more. “And I just grabbed him,” Rose told me later. “I just grabbed him. And then Wayne Garrett came in from third, and he started the whole mêlée.” Garrett, the Mets third-baseman, was just trying to protect the much smaller Harrelson. But Rose liked to blame Garrett for what happened next: multiple fights at second base, players throwing sucker punches in the pile, and Reds reliever Pedro Borbon swinging at anyone in a blue hat. “Guys scattered all over the place,” recalled Jon Matlack, a pitcher for the Mets who was in the pile trying to peel guys apart. “There were fights on the field from a couple of guys.”
When it was over, there were hats strewn everywhere, and Borbon accidentally placed a Mets cap on his head — a mistake that enraged him so much that he took his frustration out on the hat itself. “He started biting it and ripping it,” recalled Tony Pérez, Rose’s Hall of Fame teammate. Borbon was acting, Pérez said, “like a dog,” while the fans behaved even worse. For minutes afterward, they threw trash at Rose, including that bottle of whiskey, and gave Reds manager Sparky Anderson no choice but to pull his team off the field.
“I’m taking my men out of here,” Anderson barked at the umpires. “Pete Rose has done too much for baseball to die in left field.”
The players didn’t think much of it at the time. “It was just another day at the ballpark,” Pérez said. “That’s the way baseball was played 50 years ago,” Jones agreed. But looking back on it now, the players who were there, the men in the fray at Shea Stadium, realize that it was one of the last moments in baseball history when anything like this would be tolerated. Changes were coming that would alter the sport forever: the dawn of free agency a year later; the security of multiyear contracts for the first time in players’ lives; the injection of big money into the game by the late 1970s; the riches of billion-dollar television deals by the 1980s; and a raft of new rules and edicts intended to protect players — in whom the owners had invested millions of dollars.