Pete Rose @ baseball-reference.com
The Big Red Machine @ Wikipedia
Pete Rose is the all-time hits leader in Major League Baseball. 4,256 career hits. No one in the history of the sport has more. His nickname is Charlie Hustle. His entire identity is built on contact, on relentless, grinding, inescapable contact.
Across 35 simulated timelines of Game 4 of the 1972 World Series, he went 30 for 146.
That is a .205 batting average. Zero home runs. 3 RBI. Hitless in 16 of 35 games - almost half. That is what you expect from a September call-up, not the Hit King in a World Series game.
The only hustling that Charlie Hustle was doing was hustling back to the dugout after his plate appearances.
The 1972 Cincinnati Reds were supposed to be one of the most fearsome offenses in baseball history. Pete Rose. Joe Morgan. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. Four future Hall of Famers in the same batting order. The Big Red Machine.
In 35 simulated timelines, the Machine ran on two cylinders.
Johnny Bench hit .286 with 7 home runs and 17 RBI. Tony Perez hit .266 with 4 home runs and 23 RBI. Bench and Perez showed up, every timeline, every strategy engine. Bench and Perez did their jobs.
Pete Rose hit .205 with zero home runs and 3 RBI. Joe Morgan hit .211 with 1 home run and 8 RBI.
Bench and Perez combined for 11 home runs and 40 RBI. Rose and Morgan combined for 1 home run and 11 RBI. The greatest lineup of its era was carried by its catcher and its first baseman. The left fielder and the second baseman - the two players history remembers most fondly - were passengers.
The Machine was not broken. It was half-broken. And in a series of one-run games, half a Machine is not enough.
Twelve innings. Five at-bats. Five chances to be the hero in a one-run World Series game. Rose had zero hits. The game went to extras and Rose still couldn't find a gap. Oakland won 4-3 without Rose ever reaching base.
In this same game, Joe Morgan went 0-for-6. The two best contact hitters on the Big Red Machine combined for 0-for-11. Between them: zero hits, zero walks, zero times on base.
Another 12-inning game. Another 0-for-5 from Rose. But this time Cincinnati won anyway - 4-3. The Big Red Machine scraped together a victory in spite of its biggest star going hitless. They won without him. In this game, Charlie Hustle was Charlie Brown trying to kick the football.
This is the game where Cincinnati's pitching staff threw a combined no-hitter - and lost. In a spectacular breakdown of both defense and offense, 10 Cincinnati batters recorded hits off Ken Holtzman, and only two runs crossed the plate (both unearned).
Pete Rose never got to touch a single base.
His team got 10 hits. Rose got zero. In the cruelest game in 35 timelines, the Hit King couldn't hit.