Baseball Career
Rose Jr. played baseball for Bridgetown, a suburb of Cincinnati, growing up. Rose Jr. would later become a fixture in baseball's minor leagues. Pete Rose Jr began his pro baseball career when he was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles and was assigned to the Erie Orioles of the New York-Penn League in 1989. In 1990 he joined the class A Frederick Keys of the Carolina League. In 1992 he played for the Columbus Red Stixx of the class A South Atlantic League. In 1993 he returned to the Carolina league this time playing for the Kinston Indians.
Rose's best minor league season was in 1997 at Chattanooga, for the Chattanooga Lookouts, at age 27. He hit .308 in 112 games with 25 home runs, 98 RBIs, 31 doubles and 75 runs scored for the Lookouts. Later that year, Rose was called up to the Cincinnati Reds for his first and only time in the major leagues. He hit only .143 in just 11 games for the Reds, but was widely shown on popular sports highlight shows when he copied his dad's famous crouching batting stance during the first pitch of his first Major League at-bat. The junior Rose's two MLB hits give him and his father 4,258 hits, the fourth-most ever by a father and son behind Bobby and Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey, Sr. and Jr., and Gus and Buddy Bell. (The Roses are also the only father-and-son combo to get over 6,000 hits in pro ball, majors and minors, with 6,467 at the end of 2009.)
Another of Rose's notable feats in the minors was, in 1998, while playing for the Indianapolis Indians of the International League, he and three teammates hit for the rare "homer cycle" in one inning; Rose opened the inning with a solo home run; Jason Williams, three at-bats later, hit a three-run home run; four batters later, Glen Murray hit a grand slam; and two hitters later, Guillermo Garcia hit a two-run shot to complete the cycle.
Rose played for the Tigres del Chinandega, a Nicaraguan professional baseball team during the 2007-2008 offseason. In 2007 and 2008, he played for the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League. He signed with the York Revolution on June 27, 2009, and was released on Sept. 14, 2009.
Read more about this topic: Pete Rose, Jr.
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