There's Something About An Aqua Velva Man

Flashing back on some of Pete Rose's greatest TV hits

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

I rarely write about baseball over here, for the simple reason that I generally prefer my Substack to be a celebration of joyful things in these dark times, and music brings me a helluva lot more joy than the current incarnation of major league baseball does these days. It says a lot about my present disconnection from the game that I can’t even get motivated to watch the Tigers — whom I started rooting for 1976 — in the playoffs. (Though of course I reserve the right to reconsider should they make it to the ALCS…)

But whenever a leading character from the wild world of 1970s baseball makes the news, that obviously changes things a bit. These days, unfortunately, they largely make the news by dying — which is exactly what Pete Rose, MLB’s all-time hits leader, did this past week.

The fact that “Charlie Hustle” has now hustled headfirst into the hereafter has predictably re-stoked the arguments over whether or not he should be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, and whether or not his being placed on MLB’s “permanently ineligible” list was truly warranted. I find HOF arguments painfully, eye-rollingly tedious, so I’m not gonna engage in (or entertain) any of them here.

I definitely don’t think Rose got a raw deal, however. Baseball players and managers have been prohibited from betting on the game since well before Rose was born; he knew this, and still did it anyway. And as nauseating and cynical as MLB’s current partnerships with gambling interests may be, they don’t change the equation of Rose’s “lifetime ban” at all — because players and managers are still not allowed to bet on baseball.

Rose probably could have eventually made his way back into the game by coming clean in a timely fashion and demonstrating some contrition. However, he made things worse for himself by stubbornly continuing to lie for years about his transgressions, and then only admitting to his baseball betting once he had an autobiography — the overdramatically titled My Prison Without Bars — to flog. He spent the last decades of his life alternately playing the proud outlaw and the weepy victim, a combination which resonated particularly well with a certain aggrieved segment of mostly white, mostly male sports fans, but which a lot of other folks found difficult to stomach or muster much sympathy for. Throw in things like an arrest for tax evasion and a very credible statutory rape allegation, and there really wasn’t a whole lot about Rose to admire off the field.

On the field was a different story, however. There’s no question that Pete Rose was one of the greatest hitters of all time, and few players of the 1970s were as much fun to watch — or as aggravating, if you happened to be rooting for whatever team he was playing against. Rose was the first player to step to the plate at the first National League game I ever attended (August 6, 1976), and he went 2-for-5 that evening as the Reds beat the Dodgers 7-4 at Chavez Ravine. I was rooting for the Dodgers, and fumed all the way home about how Rose and the rest of Sparky Anderson’s Big Red Machine totally dominated Walter Alston’s squad; at the same time, it was an undeniable thrill for this budding baseball fan to see Reds greats like Rose, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan do their “best of the best” thing in person.

Likewise, it drove me crazy that October when Rose, playing third base for the Reds, continually psyched out Yankees leadoff hitter Mickey Rivers (one of my favorite players of the “Bronx Zoo” era) by positioning himself closer to the pitcher’s mound than the hot corner. It drove Rivers crazy, too; despite hitting .312 during the regular season, he only went 3-for-18 as the Reds swept the ‘76 World Series in four games. I hated the Reds in those days, but damn did I respect them as well.

Of course, many of us hated Rose precisely because we wished that the players on our own teams would play with that same kind of all-out effort, intensity and swagger. And Rose’s swagger was thoroughly well-earned; by the time I first saw him in action, he’d already won a Rookie of the Year award, a Most Valuable Player award, two Gold Glove awards, three NL batting crowns and five hits titles, and had made the All-Star team at four different positions.

Rose’s mixture of swagger, stardom and lunchpail congeniality made him highly marketable in the eyes of Madison Avenue. By the second half of the 1970s, Rose was appearing in TV commercials for Atari, Geritol, Swanson Hungry Man Dinners, Zenith televisions, and a particularly retina-gouging print ad for Jockey briefs. (I’ll spare you the visuals.) But I’ll remember him most fondly for his series of ads for Aqua Velva aftershave…

My favorite is this one from 1976, in which the three-time batting champ finds himself suddenly distracted from a plate appearance by the eternal question of “What’s a man really want from his aftershave?” His interrogator is none other than actor (get ready you muthas for the) Vic Tayback, who is obviously killing time in the stands before they need him back on the Alice set. Tayback’s inquiry is of such burning importance that the game stops and he and a young ballpark vendor are allowed to take the field, where they sing the praises of Aqua Velva with Rose and a friendly home plate umpire.

Perhaps correctly surmising that Pete’s pitch-shy delivery of “He wants to be cool and refreshed!” wasn’t something that needed to be repeated, Aqua Velva’s ad writers chose not to have him sing in this next spot, which originally ran in 1977 and was updated in 1978 to mention Rose’s recent NL record 44-game hitting streak. Instead, he fields hard-hitting aftershave questions from a female journalist ( played, as eagle-eyed JTL reader Karl Straub pointed out below, by Betty Buckley) while taking some swings in the batting cage (cultural note: women reporters wouldn’t officially be allowed into MLB locker rooms until October 1978), then puts on a truly Clio-worthy performance by pretending to be attracted to an age-appropriate woman.

Speaking of Rose’s 1978 hitting streak… As much as folks respected Pete Rose for his hustle and intensity, he didn’t always appreciate it when such qualities were employed against him on the field. After Gene Garber snapped his record hitting streak on August 1st by striking him out to end the Reds-Braves contest at Fulton County Stadium, Rose bitched to all who would listen that the Atlanta reliever was “pitching like it was the seventh game of the World Series.” Because, you know, how dare Garber give the proverbial 110 percent against Rose when he’s going after Joe DiMaggio’s MLB record…

Following the 1978 season, Pete inked a four-year, $3.2 million free agent deal with the Philadelphia Phillies, making him one of the highest-paid players in baseball at the time. Thus, his 1979 Aqua Velva spot has him in Phillies pinstripes, but works a nice twist into the script by having Pete slide headfirst into second against former Reds teammate Joe Morgan. Not having seen each other in a while, the first thing they catch up on is (of course!) whether or not Pete’s still using Aqua Velva. And lo — even though Pete is now substantially richer than he was a year earlier, he still wants to smell like a man!

I love this spot, both because you can sense the genuine rapport and affection that existed between the two players, and because it reminds me of a story I read back in 1977: Apparently, the Reds had held a Pete Rose roast during the off-season, where Joe Morgan quipped that “putting a tux on Pete Rose is like putting whipped cream on manure” — a joke that really captured my 10 year-old imagination at the time.

Oh hey, and speaking of manure…

I trust you’re already well aware of the absolute shitshow that Hurricane Helene has created in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s all horrible, but the massive devastation in Western NC especially hurts my heart.

I fell in love with that part of the state during my four years in Greensboro, and the catastrophic destruction from the storm — which no one there was truly prepared for, since Western NC doesn’t usually get hurricanes up in the mountains, where they also hadn’t seen this level of flooding up there in over a century — is almost too much to fully comprehend. The death toll is still rising steadily; and according to my friends out there, the national media coverage is only conveying an iceberg-tip glimpse of the horrors that have been slowly emerging. A lot of folks are desperately in need of help, and it’s going to be a long, long time before things get back to any sense of pre-Helene normalcy.

For one small example, I took this photo of the friendly little mountain town of Chimney Rock back in November 2021, when I had the pleasure of vacationing in the area for a few days. According to the pics I’ve seen in the last week, almost all of the manmade things in the pic (including most of the paved road) are now completely gone — not just ruined, but quite literally washed entirely away.

Contrary to the false narratives that certain bad-faith blowhards (one of whom denied North Carolina 99 percent of its requested federal recovery funds for Hurricane Matthew in 2017) are pushing, massive relief efforts are well underway in the state with the full backing of the feds, and there are also numerous local organizations (as well as ad-hoc community groups) who are doing everything they can to be of help right now. Of course, the remote mountain locations of so many residents — and the washed-out roads that formerly connected them to larger nearby towns — are making things extraordinarily difficult for everyone.

The damage is so profoundly wide-ranging that it’s hard to know how or where to help. But if you’re interested in helping, my pal and colleague Josh Wilker — a Chicago resident who is now in Asheville assisting his family — has shared a link to some of the many legit charities and services that are assisting flood victims in Western North Carolina, all of which could use all the support they can get right now.

Also, my dear friends Kristin and Jay at Ziggy’s Refuge Farm Sanctuary — a non-profit animal sanctuary in Providence, NC — have been teaming up with their network of other animal sanctuaries to get desperately needed food and supplies to sanctuaries and rescues in the western part of the state; they’ve already made 14 such life-saving deliveries, and they’re just getting started. Ziggy’s is accepting cash donations via PayPal (PayPal.me/ziggysrefuge) and Venmo (@ziggysrefuge), but you can also send them a number of items via their Amazon wishlist, which they can then distribute to needy folks in their network. The biggest needs are:

Pig/horse/cat/dog/chicken feed

Generators

Chainsaws

Gas cans

Stall shavings

Straw, hay and hay pellets

Bottled water

Stall pellets

Non perishable food (for humans)

Cleaning supplies

Flashlights, headlamps

Solar lights (solar-powered anything, really)

Anyway, sorry to swerve this initially jovial post into deeply serious territory; but I wanted to amplify the S.O.S. signal on behalf of all my NC friends. Anything you can do, even if it’s just donating a few bucks to any of the above organizations or sharing this info with other folks who want to help, would be greatly appreciated.

See ya next week. In the meantime, stay safe, be thankful for the roof over your head, and be sure to tell those you love that you love them…

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