See Photos of Pete Rose Becoming Baseball's All-Time Hits Leader

He is 44 years old but seems both younger and older, sort of timeless too, and he is still thriving at the major league level. In an ordinary profession, the 40s may be a disquieting, though far from a disqualifying age. Mortality’s half time. But for a 44-year-old ballplayer, the end is more than just perceivable. The fight to hold it off is well on. And the spectators know that the struggle represents no less than a simple love of life. This beguiling summer, the most single-minded baseball player since Ty Cobb has done better than play with time. He has reached back into it to play with Cobb. It took Pete Rose two decades and more, just a blink and a nod on the eternal baseball schedule, but he has come to both a paramount moment in his game and a place of moment in any enterprise. By the numbers and beyond them, he is what he does. Rose is baseball.

Coiled to the left of home plate, he has scarcely stirred from the position he staked nearly 23 major league seasons, almost 4,192 hits, ago. The brush-cut hair that blew to bangs and billowed to bouffant has been tamed and dyed. The kneesprung crouch has lost barely a trace of temper. The burly body remains respectably taut, a gunnysack full of cantaloupes and cannonballs. The seamed and arid face, a slowly eroding riverbed, is as wide open as a gap-toothed grin. It is the map of an obstinate man with 737 doubles who still flings himself flat and breaststrokes like a gopher into second base.