The Cincinnati Reds are starting over with an interim manager who's a close friend of their banished star.
Tommy Helms will try to hold the team together as interim manager while the Reds begin a search for a permanent replacement for Pete Rose, who on Thursday was suspended for life from baseball."Things must go on," General Manager Murray Cook said, introducing Helms as Rose's temporary replacement. "The game must go on. The Reds must go on."
As he walked to a cluster of microphones, Helms expressed myriad emotions that mirrored the Reds' spirit.
"This is one of the saddest days of my life, to become manager in this situation," Helms said.
The Reds made their announcement in the same room where Rose made his farewell just six hours earlier. Rose's absence was felt.
"This isn't the happiest day for us in Cincinnati," owner Marge Schott said, in a tone that was barely audible. "In fact, it's a very sad day for me. As you know, I'm the one who really wanted Pete Rose to come back to Cincinnati (as player-manager in 1984) because everybody was so down. We spent five years together with the `Pete and Marge show,' and we had a lot of fun.
"But what really counts in baseball, because it is one of the most traditional things in our country, was the integrity of baseball. And that's really what I think the commissioner is more concerned about than anything else. And it's very important."
She tried to joke once with Helms the way she would tease Rose, but it was half-hearted.
"I'm glad to have him take over. He's going to win the next 10 games in a row. Hear that, Tom?" she said.
Cook said the team was caught off-guard by word of Rose's decision to accept the lifetime suspension from Giamatti. He said the ballclub figured Rose's legal challenge to Giamatti could go all season, and it made no contingency plans for losing the manager.
"The way things were going through the course of the season, it was pretty apparent that the whole Rose investigation would go through the whole year," Cook said.
"So I say this thing was thrust upon us; certainly not that we didn't give it some thought as time went along."
Cook said the team expects to begin a search for a permanent replacement shortly, and said Helms would be a candidate.