Now that Pete Rose has been reinstated by Major League Baseball and is eligible for the Hall of Fame, the Veazie Salmon Club is revisiting a unique connection it has to the baseball legend.
Through a series of chance encounters and personal relationships, the club ended up receiving an autographed bat from Rose and the Cincinnati Reds team that he both coached and played for in 1985. The club auctioned off the signed bat at its season-ending dinner that year, with $15 dinner tickets giving people a chance to win it in a raffle.
And it wasn’t just any bat. As legendary Bangor Daily News sports and outdoors editor Bud Leavitt explained at the time, it was a bat that Rose and his teammates signed on a historic night when Rose broke Ty Cobb’s all-time MLB hits record in September of that year.
In an email on Wednesday highlighting this connection to Rose, the Veazie Salmon Club put out a call for anyone who might know where the bat wound up, saying it “would be exciting and interesting to see its travels.”
The club’s current president, Andy Fitzpatrick, said he had found a book from the 1985 dinner in the club’s archives, but it didn’t include information about who won the raffle.
“We would love to know where this bat is,” Fitzpatrick said, emphasizing the club’s storied history that includes other prominent sporting connections like Red Sox great Ted Williams being a member.
Fitzpatrick hoped that some of the club elders might know who won that auspicious raffle.
Back in 1985, Leavitt also explained the dizzying set of connections and circumstances that brought the bat to Veazie in the first place. Club member Cliff Page had randomly encountered and befriended major league catcher Bo Diaz on a trip to Florida.
Diaz played for that 1985 Reds team, and as Rose approached Cobb’s record, Page made an offhanded comment at the club about a phone call with Diaz.
“Too bad you can’t get him to have Pete Rose sign one of his bats and make it part of the dinner auction,” someone at the club told Page, as recounted by Leavitt.
“That night he telephoned Diaz in Cincinnati and the answer was, ‘Let me see what I can do, Clifford,’” Leavitt wrote. “Three weeks ago one of Pete Rose’s bats arrived at the Page residence in Orono. The very night Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record, Diaz had members of the Cincinnati Reds who played in that one historic baseball game sign the bat.”
A baseball memorabilia collector offered the club $1,000 at the time for the bat, according to Leavitt’s reporting, but it wasn’t going to be sold to the highest bidder.
“The bat will become the possession of someone in attendance at Saturday night’s dinner,” Leavitt wrote on Oct. 15, 1985. And now the club is trying to determine who that person was.
Rose had been on the MLB’s permanently ineligible list, and thus unable to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, for betting on games while managing the Reds. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred removed Rose and 16 other deceased individuals from that ineligible list Tuesday after a petition from Rose’s family.
Rose died last September at the age of 83. He remains the all-time hits leader with 4,256.
Fitzpatrick said the Salmon club would like to have some sort of photo, potentially of the Rose autographed bat or the person who won it, to display on the clubhouse walls. With the raffle’s 40th anniversary approaching, he wouldn’t be opposed to some sort of event to celebrate that history, either.
“Wouldn’t it be cool on October 15th of 2025 if we could have it appear at the Salmon Club for everybody to view,” Fitzpatrick added.
