Coming into this series, Pete Rose, the Reds’ popular player/manager, had tied Ty Cobb for the most hits in Major League Baseball history with 4,191.
If he didn’t break the record this night against Padres’ pitcher LaMarr Hoyt, he’d face the 29-year-old Show the next.
“Eric told me, ‘If Pete doesn’t get the hit, get me out of the stadium tonight because I really don’t want to talk to the press,” remembered Condit, who’d go on to be a sportscaster at WDTN and WHIO, now is the Director of Sales at Cox Media and is about to release a fascinating movie he’s directed and coproduced on Show.
The Padres right-hander elicited Condit’s help that September night because they were friends.
They had met three years earlier when Condit, then a student at St. Xavier High in Cincinnati, was asked by his brother, Jim, who ran a t-shirt printing shop in town, to deliver a shirt he’d made special for Show, who was speaking at the Draw Bridge Inn across the Ohio River in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.
Condit said Jim was a member of the John Birch Society and Show had joined the controversial right-wing group himself a year earlier.
Show took a liking to John in part because he shared some of his same conservative political ideas.
In the following years Condit said he and Show would regularly meet for dinner when the Padres came to Cincinnati.
Show would sometimes phone Condit’s Dayton apartment from California to chat on myriad subjects and once he visited the Condit’s family home on Cincinnati’s Eastside for a spaghetti dinner.
Another time he and his wife Cara Mia stopped by Jim’s house and they played music – Eric on his guitar and Jim on piano.
And then there was the night in a Cincinnati hotel when Show and his two best pals on the team – Dave Dravecky and Mark Thurmond, both of whom also had joined the John Birch Society – sat up with a local priest, Jim and John, who’s still a devout Catholic, and they talked religion until 4:30 in the morning.
That friendship helped set the stage for Show’s request that September night in 1985.
After Rose went 0-for-4, Condit hustled to the Padres’ clubhouse.
“As soon as Pete’s last at bat was over, I got Eric and escorted him out of the stadium,” Condit said.
They went to The Precinct, a Cincinnati restaurant, and Condit got an exclusive on-camera interview.
Asked about the looming 4,192 milestone, Show admitted:
“It’s a great accomplishment for Pete Rose, but I’d just as soon not be a part of that whole fiasco.”
Pressed on those thoughts, Show added that should Rose get a hit off him, “It would mean I’d have to stand around on the mound for about 10 minutes while everybody goes crazy for a while.”
Condit’s interview got national play and the following night, Show’s fear became reality.
Batting left-handed from an exaggerated crouch, Rose got the count to 2-1 and then slapped a hanging slider into left center that set off a long and joyous, stadium-consuming celebration.
The fans gave Rose a standing, roaring ovation. Teammates embraced him. Owner Marge Schott had a new car brought onto the field for the newly-crowned Hit King and Pete Jr., a batboy that night, ran to his dad.
In the last interview before his death last September – it was another exclusive for Condit – Rose admitted: “There was a 9-minute ovation with 52,000 people. It was the only time in my life I was on a baseball diamond and didn’t know what to do.”
Show was feeling the same way.
After the hit, he trotted to first base to shake hands with Rose, then returned to the mound and soon sat down and just watched.
Many people – including some teammates – took offense, seeing Show’s sitting as being disrespectful. Rose said he had no problem with it and reiterated that fact to Condit in the final interview.
As was the case so often in his career, Show’s actions, his intent, was misconstrued.
A year later, he too admitted to Condit that he hadn’t known quite what to do. But by then, that photo of him sitting alone on the mound became the defining image of his career.
Yet, the more you think about that the more you realize it was an indictment of his teammates and coaches, too.
Everybody was too busy watching the Rose festivities or criticizing Show from afar. No one ventured out to support him on the mound or guide him to the dugout for a brief respite.
“That’s where I dropped the ball,” Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy, who was the Padres’ catcher that night, said in the film. “I should have paid more attention to what Eric was doing.
“He was all alone out there.”
There would be other controversial situations in Show’s career, including hitting the Chicago Cubs Andre Dawson in the face with a pitch in a 1985 game, a bloodying blow that caused a bench-clearing confrontation on the field.
Lost in the negative swirl that came with these incidents was the fact that Show was a very good pitcher – the Padres’ all-time winningest pitcher with 100 victories – and also a compassionate guy off the mound, one known for seeking out homeless people on road trips and in San Diego and buying them dinner or taking them to shelters.
All this came after a childhood marred by verbal, emotional and physical abuse from his father and then later in his career, drug abuse that started with amphetamines to deal with back pain and ended with his 1994 death after an overdose of heroin and cocaine.
The loss of Show hit Condit hard, but it wasn’t until many years later that he got a fuller understanding of his friend’s oft-difficult life thanks to a powerful, 2010 article – “The Tortured Life of Eric Show” – that Tom Friend, one of the best sportswriters in the business, wrote for Outside the Lines. It was published on espn.com.
Condit said he knew nothing of the childhood abuse Show suffered until Friend’s account.
That story brought Show back to life for him and then he began to fully appreciate the exchanges he’d had with the pitcher over the years that no one else had had.
Although he thought it would make a great documentary, the project lingered in the back of his mind as he pursued his career outside of sports and he and wife, Chris, dedicated themselves to their family.
For a documentary on Show to have some real sizzle, Condit said he needed the thoughts of Pete Rose, with whom he’d also had several memorable dealings over the years.
Twice Condit had Rose as his cohost at the gala celebrity karaoke night he put on at the Fraze Pavilion to benefit cystic fibrosis.
Asked about his charity, Condit became tearful and needed time to compose himself. He finally shared how three of his wife’s siblings suffered from the hereditary disorder.
On one occasion – after Rose had been banished from baseball for betting on games - Condit handed him a letter as he left the stage and asked him to read it later.
He said he urged Pete, if he had gambled, to tell the truth. He told him he’d be embraced for doing so because “we are a forgiving society.”
He never learned if Pete read the letter and it wasn’t until last September 20th that they were finally able to meet when Rose came to town for an appearance and stayed at a Northern Kentucky hotel.
Condit and Rose had a 56-minute conversation on camera, in which Pete reiterated the respect he had for Show.
It was Rose’s last interview.
He died suddenly on Sept 30, 2024 at age 83.
Once he had the Rose interview, Condit – who is the director of the documentary and is co-producing it with Friend, who’s the writer on the project – began to build the film with a series of interviews with former teammates, friends, opposing players, clergy who tried to help Show, and most touchingly, the pitcher’s wife, Cara Mia, and his two sisters Cindi and Leslie.
It was Cara Mia’s first interview since Eric died 31 years ago.
For Cindi and Leslie, it was their first time getting together after nine years of estrangement, Condit said.
The film – entitled “Alone on the Mound: The Tortured Life of Eric Show” – is two weeks away from being completely finished, Condit said.
He’s in the process of finding a streaming partner and hopes it could be released in time for the World Series.
He sat down with me the other day and showed the 80-minute product and it was wonderful.
More than a baseball story – although those parts, especially the scenes capturing Rose’s historic 4,192 night, are exhilarating – it’s the compelling tale of a life whose glorious triumphs too often were eclipsed by heartbreak and trouble.
The Angry Young Man
The 60-feet, six inches meeting between Show and Rose on September 11, 1985 was the intersection of two lives whose baseball approach was opposite and yet in one way – Rose derailing his career by gambling; Show by drugs – was much the same.
Rose ate, slept, talked and defined himself by baseball. His was a head-first dive into the game.
Show’s myriad interests often pulled him away from the sport.
He was a physics major at the University of California Riverside and could talk to you about politics, religion and the stars overhead.
He embraced the guitar at an early age, and the documentary includes endearing home movies of him as a youngster mimicking Elvis Presley and clips from his big-league days playing jazz guitar.
His often-esoteric approach caused some teammates to see him as aloof and at least one called him condescending. Although Dravecky and Thurmond were his pals, he was otherwise seen as a loner.
Padres’ catcher Terry Kennedy used to call him “The Angry Young Man.” It was meant as a joke, but others heard it and made it a defining trait.
His involvement with the John Birch Society tainted some of the public’s view of him. The far right organization that embraces social conservatism has been labeled by many as racist and anti-Semitic and some tried to paint Show as such.
Once again that was a case of Show being misunderstood. Padres shortstop Gary Templeton, who is African American, said he didn’t consider any of the three to be racist and some of the other Black players on the team agreed with him.
A remembrance
The one rock in Show’s life was his wife, Cara Mia, whom he met in 1975 while playing in a summer baseball league in Wichita, Kansas.
Both 18, they first saw each other in a restaurant. He had his guitar and played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” for her, and by the time the song ended, the first notes of a long love affair had begun.
In the film she tells Condit about walking Eric back to their hotel in silence after he gave up Rose’s historic hit. She also talked about trying to get him to curtail his drug use and finally resorting to tough love as they separated and she pushed him to rehab once again.
The drug use had helped bring about his exit from the Padres in 1990 and led to a failed restart with the Oakland A’s.
In the film his sister Cindi candidly – and tearfully – admitted how he had come to her to help him get amphetamines and instead she had introduced him to crystal meth. Soon after that though she refused his requests because he was wanting more and more.
Eventually he began using heroin and cocaine excessively and soon lost his grip on reality and started having hallucinations.
Cara Mia continued to push him to get help and after one last binge he checked himself into a rehab facility, where he was put into bed.
He never woke up.
As Friend wrote, the 37-year-old Show was found with a loaded .22 caliber pistol under his pillow and his wedding band on his left ring finger.
Cara Mia had him buried in an emerald, green casket into which she placed a baseball and a guitar. She put her picture in his pocket.
Only one Padres’ player – Dravecky, who gave a touching eulogy – showed up at his funeral.
Until recently the franchise made little recognition of him. Even though he is the club’s all-time winningest pitcher, he is not in the Padres Hall of Fame.
Cara Mia and Condit both have written letters to the organization, hoping that slight is corrected and the Padres finally did honor him on July 5th when they played the Texas Rangers at Petco Park.
That meant Bochy was there to catch when Cara Mia – with Cindi and Leslie at her side – threw out the first pitch.
The best gift of all though will come from the documentary Condit has directed.
It’s a remembrance sometimes filled with unflinching truth, but always with love, insight and understanding.
When this film ends – sad as it is – you realize Eric Show was a good guy and good pitcher.
And when that happens, he doesn’t seem quite so alone on the mound anymore.
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