Palm Beach Gardens, Florida - Around the time when Pete Rose broke into a big game at an amazing speed and introduced Cincinnati to baseball thrills like "Strike to Base", an Oklahoma teenager has already slipped on his local high school diamond first without any impact.

Something

"I'm not running fast enough. I'm going to fail," Johnny Bench said. "I'm not really sliding. I'm just failing."

Of course, in a few years, the Roses and the bench will be superstar teammates – hitting home runs on the bench completely changed the catch position, the Roses ran and took a walk, amassed thousands of hits and inspired generations of kids to intensify coaching, diving, diving, diving into bases in the United States.

But while Ross has received honors for popularizing the move that led to the extinction of the hook, the little-known legacy of the little-known Red Machine Age is that the future Hall of Fame member of Binger, Oklahoma, is also one of the rare young players, and a reason he has any reason to pay attention to the Rose.

Why?

“The Enos massacre,” the bench said. “The Enos massacre was the first to do so.”

"I want to save Pitt": Johnny Bench

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The hard, hard massacre was a favorite of many eager young players who regarded him as a perennial All-star in the 1940s and early 1950s.

These included the bench and Ross, who praised the massacre and inspired his first hard run during his walk.

"I imitated Enos's massacre. But it killed me." "It just hurt my chest, hurt everything. Because I wasn't gliding. I was dragging."

He said that it wasn't better on the professor's bench in his development years, with the runner trying to slide outside the bag's feet first and then hooking the corners of the bag with his toes.

"No matter which way I go, I will still fail," he said.

If the bench joined the Reds in 1965 at the inaugural draft of Major League Baseball, and he continued to serve as the starting drama, Rose's preference and Flair eliminated it.

"I'm never going to slip over my head first again because that's going to be, 'Oh, you're doing what Pete is doing.' That's Pitt's stuff."

The rest is history - the image of the Rose sliding head is first immortalized on the bronze medal, until today on the large stadium square in the United States.

The story is part of an ongoing series this year at the 1975 Big Red Machine First Championships.