Turning the other cheek from such widely-quoted braggadocio, Fosse refrained from publicly criticizing Rose, although he did point out that if Rose “had slid conventionally on his rear, he would have made it easily.”

Fosse’s arm and shoulder movements were severely limited after his collision with Rose, but Cleveland Indians doctors, relying on X-rays, exhorted their shaken catcher to keep playing that season. “Back then, if you didn’t stick it out,” Fosse recalled, “you were faking an injury.”

Only the following spring was the full damage to his shoulder diagnosed. During batting practice before an Indians-Reds exhibition game early that season, Fosse felt stung when Rose called out to him in the outfield — their first encounter since the All-Star Game — “Hey, you’re off to a slow start!”

Fosse played through the 1970s as a major leaguer but never achieved his original promise. Now a 67-year-old color commentator for the Oakland Athletics, he recently told Fox Sports, “My career completely changed once I was hit.”

The scene of Fosse’s smashup with Rose is now vanished. While new red-brick baseball parks of human scale, harking back to the game’s early history, were rising in cities like Baltimore, the 1970s-Brutalist design of that multipurpose coliseum (it also housed the Cincinnati Bengals) made fans feel soul-deadened; it was demolished in 2002.

Fosse was not the only one in Riverfront Stadium whose life was altered that day. Before leaving the White House that morning, President Nixon (who intently watched the smashup from his nearby box) secretly approved the murky domestic surveillance scheme later known as the Huston Plan, from which followed some of the Watergate offenses that in 1974 compelled his resignation.

As for Rose, it was later observed that it was after his collision with Fosse that a few of his ardent loyalists began to suspect that there was something off-kilter about the phenomenon they called “Charlie Hustle.”