Remembering the Pete Rose-Bud Harrelson brawl from 50 years ago

They had to be separated 50 years ago. Their legacies are nearly inseparable today.

Bud Harrelson and Pete Rose infamously brawled near second base at Shea Stadium on Oct. 8, 1973, during Game 3 of the NLCS. Rarely is one player mentioned in a sentence without the other, even though both had distinguished and distinctive major-league careers, playing 40 years and more than 5,000 games between them.

“No matter what I did in my career, that fight stood out because it was the playoffs,” Harrelson once said. “It’s never far from people’s memories. I’ll be signing autographs and some kid will say, ‘My dad told me you got in a fight with someone.’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, Pete Rose. I hit him in the face with my eye.’ ”

This is the  golden anniversary of one of the signature moments in the long, glorious baseball history of New York City — and Buddy, as he is mostly known, was a good companion for some nostalgia.

“That’s a good game for me to sit around and think about. I can never forget it. I don’t remember the score, but I remember every little thing about the fight,” the iconic former Mets shortstop and former Ducks part-owner once said of his scrap with the thorny Rose, which usually lands on any Top 10 list of memorable baseball fights.

There is sad irony in those words, spoken 16 years ago before Alzheimer’s disease robbed Harrelson, now 79, of his memory. He was sitting in his office at Citibank Park (now Fairfield Properties Ballpark), delighted to be retelling this tale yet again in a private interview with a Newsday reporter.

Harrelson called it the most memorable moment of his career. “How could it not be? Every person that met him over the years talked about it,” Kim Battaglia, Harrelson’s former wife and main caregiver these days, said with a soft, knowing chuckle. She visits him regularly in the memory care unit of a Long Island assisted living facility.

RoseBud had its seeds in what Harrelson insisted was an innocent comment made the day before the Melee at Shea. Mets lefthander Jon Matlack had tossed a two-hitter in a 5-0 victory at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium in Game 2 that evened the best-of-five series. That created a baseball buzz because the mighty Reds, in the early years of their dominant Big Red Machine period, had won 99 games in ’73 while the Mets (“It ain’t over ’til it’s over”) made a stunning comeback from last place to win the NL East title with a paltry 82-79 record.

“Matlack’s locker was next to mine and he was being interviewed on TV, which meant a million writers were all around me waiting for Jon,” Harrelson said. “One guy yelled, ‘Hey, Bud, what do you think about The Big Red Machine?’ I said, ‘They all looked like me hitting.’ [He batted .258 with zero home runs that season.] That’s all I said. I never mentioned anyone’s name. All the writers laughed.”

Harrelson learned later that some Reds did not get the joke. “One of the [Cincinnati] writers ran back to their locker room and my comment became a big deal,” he said. “I didn’t realize it until the next day [Game 3 at Shea Stadium]. They were supposed to take batting practice right after us, so they were on the field waiting.”