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Since when does a catcher get to creep up the 3rd base line in an attempt to block the plate while not having even tracked the throw home yet?

He can creep up the line as far as he likes so far as he is in front of the line, on the infield side of the line, and not on the line itself or its dirt path. As a matter of fact, Rose most likely had the play beaten by a half step at the plate - even using a hook slide, his arriving just ahead of the ball into Fosse's mitt would still have scored that run. Had Fosse been blocking the plate by smothering over it or otherwise covering the plate entirely, rather than being that step or two up and in front of the line, then might Rose have been justified by the rulebook. Bear in mind, always, that just because the rules allow for something does not always mean said something is either advisable or ethical.

It's too bad that Fosse became gun shy after that incident, but the play was clean, hard baseball.

Gun shy? Ray Fosse didn't know the meaning of the word quit. But he had another wounding flaw, as he himself has admitted in the years since: He was one of those players who, for myriad reasons including a reluctance to appear as though he "couldn't take it," waited for his manager to notice he was in particularly bad shape, even if he could barely swing the bat or throw a ball properly. The Indians began the second half of that season in Kansas City, and Fosse took a turn in the batting cage before the game, barely able to swing the bat, and nervous about telling manager Alvin Dark he was in too much pain to play.

Fosse's nickname as an Indian was The Mule. He continued playing despite the shoulder injury, and not until the following spring, when a doctor examined him for back pains, did he realise his shoulder was still in big trouble - broken. The inflammation and swelling from the Rose collision was apparently severe enough that the actual fracture and separation didn't show up in the initial X-rays.

"I obviously was hurt," he told Terry Pluto, author of The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump, "but I figured unless the bone was sticking out of the skin, you played. But no one came to me and said, 'Ray, are you hurt? What's wrong, why don't you take some days off?'...But I played through July and August, then I broke my right index finger in early September and my season was over."

Even with only one good arm and his power hitting cut into severely, Fosse still managed to hit .297 somehow for the second half of 1970. He also suffered several rounds of nagging injuries as time went on, usually to his hands or his fingers, not to mention his knees, and did I mention also his shattering several vertebrae in his neck trying to break up a brawl between Bill North and Reggie Jackson during his days with the Oakland Athletics?

The corollary effects of all those - his power hitting was all but erased, and his throwing arm was irreparably compromised - is probably what causes people to presume he was made gun shy by the Rose collision. He bulldogged himself to a seven and a half year career, in fact; you could make a case that, all things considered, he was damn lucky to end up with a .255 career batting average 55 homers from 1970 through his retirement, He had his uses on three straight Oakland pennant winners, but his own mulishness despite the Rose collision is probably the most likely reason Ray Fosse never put up the career he was projected to put up. (There were those who actually considered him in the first half of 1970 better than Thurman Munson, then the comer of the Yankees, and having seen them both play that season it's not entirely farfetched: Fosse was the more talented of the two before the Rose collision.)

I mentioned the Fosse collision and the hitting streak in context of discussing Rose viz ethics and ethics viz Rose, and illustrating the point that when it came to ethics Rose was not always beneath suspicion - in the same context, I mentioned the manner in which he played the hoopla around his passing Ty Cobb as an example of the better side of Rose's on-field ethics. It was a contextual reference. Though, I must confess, baseball writers - whether seasoned and properly aged in soul, or whether aspiring Webziners like yours truly - do tend to digress here and there, but in this instance it was a digression within a certain context.