For those developers, Hadoop explorers, etc. following behind me:
The heart of the issue on my laptop environment was due to the fact that only the adapter for VMNet 1 (host-only communication) was appearing on a device manager/network adapter lookup, but not the NAT adapter VMNet 8 for the physical network, so on guest startup, eth0 had no addresses to work with. After reading this post, and viewing this post, I decided to re-install VMWare Player.
After re-installing VMWare Player, I was able to see the VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet8 (screen shot). Once that appeared, Centros was able to assign addresses correctly.