Officially, Pete Rose died on September 30, 2024. He was 83. In reality, Rose died August 24, 1989. He was 48. That’s the day baseball’s all-time hits leader was banned from the game he loved, told he would never have a home in its Hall of Fame.
The number that mattered to Rose more than 4,256, his hit total, was 13326, Cooperstown’s zip code. He believed the first would be his ticket to the second and, for half of his adult life, he was right.
Then the late Bart Giamatti, baseball’s commissioner for just 153 days, lowered the morality boom on Rose for betting on games while playing and managing. That is, or was, baseball’s greatest sin. Now? Does anybody besides me find it ironic that Rose’s fatal felony (gambling) is now a major revenue stream for the game he played like nobody else?
About a hundred columns ago, I made the case for Rose’s place in the Hall of Fame. Players aren’t enshrined for their integrity or humanity, ethics or honesty, ethnicity or morality. They’re enshrined for being great players. Period.
Rose belongs.
He played more games and had more at-bats than any player in history. He was an All-Star 17 times. He was on a World Series champion three times. He was a regular-season and Series MVP. A player could get 200 hits a year for 20 seasons and fall short of his record, and only Rose and Ichiro Suzuki ever had 10. Few, if any, were his equal.
The immoral side of Rose was almost as prolific. His hero was Ty Cobb, the Hall of Famer whose hit record he destroyed and a notorious racist also known for cutting up his opponents with his spikes…Rose named his second son Tyler after Cobb, whose name was actually Tyrus (Rose never was great on details). There was his admitted gambling, and the mobsters with whom he was alleged to be connected. When he was accused by a woman of sleeping with her when she was 14 or 15, Rose said he thought she was 16. At the time, he was past 30.
He never drank. He never smoked. He never did drugs. Nobody’s perfect, right?
During the heart of his 23-year career, I was a baseball writer in Montreal. I covered many games the Expos played against Rose and the Big Red Machine from Cincinnati, then both the Reds’ World Series victories, I met Rose only in media scrums. By the time he joined the Expos for 72 of his hits, I had moved on, missing my chance to sit down and interview this larger-than-life player. It was a miss I never regretted.
A non-interview setting came along years later on the streets of Las Vegas. He was signing anything people wanted, for a price. Much later, I learned he pedalled $175 baseballs on which he inscribed: “Sorry I Bet On Baseball.” The man had no shame.
Christened Charlie Hustle by a couple of sarcastic New York Yankees, he ran out walks and slid head-first into bases before it was popular. Somewhere along the way, he found in his dictionary the other meaning for “hustle”.
And ultimately, that became his “cause of death.”
