Pete Rose was everything you would want in a baseball player on the field. He was talented, ruthless in his pursuit of winning, and he played as hard as any player to lace ’em up. “Charlie Hustle,” as Rose was known around baseball, had the ultimate career, winning three World Series titles with the Reds and Phillies, a Rookie of the Year Award, an NL MVP, and earning 17 All-Star appearances at five different positions.
Rose, who died Monday at age 83, is best known for being baseball’s “Hit King,” collecting 4,256 hits over the course of 24 seasons with the Reds, Phillies and Expos.
Off the field, Rose has maybe the most tarnished and complicated legacy in baseball’s history.
Infamously in 1989, through a very public MLB investigation, the league’s committee found then-manager Rose guilty of having gambled on baseball through illegal bookies. Former commissioner Bart Giamatti and Rose signed a formal agreement, banning Rose from baseball for life in exchange for the league not viewing the signing as an admission of innocence or guilt.
Throughout his ban, Rose staunchly denied ever having bet on baseball. That is, until 2004, when he admitted in an interview that he did, in fact, bet on baseball as a manager, and a decade later, he admitted to doing so as a player as well.
Rose’s ban, which was upheld by every MLB commissioner after Giamatti’s death, also made Rose ineligible to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
His post-playing career continued to take unfortunate turns when he was accused in 2017 by a woman of having a sexual relationship with her when she was a minor in 1973. When asked about the allegations in his return to Philadelphia when his 1980 World Series team was honored in a ceremony in August of 2022, Rose offered this retort to a reporter: “That was 55 years ago, babe.”
“Who cares what happened 50 years ago?” he continued. “You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t be talking about it, because you weren’t born. If you don’t know a damn thing about it, don’t talk about it.”
That’s Pete Rose, the legendary player whose transgressions both verified and alleged didn’t appear to concern him. Unfortunately, it’s human nature to forget much of the story of a person’s life when they die. And that is what’s likely to happen in baseball, likely what you are going to see over the days and weeks to come.
Yes, Rose is a Hall of Fame talent who was undoubtedly deserving of being enshrined in Cooperstown as a player. Yes, it seems hypocritical that sports leagues, including MLB, are in business with sportsbooks, with kiosks and betting facilities at and around ballparks. And yes, Rose was still wrong for betting on baseball.
Not to mention that in what Rose thought was a defense against those allegations from 1973, instead of talking about his innocence, he publicly leaned into his belief that it “was a long time ago,” a brush-off that was grotesque and disheartening.
This is not Willie Mays, a person who was just as legendary off the field as he was on it. This was one of baseball’s all-time great players who also happened to have some detestable tone deaf qualities. Over the days and weeks to come, we’ll see many tributes about Rose as a player and individual stories of him as a person, perhaps even people clamoring for Rose to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
But if you don’t tell the whole story of Rose’s legacy, the rest seems moot.
