Pete Rose died last Monday at age 83 and so ended one of the great American tragedies.
Throughout his entire playing career — which encompassed three batting titles, the Rookie of the Year award in 1963, a Most Valuable Player award in 1973, 10 200-hit seasons, a National League record 44-game hitting streak, four runs-scored titles, a .321 average in 67 postseason games, and the major league records for most hits (4,256), games played (3,562) and plate appearances (15,890) — Rose embodied how the game was supposed to be played and he was also baseball’s prime goodwill ambassador.
If only that brash, shaggy-haired “Charlie Hustle” persona could have been the essence of him.
If only Rose’s uncompromising will to win on the field wasn’t eclipsed by his equally uncompromising obsessive, self-destructive behavior off it.
It all began to unravel for Rose on March 20, 1989 when then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth announced he was conducting a full inquiry into “serious allegations” of Rose’s involvement in wide-scale betting and his connections with a network of bookies and other gambling figures. Betting on baseball was the game’s cardinal sin, dating back to the 1919 Black Sox World Series fix and carried with it a lifetime ban for anyone in the game engaging in it.
When Ueberroth left office, his successor Bart Giamatti’s dogged investigator John Dowd uncovered a mountain of evidence — telephone records, betting slips and sworn testimony from Rose’s bookies and associates — “that reveal extensive betting activity by Pete Rose in connection with professional baseball and, in particular, Cincinnati Reds games during the 1985-86-87 baseball seasons (when Rose was the Reds player-manager).”
At the subsequent press conference in New York announcing his decision to suspend Rose, a visibly sad-faced Giamatti said: “One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts.”
What’s important to note, however, was that in announcing he was placing Rose on baseball’s permanent ineligible list, Giamatti left the door open for Rose to appeal for reinstatement down the road — but that he first needed “to reconfigure his life.” In addition, Giamatti said nothing about the Hall of Fame. It wasn’t until two years later, when Rose was about to go on the Baseball Writers Association ballot, that the Hall of Fame Board of Directors adopted a rule that anyone on the permanent ineligible list was also ineligible for election to the Hall of Fame. At the time, there was considerable upset among the baseball writers for having the Hall of Fame vote on Rose taken away from them.
I have to admit I have had conflicted feelings about Rose and the Hall of Fame over the years, mostly because as a player he was a delight for the writers and an inspiration to the fans. Like my BBWAA brethren I was extremely disappointed when the Hall of Fame took his fate out of our hands. I definitely wouldn’t have voted for him his first year on the ballot, but I would’ve liked to see if he “reconfigured his life” over the next 10 years. As it turned out, he never did — and he made it worse by denying he bet on baseball for 14 years before finally coming clean in 2004 in a mea culpa meeting with commissioner Bud Selig that was arranged by his former teammates, Hall of Famers Joe Morgan and Mike Schmidt.
But just as it looked as if Selig might be ready to finally lift his ban, Rose, in his inimitable ability to infuriate baseball officials, elected to go public with his confession in a book “My Prison Without Bars” — which was published the same day Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley were elected to the Hall of Fame. Molitor was Selig’s favorite player with the Milwaukee Brewers and the commissioner was outraged at Rose for upstaging him and Eckersley on their big day. That was probably the closest Rose ever got to being reinstated.
He made numerous pleas to the present commissioner Rob Manfred, but always there were concerns about something else cropping up about Rose to embarrass baseball — such as in 2017 when the Phillies were forced to cancel their induction of Rose into their Hall of Fame amid allegations that he’d had sex with an underage girl in the 1970s. The statute of limitations had long since expired and Rose was never charged with a crime, but he was dropped by FOX as a commentator and never had any further associations with baseball.
And yet I still keep going back to Rose’s original sin — betting on baseball, which was compounded by all those years of denying it. Today, Major League Baseball is in bed with betting and gambling sites and in retrospect it does seem rather hypocritical to deny baseball’s all-time hits leader a Hall of Fame vote. If you ask me, Barry Bonds and the steroid cheats did a whole lot more damage to the game than Rose did, but they at least all got their day in court with both the baseball writers and the veterans committee.
I was taken by something Johnny Bench said the other day on the news of Rose’s passing. Despite being the cornerstone players of the ‘70s Big Red Machine, Bench and Rose had been estranged for years, but death has a way of rekindling the good times and the meaning of relationships. “My heart is sad,” Bench said. “I loved you Peter Edward. You made all of us better. No matter the life we led.”
Rose is gone now. His lifetime ban has been completed. Manfred has no more worries about being embarrassed by him. He should re-instate him and allow the Hall of Fame to accord him the same process as they have had with the steroid cheats. And what will be, will be.