Pete Rose: Forever a beacon of controversy.
Baseball's all-time hits leader died on Monday. He was 83.
Baseball is a sport, much more than others, for better or worse, that is particularly attuned to its history.
From the most minute of statistics, to the numbers known from memory, the one-off chatter in the dugout that, rather than being forgotten come the seventh inning stretch, instead, becomes as immortal as the player it was encapsulating.
Colourful, beyond immediate understanding.
Speaking of, do you know how Pete Rose got his nickname, “Charlie Hustle?”
Depending on your fondness for purposeful ambiguity, it depends on which version of the story you chose to believe.
In either case, it began in early 1963. A spring training clash between the New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds. On one side, you had Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, both, by then, legends in pinstripes.
And on the other, there was Peter E. Rose.
He was only a young man then, 22 but you see, a few years earlier, after burning through his high school athletic prospects and with them, any potential future opportunities? Rose turned to his uncle, Buddy Bloebaum, himself, a former minor leaguer.
Bloebaum did some part-time scouting on the side and directed his nephew towards a local amateur team in the Cincinnati area (baseball’s amateur draft didn’t come to be until 1965).
Any opportunity, that’s all Rose was looking for and in the summer of 1960, it found him. Signed by his hometown Reds for $7,000, Rose was sent to Florida to play Class-D ball and promptly did so with such abandon, his only gear, it seems that nobody quite knew what to make of him.
Charging to second on stand-up doubles, every play, his last. No slowing down, no brakes. Never. Johnny Vander Meer, his manager at the time, found a particular amusement with Rose:
“He runs like a scalded dog.”
During that 1961 minor-league season? Rose, a switch-hitter, had 30 triples, stole 30 bases and with 160 hits, he played like someone who, not long prior, had no major league prospects but dammit, he wasn’t going to let that stop him.
And such, no-time-for-bullshit resilience? It brought him - and brings us, back - to that spring training game in early ‘63. The origins, as it were, of Charlie Hustle.
Well?
Maybe it was because, with the upmost seriousness, Rose sprinted to first after drawing a walk. Maybe it was later that day, when he vainly tried to catch, with all his might, a towering Mantle homer. Maybe it was Ford who, miffed with this rookie’s try-and-stop-me attitude, turned to Mantle and said, “Look at Charlie Hustle there”, though perhaps it was the reverse.
Though maybe it was just a name, just a story of somewhat dubious claim and it only mattered because Rose needed to make something of it. And to say he didn’t?
A bigger understatement, there has rarely been.
Pete Rose, infamous in baseball circles beyond measure, he, who was MLB’s all-time hits leader and wore controversy tighter than the stitches on his glove, died on Monday, from causes not immediately disclosed.
Just what then, really, should be made of Pete Rose?
Try as one might, it is, frankly, an impossible exercise, to separate the man on the diamond from who he was off it. Both threads, intertwined to such an extreme degree, that baseball itself as an institution (which is no stranger to morally questionable men of various failings) wasn’t quite sure what to do with him.
It is a reminder though, that many things can be true at once.
On the field, Rose, with his atypical sports physique and blue-collar character was critical cog in the “Big Red Machine” clubs out of Cincinnati that ran baseball for most of the 1970s, capped off with two consecutive, World Series championships in 1975 and 1976. He wasn’t Joe Morgan or Johnny Bench, it is true but Rose, if often through pure force of will, turned himself into a star.
Rookie of the Year in 1963, NL MVP in 1973, World Series MVP, two years later and three-time total champion. He was a seventeen-time All-Star, won three batting titles and played twenty-four seasons of professional baseball until he was 45, long after his prime had ended - from leaving Cincinnati, to Philadelphia, then Montréal, then Cincinnati once again.
He played more games than anyone else, had more at-bats and plate appearances. More singles and of course, more hits.
He finished with 4,256, surpassing Ty Cobb’s long-thought of unbreakable record in September of 1985, just a year before he retired.
But there was everything else with Rose, wasn’t there? There is no separating those two halves, no dividing them or waving one away simply because it fits the more convenient narrative. No. Nor should there be.
The reasons, for all his on-field accomplishments, he was never elected to Cooperstown during his lifetime (and now, even with his passing, probably never will be), why he was more-or-less shunned from the sport in retirement, why his name brought disgust, not adulation.
Rose was permanently banned from baseball in 1989, following a prolonged investigation in which it came to light that, during his tenure as Reds manager, Rose had gambled on the sport, specifically, the Reds themselves - his own team, the worst of sins in baseball, for which there is no open forgiveness. In 1991, Cooperstown came down with their own verdict: anyone on baseball’s ineligible list wouldn’t be considered for enshrinement.
And so, began the crusade of sorts that defined Rose’s next three decades, his numerous attempts at reinstatement, turned down each time - close to the game but equally far away.
He would deny everything, of course, until he didn’t, finally coming clean in 2004. Though it mattered not, in the end.
But if his actions outside the diamond, beyond the gambling, proved anything, it was the foolhardy way sports figures are often held up to a status they don’t rightly deserve, regardless of prior achievements.
He spent time in prison, in the early-1990s, for tax evasion and in the late-2010s, as part of a defamation suit that was later dismissed, Rose was accused of statutory rape by John Dowd, the legal counsel who was a key figure in the investigation that led to Rose’s ban from baseball.
As reported by ESPN in 2017, Rose, in court documents, admitted to having a sexual relationship with a woman in the 1970s, when he would’ve been in his mid-30s but recalled it beginning in 1975, when the woman in question would’ve been sixteen at the time, Ohio’s age of consent.
A ballplayer of record there is no doubt but a hero, a man of strong conviction or morals to be upheld, no, Pete Rose was anything but.
The now-ubiquity of gambling in this, our current sports landscape, baseball in particular, given its history, continues to be divisive. Even as recently as this past summer, the discourse gained renewed steam, when now-former shortstop, Tucupita Marcano, was banned for life.
So the discussion started up once more, didn’t it, with Rose and all his on-field accolades calling to be considered. A false equivalency or hypocrisy amongst the suits?
Well, while gold ink may adorn a fair portion of his Baseball Reference page, as was always the case with Pete Rose, things were much more complicated then a simple, wrong-versus-right,
Charlie Hustle and “Hit King”, even now, forever to be synonymous with something as straightforward as the way Rose played the game.
Shutout.
Another great piece, Ryan. Pete Rose played a prominent role in my childhood as an 80's Mets fan. Lots of controversy, lots of incredible hits. Thanks for the insightful recap.
Thanks for the article Ryan. Quite the ballplayer! Controversy galore as you've noted ☹️