Yahoo Sports Rose was a baffling contradiction: Deeply flawed but, good Lord, he was a great ballplayer
Covering Pete Rose was tremendous fun until it came time to call for his head. He was an endlessly entertaining interview subject, with an opinion, an anecdote and a one-liner for every occasion. Some of them printable.
“To writers, Pete was kind of a narcotic. ... ” Tom Callahan wrote. “A man who rotates his similes can be awfully hard to resist.”
Callahan was the Cincinnati Enquirer’s sports columnist at the height of the Big Red Machine. I landed that same gig shortly after Rose returned to his hometown as the Reds’ player-manager in 1984, in time for a front-row seat for his record-breaking pursuit of Ty Cobb and his steep fall from grace for betting on baseball.
Writing critically of Rose in his hometown where he was revered, I was reminded of a line from Shakespeare’s Brutus: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.”
In short, the institution of baseball meant more to me than the fate of an individual who had repeatedly broken its cardinal rule.
Rose lied about betting on ballgames for nearly 15 years after Commissioner Bart Giamatti imposed a lifetime ban on Aug. 24, 1989, finally confessing only when he had a book to sell.
Rose rejected the well-meaning advice of those who cared about him and his legacy, friends and colleagues who saw (or at least imagined) a path to his eventual reinstatement.
But rather than come clean, seek help and take the recommended steps toward a reprieve, Rose proved to be incapable of the kind of personal change that might have cleared his path to Cooperstown.
Instead, he doubled down on conduct destined to further distance him from those with the power and/or inclination to remove him from baseball’s permanently ineligible list, relocating to Las Vegas and conducting a radio show from the back of a casino sportsbook, selling autographs down the street from the Baseball Hall of Fame on induction weekends, doing time for tax evasion and brazenly continuing to bet on baseball.
In openly flouting Giamatti’s insistence on a “reconfigured” life as a prerequisite for parole, Rose chose the path of most resistance in keeping with his default setting: ever combative, never contrite.
That Rose has died without a Hall of Fame plaque is not a tragedy, but it is exasperating. Beyond his many records — most notably for career hits (4,256), singles (3,215) and games played (3,562) — no player before or since played harder, proved more versatile or demonstrated keener instincts on the field.
A switch-hitter who attained All-Star status at five different positions, Rose was the National League’s Rookie of the Year as a second baseman, its Most Valuable Player as a left fielder and the World Series MVP as a third baseman.
His head-first dive was both trademark and metaphor, an approach that said here was a competitor so committed that collateral damage was not even a consideration.
Derisively nicknamed “Charlie Hustle” by Yankees great Whitey Ford for running to first base on a walk, Rose came to symbolize striving for generations of fans and his fellow ballplayers. He showed that boundless will could compensate for limited talent, and he proved that point day after day for more than two decades.
Yet Rose the addicted gambler was a baffling contradiction, as reckless as a base-runner trying to stretch a single into a triple. He failed to cover his tell-tale tracks or appreciate the perils gambling posed to his career, and spent much of his exile seemingly oblivious to his self-made obstacles and utterly unapologetic.
“It’s been a long time, and there’s been a lot of negative things happen in the world of baseball,” Rose told KTLA Los Angeles last month.
“I was absolutely 110% wrong for what I did, and that’s bet on baseball games, and now you’re punished for the rest of your life . . . when other guys will kill somebody, or they’ll be strung out on drugs and they’ll beat their wives and stuff like that, in a couple years, they’re back in the game.”
Absent any evidence of reform, Commissioner Rob Manfred rejected Rose’s application for reinstatement in 2015. Because baseball’s leadership has since embraced sports betting for its profit potential, forsaking the moral high ground without forgiving the hit king it exiled 35 years ago, the appearance of hypocrisy is acute
More than a century since Shoeless Joe Jackson was banished for his role in fixing the 1919 World Series, it appears unlikely Rose will be freed from his permanently ineligible purgatory anytime soon.
That would be a pity, for throughout his playing career, Pete Rose was an exemplar, a man who exceeded his physical tools by embodying effort.
He was deeply flawed, to be sure, but also, indisputably, great.
Tim Sullivan has been a sports columnist in Louisville and San Diego after 25 years at the Cincinnati Enquirer. He became a full-time columnist at the Enquirer in 1984, shortly after Pete Rose returned to the Reds as player/manager. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the first time for a series of Rose-centric columns. He’s written more than 50 on Rose over the years.
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