Pete Rose, baseball’s banned hits leader, has died at 83
He was not on the list.
NEW YORK (AP) — Pete Rose, baseball’s career hits leader and
fallen idol who undermined his historic achievements and Hall of Fame dreams by
gambling on the game he loved and once embodied, has died. He was 83.
Stephanie Wheatley, a spokesperson for Clark County in
Nevada, confirmed on behalf of the medical examiner that Rose died Monday.
Wheatley said his cause and manner of death had not yet been determined. Over
the weekend, he had appeared at an autograph show in Nashville with former
teammates Tony Perez, George Foster and Dave Concepcion.
For fans who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, no player
was more exciting than the Cincinnati Reds’ No. 14, “Charlie Hustle,” the brash
superstar with the shaggy hair, puggish nose and muscular forearms. At the dawn
of artificial surfaces, divisional play and free agency, Rose was old school, a
conscious, dirt-stained throwback to baseball’s early days. Millions could
never forget him crouched and scowling at the plate, running full speed to
first even after drawing a walk, or sprinting for the next base and diving
headfirst into the bag.
Major League Baseball, which banished him in 1989, issued a
brief statement expressing condolences and noting his “greatness, grit and
determination on the field of play.” Reds principal owner and managing partner
Bob Castellini said in a statement that Rose was “one of the fiercest
competitors the game has ever seen” and added: “We must never forget what he
accomplished.”
Longtime Reds teammate and Hall of Famer Johnny Bench posted
his reaction to Rose’s death in a social media post, saying: “My heart is sad.
I loved you Peter Edward. You made all of us better. No matter the life we led.
No one can replace you.”
A 17-time All-Star, the switch-hitting Rose played on three
World Series winners. He was the National League MVP in 1973 and World Series
MVP two years later. He holds the major league record for games played (3,562)
and plate appearances (15,890). He was the leadoff man for one of baseball’s
most formidable lineups with the Reds’ championship teams of 1975 and 1976,
featuring Hall of Famers Perez, Bench and Joe Morgan.
But no milestone approached his 4,256 hits, breaking his
hero Ty Cobb’s 4,191 and signifying his excellence no matter the notoriety
which followed. It was a total so extraordinary that you could average 200 hits
for 20 years and still come up short. Rose’s secret was consistency, and
longevity. Over 24 seasons, all but six played entirely with the Reds, Rose had
200 hits or more 10 times, and more than 180 four other times. He batted .303
overall, even while switching from second base to outfield to third to first,
and he led the league in hits seven times.
“Every summer, three things are going to happen,” Rose liked
to say, “the grass is going to get green, the weather is going to get hot, and
Pete Rose is going to get 200 hits and bat .300.”
Rose was Rookie of the Year in 1963, but he started off 0
for 12 with three walks and a hit by pitch before getting his first major
league hit, an eighth-inning triple off Pittsburgh’s Bob Friend. It came in
Cincinnati on April 13, 1963, the day before Rose’s 22nd birthday. He reached
1,000 in 1968, 2,000 just five years later and 3,000 just five years after
that.
He moved into second place, ahead of Hank Aaron, with hit
No. 3,772, in 1982. No. 4,000 was off the Phillies’ Jerry Koosman in 1984,
exactly 21 years to the day after his first hit. He caught up with Cobb on
Sept. 8, 1985, and surpassed him three days later, in Cincinnati, with Rose’s
mother and teenage son, Pete Jr., among those in attendance.
Rose was 44 and the team’s player-manager. Batting
left-handed against the San Diego Padres’ Eric Show in the first inning, he
smacked a 2-1 slider into left field, a clean single. The crowd of 47,000-plus
stood and yelled. The game was halted to celebrate. Rose was given the ball and
the first base bag, then wept openly on the shoulder of first base coach and
former teammate, Tommy Helms. He told Pete Jr., who would later play briefly
for the Reds: “I love you, and I hope you pass me.” He thought of his late
father, a star athlete himself who had pushed him to play sports since
childhood. And he thought of Cobb, the dead-ball era slasher whom Rose so
emulated that he named another son Tyler.
Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, watching from New
York, declared that Rose had “reserved a prominent spot in Cooperstown.” After
the game, a 2-0 win for the Reds in which Rose scored both runs, he received a
phone call from President Ronald Reagan.
“Your reputation and legacy are secure,” Reagan told him.
“It will be a long time before anyone is standing in the spot where you’re
standing now.”
Four years later, he was gone.
On March 20, 1989, Ueberroth (who would soon be succeeded by
A. Bartlett Giamatti) announced that his office was conducting a “full inquiry
into serious allegations” about Rose. Reports emerged that he had been relying
on a network of bookies and friends and others in the gambling world to place
bets on baseball games, including some with the Reds. Rose denied any
wrongdoing, but the investigation found that the “accumulated testimony of
witnesses, together with the documentary evidence and telephone records reveal
extensive betting activity by Pete Rose in connection with professional
baseball and, in particular, Cincinnati Reds games, during the 1985, 1986, and
1987 baseball seasons.”
Betting on baseball had been a primal sin since 1920, when
several members of the Chicago White Sox were expelled for throwing the 1919
World Series — to the Cincinnati Reds. Baseball’s Rule 21, posted in every
professional clubhouse, proclaims that “Any player, umpire or club or league
official or employee who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in
connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared
permanently ineligible.’'
In the decades following the 1919 Series, Dodgers manager
Leo Durocher and Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain were among those suspended
for gambling, and Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were reprimanded for
associating with casinos, even though both had retired years earlier. As far
back as the 1970s, Bench and others had worried about Rose. By all accounts, he
never bet against his own team, but even betting on the Reds left himself open
to blackmail and raised questions about whether a given managerial decision was
based on his own financial interest.
In August 1989, at a New York press conference, Giamatti
spoke some of the saddest words in baseball history: “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.” Giamatti announced
that Rose had agreed to a lifetime ban from baseball, a decision that in 1991
the Hall of Fame would rule left him ineligible for induction. Rose attempted
to downplay the news, insisting that he had never bet on baseball and that he
would eventually be reinstated.
Within weeks of his announcement, Giamatti was dead from a
heart attack. But the ban remained in place and Rose never made it to the Hall
in his lifetime, although he did receive 41 votes in 1992 (when 323 votes were
needed), around the time the Hall formally ruled that those banned from the
game could never be elected. His status was long debated. Rose’s supporters
including Donald Trump, who in 2015, the year before he was elected president,
tweeted: “Can’t believe Major League Baseball just rejected @PeteRose_14 for
the Hall of Fame. He’s paid the price. So ridiculous — let him in!”
Meanwhile, his story changed. In a November 1989 memoir,
written with “The Boys of Summer” author Roger Kahn, Rose again claimed
innocence, only to reverse himself in 2004. He desperately wanted to come back,
and effectively destroyed his chances. He would continue to spend time at
casinos, insisting he was there for promotion, not gambling. He believed he had
“messed up” and that his father would have been ashamed, but he still bet on
baseball, albeit legally.
“I don’t think betting is morally wrong. I don’t even think
betting on baseball is morally wrong,” he wrote in “Play Hungry,” a memoir
released in 2019. “There are legal ways, and there are illegal ways, and
betting on baseball the way I did was against the rules of baseball.”
His disgrace was all the harder because no one seemed to
live for baseball more than Rose did. He remembered details of games from long
ago and could quote the most obscure statistics about players from other teams.
He was as relentless in spring training as he was in the postseason, when he
brawled with the New York Mets’ Buddy Harrelson during the 1973 NL playoffs.
His compulsion was most memorably defined in an otherwise
meaningless contest — the 1970 All-Star Game, in Cincinnati.
In the bottom of the 12th inning, the score tied at 4, he
singled with two outs and advanced to second on a single by Billy Grabarkewitz.
When Jim Hickman followed with a single, Rose raced past third and crashed at
home into the Cleveland Indians’ Ray Fosse, scoring the winning run and
fracturing Fosse’s shoulder. It was a collision often replayed, and an injury
from which the catcher would say years later still pained him.
“Would I do the same thing again today in the same
situation? Damn right I would,” Rose wrote in his 2019 memoir. “But would I
rather it had all gone down without Ray having suffered an injury that would
dog his career? You bet.”
Rose didn’t drink or smoke but indulged himself in other
ways. He cared openly about money, vowing to become the first singles hitter to
make $100,000 a year and leaving the Reds for the Phillies after declaring free
agency at the end of the 1978 season (Rose returned in 1984). He was a longtime
womanizer whose two marriages ended in divorce and who acknowledged fathering a
child out of wedlock. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to two charges of filing false
income tax returns and served five months in prison, the prosecutor calling his
sentencing ″a sad day for those young Americans to whom Pete Rose was an idol.″
In the beginning, it was all about the game. He was a
Cincinnati native from a working-class neighborhood whose father, Harry Francis
Rose, like the father of Mickey Mantle, taught his son to be a switch hitter.
Rose mastered his skills with a broom handle and a rubber ball, thrown to him
by his younger brother, Dave.
“I’d let him get as close as he wanted,’' Pete Rose told The
Cincinnati Enquirer in 2015. “The closer he got, the harder it was to hit. Hour
after hour, he’d try to strike me out. I wore that wall out.’'
The Roses attended numerous games at Cincinnati’s Crosley
Field, where the elder Rose noticed that St. Louis outfielder Enos Slaughter
would always run full speed, whether at bat or in the field, and tell his son
to do the same.
Pete Rose graduated from high school in June 1960. He flew
to Rochester, New York, two days later, and then rode a bus some 45 miles to
Geneva, home of the Reds’ level D minor league team. By 1962, he had been
promoted to level A, in Macon, Georgia. He batted .330 and vowed to displace
Reds second baseman Don Blasingame in 1963, telling a reporter “I’m going to be
on his heels.”
Blasingame was with the Washington Senators by midseason and
Rose was a phenomenon: “Charlie Hustle,” Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford reportedly
called him, mockingly, after watching him hurry to first upon drawing a walk in
spring training. Rose hit .273 as a rookie and, starting in 1965, batted .300
or higher 14 out of 15 seasons. He was so dependable that in 1968, the “Year of
the Pitcher,” he led the league with a .335 average, one of three batting
titles.
“You could see he was going to be something, even in the
minor leagues,” Dave Bristol, who managed him in the minors and for the Reds,
told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “You knew he was going to set records at
something, if not Cobb’s. All that determination. He didn’t hit a ball, he
attacked it. He was like a guy breaking up a dogfight. He loved to hit and hit
and hit. You go to his hotel room at night, and he’s hitting the bed post.”
After the 1969 season, when the Reds finished third, Bristol
was fired and replaced by a minor league manager, 36-year-old Sparky Anderson.
The age of “The Big Red Machine” had arrived. Anderson was known as “Captain
Hook” for his willingness to replace pitchers, but he flattered and pampered
his hitters, naming Rose team captain and letting Rose practice separately with
Morgan, Bench and Perez. Between 1970 and 1976, the Reds won five division
titles, four pennants and two World Series.
As much as any player, Rose made the machine run, and not
just on offense. With the Reds struggling at the start of the 1975 season, he
agreed to move from left field to third base and make room for power hitter
George Foster. The Reds were soon unstoppable, finishing 108-54 and sweeping
Pittsburgh in the playoffs. In the World Series, one of baseball’s most
dramatic, they outlasted the Boston Red Sox in seven games and won their first
championship since 1940. Rose batted .370 and enjoyed himself so completely that
during Game 6, won by Boston on Carlton Fisk’s 11th-inning homer, he turned to
the Red Sox catcher during a previous inning and marveled at what a great game
they were in.
The Reds faded after the 1976 season and their World Series
sweep against the Yankees, but Rose’s hits continued. In 1978, he batted safely
in 44 straight games, 12 behind Joe DiMaggio’s record of 56. After leaving for
the Phillies in 1979, he surpassed Stan Musial as the National League’s career
hit leader and helped lead Philadelphia to its first World Series title in
1980. At age 39, he batted a solid .282 and scored 95 runs, and, always
hustling, made one of the World Series’ most memorable defensive plays.
In the decisive Game 6 against Kansas City, the Royals
trailed 4-1 going into the ninth inning, but loaded the bases with one out
against reliever Tug McGraw. Kansas City’s Frank White then lofted a foul pop
fly to the first base side of home plate. Catcher Bob Boone raced under it,
only to have the ball pop out of his glove. Rose, sprinting in from first,
snatched the ball for the out. McGraw struck out Willie Wilson to end the game.
Rose played in one more World Series, in 1983, when he
batted .313 even as the Phillies fell to the Baltimore Orioles in five games.
He signed with the Montreal Expos in 1984, but rejoined the Reds in August as
player-manager, replacing the fired Vern Rapp after the Reds acquired him in
exchange for a minor leaguer. “There’s no question I’ll make some mistakes,” he
told reporters.
Rose had planned to limit himself to pinch-hitting with the
Reds, but the trade revived him and he hit .365 over the rest of the season
after batting just .259 for Montreal. He retired as a player after the 1986
season and his last game as a manager came two days before his banishment, Aug.
21, 1989, a 6-5 victory over the Chicago Cubs. His career managerial record was
412-373.
In his post-baseball life, he did make it to a few honorary
associations. The Reds voted him into the team’s Hall of Fame in 2016, the year
before a bronze sculpture of Rose’s iconic slide was unveiled outside of
Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park, and retired his uniform number.
Rose the man was never inducted into Cooperstown, but his
career was well represented. Items at the Baseball Hall include his helmet from
his MVP 1973 season, the bat he used in 1978 when his hitting streak reached 44
and the cleats he wore, in 1985, on the day he became the game’s hits king.
