There could only ever be one Pete Rose. The self-proclaimed “Hit King,” baseball’s all-time hits leader, is dead at 83. Fittingly, Rose was born in Cincinnati, the city he came to embody as baseball’s “Charley Hustle,” in 1941. Also fittingly, he died in Las Vegas, ending his lifelong exile from the game for gambling on baseball in the gambling capital of America.
Two things are worth remembering above all: Pete Rose played more major-league baseball games than anybody, ever, and he played every single inning of them like he had money riding on it. He’s not just the all-time leader in hits, but in games, at bats, and plate appearances. Thirty-eight years after he retired, he’s still second all-time in doubles and sixth in runs. His 4,256 career hits swell to 4,776 in official games if you count up minor-league, postseason, and All-Star Game hits (Rose appeared in 67 postseason games in the era before the wild card, as well as 16 All-Star games), which places him ahead of the totals (including international and Negro League games) for Ty Cobb (4,372), Ichiro Suzuki (4,292), Derek Jeter (4,232), Hank Aaron (4,133), Stan Musial (4,043), Tris Speaker (3,987), Nap Lajoie (3,889), Julio Franco (3,888), and Carl Yastrzemski (3,816).
Rose bore the marks of the style of play brought to Cincinnati by Frank Robinson, his teammate for his first three seasons, and even with teammates better than Rose (such as Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan), Rose remained the definitive Red. Baseball rewards the player who plays the percentages rather than diving for every ball, breaking up every double play, and running into every wall. It punishes the guys who play the game as if it’s football, where you get a week to lick your wounds before suiting up again. Rose, uniquely in the game’s history (even moreso than Ty Cobb, the man he measured himself against), played baseball the way football is played and never paid a price for it. While Rose was only a really spectacular offensive force for about two years (1968-69), he was insanely consistent and durable over a staggeringly long period, being essentially the same player at 38 (when he batted .331 and set a career high in steals) as he was at 24, and with little variation over a decade and a half between. Over those 15 seasons, he averaged 158 games played, 729 plate appearances, 204 hits, and 105 runs per year, and he kept up that pace of everyday-every-inning play until he was 41. He was 37 when he had a 44-game hitting streak, the second-longest single-season streak in MLB history to Joe DiMaggio’s 56. Still fresh in October, he hit .321/.388/.440 career in the postseason. 5’11” and stocky, Rose didn’t have the kind of physique that would merit a sculpture or awe anybody in the gym — but he was built to take a licking and keep on ticking.
Rose embodied a certain set of old-school baseball virtues: Never come out of the lineup, never back down, never let them see you hurting, never stop hustling. He uncomplainingly accepted position switches from second base to the outfield to third base to first base, with the move to third a learn-on-the-job gig in 1975 away from a position where he’d won an MVP and two Gold Gloves. The Reds were rewarded with mediocre fielding — and back-to-back World Championships. The winning mattered more. Sparky Anderson thanked Rose by petulantly ending his consecutive games played streak by benching him when it was clear Rose was leaving for Philadelphia (and another World Championship) as a free agent.
The hyperactivity and raw aggression of Rose’s style earned him detractors, but never kept him out of the lineup. Veterans mocked the young Rose as “Charley Hustle” for running out walks, which he did into his forties. In 1961, the 20-year-old Rose played in the Class D Florida State League, whose cavernous ballparks limited the league leader in home runs to twelve and the next-best slugger to eight. Nobody else hit more than 26 doubles or twelve triples. Rose hit 20 doubles and 30 triples. He leveled Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game, ruining Fosse’s career; Rose hit .307 the rest of the season. He earned the hatred of Mets fans for body-slamming Buddy Harrelson in the 1973 NLCS, triggering a massive brawl. Rose didn’t care. My enduring memory of Rose as a manager was the epic 1986 Mets-Reds game with a colossal brawl started by Ray Knight and Eric Davis, in which Mets manager Davey Johnson (short of players) rotated relievers Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco between the outfield and the mound. A frustrated Rose could be seen in the dugout literally throwing the rulebook when he couldn’t find a rule against it. It was a metaphor for what would follow.
The 1989 gambling scandal was controversial and only got worse as more facts trickled out over the years. Rose was defiant, but it was clear that he had bet on baseball, and bet on his own team — but always to win. That can put a corrupting pressure on a manager, especially in the bullpen, as can be seen by his peak reliever workloads: Ted Power (78 games, 108.2 innings in 1984), John Franco (74 games, 101 innings in 1986), Ron Robinson (70 games, 116.2 innings in 1986), Rob Murphy (87 games, 100.2 innings in 1987), and Frank Williams (85 games, 105.2 innings in 1987). But Rose was always, always trying to win at everything all the time. The cardinal sin in baseball — throwing games, as the 1919 Black Sox did — was alien to Pete Rose. One may as well have asked him to walk on the ceiling.
In retrospect, Rose had other scandals more unsavory, as recent years brought to light a sexual relationship in the 1970s with a teenage girl (Rose said he waited until she was 16 to have sex, she said earlier; neither account looks good on a man in his late 30s). As the buzzcut Rose of the Sixties gave way to the Prince Valiant-haired Rose of the Seventies, he partook too deeply of the Sexual Revolution’s dissipated mores. Or maybe Pete just never could stop hustling.
Nor could he after the ban. He spent years hawking autographs and memorabilia as a sort of alternative living Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He eventually returned to a second act as an ESPN studio commentator, where he was more entertaining than enlightening, adding a crusty old guy at the end of the bar vibe to broadcasts.
Rose belongs in the Hall, because the Hall is a mockery if it’s missing the best ballplayers, saints and (far more often) sinners alike. Only the guys who threw games should be barred forever. But Leo Durocher always said the one thing he asked was to put him in while he was alive, or not at all. Leo was inducted shortly after his death. Maybe there’s a rough justice if Rose finally gets immortalized someday, but isn’t there on the stage. But the game deserves to remember Pete Rose, because we’ll never see another one.
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