There’s a challenge older sports fans often issue younger ones: “Did you see him play?”
It’s a gatekeeping question, an attempt to pull rank and render inadmissible any evidence obtained secondhand. Any court could tell you that eyewitness accounts aren’t always trustworthy, but they are plenty persuasive.
In sports, also, sometimes seeing is believing. Baseball, of course, has a substitute for the eye test: encyclopedic, descriptive stats. The numbers do a damn good job—probably better than the visuals or vibes—of preserving players’ value for posterity. But even Statcast can’t record everything, which is why there’s something to the eye test, too. Bobby Abreu, Dave Winfield, and Andre Dawson may have essentially the same FanGraphs WAR, as do Bobby Grich, Miguel Cabrera, and Jim Thome. But WAR doesn’t fully capture what those players looked like in action, or how they made fans feel.
You don’t have to have seen the Big Red Machine to hold an opinion on Pete Rose. But whether you watched him play probably informed your reaction to his death on Monday at age 83. If you lived through his heyday—if you can conjure him in your mind’s eye not from the few familiar highlights every fan has in their head, but rather straight from the source—then maybe he’s a flawed hero who got a raw deal and deserves veneration. If you didn’t—or if you did but still can’t cordon off his play on the field from the life he led off it—then no tales of his hits or his hustle can outweigh his worst deeds, both baseball related and otherwise.
In the heights he reached and the depths he sank to, Rose became a cultural figure the likes of which the sport he excelled at rarely makes anymore. Baseball lifers whose years of watching baseball overlapped with Rose’s years in uniform tend to extol how hard he played, how badly he wanted to win, how far he stretched his natural talent. Rose was always in motion; he jelled well with his teammates, and at a time of turmoil he endeared himself to traditionalists who saw him as a throwback to an even older school. Most of all, fans responded to how good he was. If we interpret the task of a hitter literally, then Rose, the switch-hitting leadoff man, was more up to it than anyone else in baseball history, fulfilling his mission 4,256 times. For several reasons, that record is unlikely to be broken, not least because it required Rose to play more than anyone else: He also holds the all-time records for games, plate appearances, and at-bats. In his 24-year career, he made 17 All-Star teams and won three World Series (with the 1975 and 1976 Reds and the 1980 Phillies), two Gold Gloves, and one MVP award.
On a statistical level, Rose certainly had a Hall of Fame–caliber career; it’s not as if sabermetrics has exposed him the way it has, say, Steve Garvey, who was at one time thought to be Cooperstown bound. Still, the distinction of reigning as hit king has lost a little luster. For most of his baseball career, Rose was, as Steven Goldman wrote in his 2022 book, Baseball’s Brief Lives, “very good, and sometimes great.” He never hit more than 16 home runs or stole more than 20 bases in a season. In his career, he accrued negative baserunning and fielding value, though he was defensively versatile and had some standout years in left field (which wasn’t where he won Gold Gloves). In his MVP year, 1973, he handily defeated hitters who out-WARed him, including his Cincinnati teammate Joe Morgan and Atlanta’s Darrell Evans, the latter of whom led all National League position players in FanGraphs WAR, narrowly trailed Morgan in Baseball-Reference WAR, and finished 18th in MVP voting. (Ah, the ’70s.)
Rose does deserve extra credit for producing some of his strongest seasons at the plate during the ebb in offense from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s; he batted .322 with a .384 on-base percentage from 1965 through 1969, a period during which the NL averages never rose above .256 and .319, respectively. All in all, he played proficiently and prolifically for the better part of two decades—and then, less gloriously, kept playing for several seasons beyond that.
From 1980 through 1986, the aging Rose, who reportedly corked his bats as he chased Ty Cobb’s ghost, tacked on 884 hits as a below-average offensive contributor. He was rarely replaced in the lineup, despite hovering right around replacement level. It helped that he had an in with the manager for the tail end of that period: Rose himself served as the Reds’ player-manager—the last in the majors—from midway through the ’84 season until the end of ’86. And he kept writing “Rose” on his lineup card, at the expense of younger, more productive players, as the Reds finished second in the NL West in back-to-back campaigns.
“The only reason you play a game is to win,” Rose said years later, when he requested this epitaph on his tombstone: “Here lies the biggest winner in the history of sports.” (In this instance, at least, no lies were detected.) But he also played plenty of games to compile personal stats, even when it likely cost his team victories. (In ’83, 10 years after his MVP award, he was MLB’s least valuable player—and he complained when the Phillies benched him in Game 3 of the World Series, after a 1-for-8 showing in Games 1 and 2.) Although Rose ranks 66th all-time in career bWAR, he slips to 218th in wins above average, which rewards star-level play along with longevity. That unusually large disparity puts his WAA just below that of Craig Biggio, another great who hung on past his sell-by date in pursuit of a hits milestone.
Rose’s single signature play, his career-altering steamrolling of Ray Fosse at home plate in the 1970 All-Star Game—what does it say that this is the moment he might be most associated with?—may have seemed like hard-nosed baseball in an era of intense league rivalries, but it reads, in retrospect, as gratuitous and borderline brutal, an act of needless violence that MLB prohibits today. At what point does “hustle” become reckless endangerment? Anecdotally, a strong correlation seems to exist between Rose stans and those who think baseball players (and, perhaps, athletes in general) have gotten too “soft.” If endangering competitors’ careers in exhibition games is hard, then soft sounds better to me. No nickname sounds more wholesome than Rose’s, “Charlie Hustle,” but even that moniker was originally derisive, intended to mock the then rookie’s displays of eyewash. Wherever one scratches the surface of Rose’s legend, dirt lies below.
If these on-field shortcomings and lapses were the sum of the slights against Rose, his obits would strike a more laudatory tone. But now-illegal collisions were the least of Rose’s infringements of rules and laws. If Rose is known for one thing beyond holding the hits record, it’s betting on baseball during his tenure as Reds manager—potentially starting while he was still playing, and maybe even including later wagers against his team—repeatedly lying about it, and subsequently being banned from the game. Rose’s relegation to the permanently ineligible list, both an embarrassment for baseball and a warning shot across other would-be gamblers’ bows, persists despite several applications for reinstatement.
There’s a strain of thought that MLB’s recent, wholehearted embrace of legalized sports betting is inconsistent with its stance on Rose—a position that a viral tweet posted shortly after Rose’s death tried to turn into a gotcha:
Far be it from me to defend the flood of gambling content in ballparks and on broadcasts, but there’s no hypocrisy here. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were banned from baseball for serving as glorified greeters at casinos. That’s inconsistent with MLB’s present partnerships. (Both were reinstated in 1985.) But Rose? He wasn’t banned for spending time at casinos. He was banned for breaking one of sports’ cardinal rules, which is still strictly upheld today: Don’t bet on games. It’s entirely logical for MLB to draw a distinction between the betting behavior of fans and team personnel; current commissioner Rob Manfred made a great point when asked last year to address Rose’s status:
We’ve always approached the issue of gambling from the proposition that players and other people who are in a position to influence the outcome of the game are going to be subject to a different set of rules than everyone else in the world. … Pete Rose violated what is sort of rule one in baseball, and the consequences of that are clear in the rule, and we’ve continued to abide by our own rules. It’s just the rules are different for players. It’s part of the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being a major league player.
Or a major league manager, for that matter. If you want to argue that MLB’s (and the rest of the sports industry’s) embrace of sports betting has increased the risk of a serious scandal, I wouldn’t disagree, but that trend has no bearing on the merits of a reprieve for Rose. If anything, it makes it more important to continue to set an example with a fallen luminary, even after he’s gone.
Rose clearly suffered from a long-term gambling problem, which might have engendered sympathy had he owned up to it, sought help, and made amends. But he made it impossible to view his apologies as sincere when he used them to turn a profit, one “I’m sorry I bet on baseball”–signed ball at a time. (Consider, also, the self-pitying, opportunistic title of his 2004 autobiography, My Prison Without Bars.) Usually, autographs go up in value after their author’s death cuts off the supply, but Rose flooded the market with what must have been multiple standard celebrity lifetimes’ worth of signed stock. Fittingly, he attended an autograph show the weekend before he died.
All of these baseball sins pale in comparison to one that came to light more recently. John Dowd, the lawyer who had investigated the gambling charges against Rose decades earlier, said in 2015 that Rose’s bookie Michael Bertolini had “told us, you know, he not only ran bets, but ran young girls down at spring training, ages 12 to 14. … So that’s statutory rape every time you do that.” (This wasn’t the first time similar statements had been made about Rose.)
Rose filed a defamation lawsuit that was later dismissed after the parties reached an agreement, though not before a sworn statement emerged in which an unidentified woman said that Rose had engaged in a sexual relationship with her in the 1970s that began before she turned 16, the age of legal consent in Ohio. Rose, who was married with multiple children at the time, defended himself by saying that he had thought she was 16. If she was in fact younger than that, then regardless of Rose’s belief, he still would have been criminally liable in Ohio had the statute of limitations not expired.
Plans for Rose to join the Phillies’ Wall of Fame were scuttled, and Rose also lost his broadcast gig with Fox Sports. Five years later, Rose’s reply to a question about the matter from a female reporter was “It was 55 years ago, babe.”
You don’t have to have seen, say, Henry Aaron or Willie Mays in the ’50s, ’60s, or ’70s to admire or mourn them. In Rose’s case, though, you had to be there, before his reputation was tarnished. And then you had to cling tightly enough to those memories from a more innocent time to retain some residual fondness for the hero he seemed to be back then. If you came along later, Rose was a disgraced gambler and liar who had a lower career WAR than Jeff Bagwell or Adrian Beltré, who’d hawk any product even in his prime and became a more pitiable pitchman with time, and whose excuse for an apparent statutory rape was that he thought the girl he’d cheated on his wife with was 16. We haven’t even gotten to the time in 1990 when he spent five months in prison after pleading guilty to two charges of filing false income tax returns.
Rose was great at getting hits. Beyond that, there’s not a lot left to idolize. Jackie Robinson said, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” Rose sabotaged his own life and had a horrible impact on others’, too. On the positive side of the scale, for more than 20 years, he enriched the lives of millions of fans who loved him because he played baseball brilliantly. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether he was putting on that show for their benefit or his own.
“Who cares what happened 50 years ago?” Rose said in 2022, deflecting an Associated Press reporter’s question about his earlier, even more dismissive “babe.” “You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t be talking about it, because you weren’t born.” It was, in a way, a “You didn’t see me play.”
Before his passing, Rose continued to be talked about; a well-received biography and a docuseries centered on him just this year. Shoeless Joe Jackson still has supporters more than a century after he last suited up, following his not-actually-unknowing participation in the 1919 Black Sox scandal; Rose always will, too. But I suspect that gradually, he’ll get what he told that AP reporter he wanted. Pete Rose deposed the hit king, and now fewer and fewer people will care what the king accomplished 50 years ago. They won’t be talking about it, because when he was in power, they weren’t even born.
