By Bruce Weber
Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds. No cause was given.
For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.
Few sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal — which earned him the nickname “Charlie Hustle” — and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.
Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.
A lifelong adrenaline junkie who often operated out of sheer gall, Rose was long known to baseball officials as a fevered horse player with a network of unsavory associates and a rumored out-of-control gambling habit. During his nonpareil career as a player, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team, he was warned repeatedly by major league officials to curtail his gambling, and in the late 1980s, Rose, then the Reds manager, was investigated by baseball to determine if any of his activity was illegal.
The report by the investigator, John Dowd, revealed that Rose had bet regularly with bookmakers on a variety of sports, and though Rose vehemently denied it, baseball included. In August 1989, he was banned from the game by the commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, and he was subsequently declared ineligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which would otherwise have been a certainty.
One of the tawdrier episodes in baseball history and one of the most public — Rose’s farewell news conference was televised nationally — it was also, for Rose, monumentally costly. Not only did he lose his livelihood; he subsequently spent several months in jail for evasion of taxes related to his gambling income as well as his baseball memorabilia sales and autograph appearances.
Hoping for eventual reinstatement, the possibility of managing again and restoring his candidacy for the Hall, Rose perpetuated his lie for 13 years, steadfastly claiming, against a preponderance of evidence, that though he gambled on other sports, he never bet on his own. It was not until 2002 that he admitted to the baseball commissioner at the time, Bud Selig, that he had.
The confession was made public two years later in an autobiography, “Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars,” written with Rick Hill. In the book he acknowledged that he had told Selig that he had bet regularly on baseball, including on games played by the Reds while he was their manager, though never against them, he claimed, asserting at one point that he “would rather die than lose a baseball game.”
In 2017, Rose’s reputation was further tarnished when an allegation that he had once had sex with a minor came to light in a defamation lawsuit that he filed against Dowd, who had led the investigation into Rose’s gambling. The lawsuit stemmed from remarks Dowd had made on a radio program saying that Rose had had sex with “12- to 14-year-old girls.”
In testimony from that case, an unidentified woman said she had sex with Rose when she was under 16. Rose responded that he had believed that she was 16, the age of consent in Ohio. He never faced any charges related to underage sex, the statute of limitation having expired.
Despite the black marks against him, Rose remained an enormously popular figure among fans, regularly drawing large crowds for memorabilia shows and signings, including in Cooperstown, New York, the home of the Hall of Fame, during its annual induction weekends.
Rose’s career batting average, with the Reds, the Philadelphia Phillies and, briefly, the Montreal Expos, was .303. He hit 160 home runs and had 1,314 runs batted in and 2,165 runs scored, sixth most in history. In six seasons as a manager, his Reds teams were 412-373, finishing second four times but never first.
Peter Edward Rose was born in Cincinnati on April 14, 1941, opening day of the Major League Baseball season, and grew up in the Anderson Ferry neighborhood along the Ohio River in the western part of the city. His father, Harry Francis Rose, known as Pete (or Big Pete), was a bank teller and accountant by profession and a well-known local athlete who boxed, played baseball and was especially celebrated for his exploits as a semipro football player.
Multiple biographical sources, as well as Rose himself, have said that Big Pete was the biggest influence on his son and his toughest critic, imbuing him with the relentlessness and drive that characterized his play; it was at his insistence that young Pete, at age 8, learned to switch-hit.
Rose’s mother, LaVerne (Bloebaum) Rose, called Rosie, was the disciplinarian in the family. “He was a real easygoing person,” she said of her husband, “and I wasn’t.” Just about every biographical source about her son recounts her openness, her lack of pretension and her reputation for brawling.
Small and slight through his high school years, Rose was fearsomely competitive and obsessively devoted to honing his skills even as a boy. At Western Hills High School — whose other alumni include big leaguers Don Zimmer and Ed Brinkman — he excelled as an elusive runner in football as well as in baseball, though he was ineligible to play as a senior because he had had to repeat his sophomore year after flunking out.
Instead, he played semipro ball; his uncle, Buddy Bloebaum, a former minor leaguer (and reportedly a skilled pool hustler), was a sometime scout for the Reds, and he put in a word for his nephew, who signed a minor-league contract and began his professional career in 1960 with the Class D Geneva Redlegs, for whom he played second base and hit .277 in 85 games.
Three years later, having grown 2 inches, added nearly 40 pounds and impressed Reds manager Fred Hutchinson with his savvy and hustle, Rose was in the big leagues. Indefatigably brash, he refused to play the traditional rookie role of going along to get along, and he was disliked by most of his teammates, especially after he displaced veteran second baseman Don Blasingame in the starting lineup and Blasingame was traded.
Rose found his niche in the clubhouse with the Reds’ Black stars, Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, who responded to Rose with sympathy, recognizing ostracism when they saw it. The liaison was unusual in baseball of the early civil rights era; Sokolove reported that Rose was pressured by many, including Hutchinson and Big Pete, to seek society within his race.
Married and divorced twice, Rose had four children with his wives: two daughters, Fawn and Cara; and two sons, Tyler and Pete Jr., who played and managed in the minor leagues and was briefly with the Reds in 1997.
As the object of a paternity suit, Rose, an admitted philanderer, eventually acknowledged that he was the father of another daughter, Megan Erin Rubio.
Rose had a partner, Kiana Kim, and grandchildren as well. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.
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