'I’m the Biggest Winner in the History of Sports'
'I’m the Biggest Winner in the History of Sports'
Pete Rose, 1941-2024.
A dozen or so people texted me the news at almost exactly the same time, the news of Pete Rose’s passing at age 83, and there’s something odd that stays with me. Just about every one of them, both his fans and his haters, added words to this effect: “I thought he’d live forever.”
I did, too. It makes no sense at all. He certainly didn’t live a life geared toward longevity. But, yeah, I was like everybody else. I kind of thought Pete Rose would live forever.
A Pete Rose story: Thirty years ago, I was sent down to Florida to find Pete Rose. He wasn’t hard to find. He was sitting exactly where you would expect him to be sitting—at the now-defunct Pete Rose Ballpark Cafe in Boca Raton.
This was on the five-year anniversary of his banishment from baseball, and his people had discouraged me from coming. They insisted forcefully that he would not be talking to anybody on this solemn occasion, much less a kid reporter he’d only met once. So I sat a respectful distance away and wrote down a few thoughts while watching the most voracious hitter of our time or any time gnaw on a sandwich…
“Go talk to him,” my server said, after bringing over a Diet Coke.
“Well, I’m told he doesn’t want to talk,” I replied. She began laughing.
“That’s Pete,” she said. “He ALWAYS wants to talk.”
So I walked over to Pete Rose with a notepad, and before I could even introduce myself, he kicked out the chair next to him and said, “Have a seat.”
And for the next three hours, he talked and talked and talked, mixing legends and lies, stories and fury, jokes and bitterness, memories and grievances.
“I like my life,” he said.
“I belong in the Hall of Fame,” he said.
“I never bet on baseball,” he insisted.
“I played the game the right way,” he repeated again and again and again.
First, he was Little Pete. His father, Harry Rose, was “Big Pete.” There was no one on the West side of Cincinnati tougher than Big Pete. He spent his days working for Fifth Third Bank, but spent his weekends cracking heads on sandlot football fields around town. Everybody told stories about Big Pete. He played against people 20 years younger when he was in his 40s. He once played a game with a broken leg. An opponent once crowed before a game that he would be the one to finally retire Big Pete. It was the last game that guy ever played in.
Big Pete raised his son to be a baseball player… and not just any ballplayer. He would be a ballplayer like Big Pete’s hero, the ferocious Enos Slaughter, who, it was said, played baseball the way that George Patton played war. When Pete Rose was 8 years old, his father approached his Knothole League coach with a deal:
“You have to promise to let my son switch-hit,” Big Pete said. “Every time.”
And in exchange? Well, in exchange, Little Pete would play his heart out on every single play in every practice and every game… and that meant every game. He would never miss one. “We’ll even leave him here on vacation,” Big Pete promised.
The coach let him switch-hit, and Little Pete played his heart out, and he didn’t stop for the next 40 years. He cracked more hits than anyone ever had. He ran out his walks, stretched singles into doubles, stretched doubles into triples, and all the while he dove headfirst into bases. “Look at Charlie Hustle over there,” Mickey Mantle once said, mockingly, when Little Pete took a spring training game as seriously as if it were Game 7, and Pete loved that name, loved it so much that he made it his nickname, made it his identity. Charlie Hustle, yes, that was exactly right.
“Before the All-Star Game, he came into the clubhouse and took off his shoes,” Henry Aaron said. “They ran another mile without him."
No, Pete Rose never really figured out the rest. The women, the gambling, the lies, the addictions, the self-destructive tendencies, all of that was just how he filled the blank spaces when he couldn’t be on the diamond playing baseball.
On that diamond, though, he was The Hit King.
On that diamond, he was exactly the man Big Pete wanted him to be.
A Pete Rose story: We were at a shop called ‘The Field of Dreams,” in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. He was sitting behind a table, and outside, a couple of the store’s carnival barkers shouted at the passing tourists, “Step right up! Meet the Hit King! This is your chance to meet Pete Rose.” Traffic was light. He was at The Field of Dreams signing autographs just about every day.
Pete passed the time with stories and trivia questions and dirty jokes. They weren’t terribly dirty jokes… more like naughty jokes, the sort 12-year-olds tell each other in the barracks at summer camp.
“And I said, ‘Is that in Tennsylvania?”
“Ping pong balls? I thought you said King Kong balls.”
“Did you hear about the Breeder’s Cup?” Rose asked. “I bet on it, and Steve Garvey won it.”
After he unloaded one of the punch lines, he would lose himself entirely in laughter. His face would go red. His body would convulse. You know, like a 12-year-old who just told a naughty joke in the barracks at summer camp.
“I’m the best deal in Las Vegas,” he said suddenly. “I mean, look, you can spend $100 to go see Celine Dion sing. But will she come out and shake your hand? Will Bette Midler put her arm around you and have a photo taken with you? Can you ask her questions? I got people asking me the damndest questions you ever heard. And I’ll give ’em an answer every time. I’ll answer anything. Go ahead. Ask me anything.”
I asked him how he felt being in baseball limbo.
“I’m the best deal in Las Vegas,” he said again.
The numbers are staggering. Game played: 3,562. Record. Plate appearances: 15,890. Record. Times on base: 5,929. Record. And, most of all, there are all those hits, 4,256 of them, a numerical marvel.
The first half of the hit total, 42, is Jackie Robinson’s uniform number.
The second half of the hit total, 56, is Joe DiMaggio’s unbeatable hit streak.
“Guess what,” Pete Rose told me. “Nobody’s breaking that record. Nobody. The first three thousand hits are easy. Baseball’s an easy game to play when you’re 100 percent. But try getting those hits when you’re old, when your bat’s slow, when your back hurts.… Nobody’s ever breaking that hit record. Mark that down. You ask somebody in 100 years who holds the hit record, and they’ll tell you: Pete Rose with 4,256 hits.”
This was not just what he told me, not just what he told others, but it’s what he told himself. They could take away the Hall of Fame. They could take away his right to manage baseball games. They could keep him away from the ballpark, which is the only place where he really felt at home.
But, hell no, they couldn’t erase 4,256 any more than they could erase the Sistine Chapel or Hamlet or Chuck Berry performing “Johnny B. Goode.” That was his life’s work, his immortal contribution to the world, and it would live on; it had to live on, for as long as pitchers pitched and hitters hit and fans ate hot dogs at the ballpark.
When Joe Morgan joined the Reds in 1972, he and Rose became inseparable friends—Rose’s teammates, with only the rarest exceptions, adored him—and the thing that Morgan simply couldn’t comprehend was how badly Pete Rose needed hits. If Rose had two hits in a game, he needed three. If he had three, he needed four. If he had four, even if the game was well in hand, Rose still hungered for that fifth hit like a lion that had not eaten for weeks.
That’s what 4,256 represented—day after day after day of hunger.
“There weren’t many players I knew who felt what I felt,” Frank Robinson said. “Baseball wasn’t just a game to me. That’s what I saw in Pete when I first met him. He was still a kid then. But baseball wasn’t just a game to him.”
A Pete Rose story: At some point, Pete Rose realized he could make a few bucks by signing baseballs with the line, “I’m sorry I bet on baseball.”
Over the years, he’d sign anything that could make him a few bucks. He signed the mugshot taken when he served time for tax evasion. He signed copies of the Dowd Report, which led directly to his expulsion from baseball. He signed betting slips, he signed photos of the time he crashed into Ray Fosse in the All-Star Game, he even signed newspaper articles detailing the many unsavory things he did in his life, including an allegation that when he was in his 30s, he had a sexual relationship with a woman before she turned 16. In court, Rose acknowledged the relationship. His defense was that he believed she was 16.
But it was the request for “apology balls,” as Rose’s inner circle began to call them, that followed Rose wherever he went. People were willing to pay for Rose’s scribbled admission, and so, a few times every day, someone on his team would yell out, “Hey, Pete, we need another apology ball.”
Then, instinctively, he would grab a baseball, and he would print, in all capital letters, “I’M SORRY I BET ON BASEBALL,” between the seams.
On eBay right now, there are dozens of such baseballs for sale, and also bats and hats and jerseys and baseball cards with those words on them. Pete Rose wrote the words “I’m sorry I bet on baseball,” hundreds of times in his life, a real-life Bart Simpson reflexively writing his penance on chalkboards for all to see.
But was Pete Rose actually sorry?
“I don’t know what more I can do or say to convince people of that,” he said. “I respected the game. I respected the game more than anybody. I lived for the game. It was all I thought about, all I dreamed about. It was everything to me. Maybe that was my problem. Maybe that was the reason I did what I did. When I was finished as a ballplayer. I needed more.”
And just then, someone shouted, “Hey Pete, we need an apology ball.”
He picked up a baseball. He wrote the words. Introspection was never Pete Rose’s racket. He began talking about steroids and how that is real cheating.
How do you sum up the 83-year life of Pete Rose? The answer, alas, is that you can’t. People who love him will see one life. People who loathe him will see another. At just about every public event I have done over the last 15 years, I’ve asked a question: “Should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame?”
Almost exactly half the hands in the crowd shoot up in the air. Every time.
Almost exactly half the hands in the crowd stay down. Every time.
He did not get into the Hall of Fame while he was alive. He probably never will.
But Pete Rose, the ballplayer, did the greatest thing imaginable: He got the absolute most out of his ability. What more can you ask of anybody in any field? Rose was not 6 feet tall. He was not fast. He did not have natural power or a natural defensive position. He was not graceful. He did not have a strong arm. All he had was a good eye, an indestructible body, and a quenchless thirst.
And yet, he outhit Cobb.
And yet, he scored more runs than Mays.
And yet, he played more baseball games than Aaron.
And yet, he totaled just one fewer base than Babe Ruth.
And yet, he led the Big Red Machine, perhaps the greatest of all teams.
And yet…
“I’m the biggest winner in the history of sports,” Pete Rose said. “Think about that. It’s safe to say baseball players play more games than any other sport. And I’m the all-time leader in games won. That has got to mean something, doesn’t it? That has got to mean something.”
I remember something I read, decades ago, about Joe Jackson. I'm pretty sure it was in one of Bill James' annuals, but I won't die on that hill. The gist was that, after EVERY player, manager, coach, umpire, executive, owner, journalist, anyone else, who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame is in the Hall of Fame, then it would be time to include Jackson. I've always thought of Pete Rose in the same category as Joe.
A well balanced and thoughtful piece on Rose. It reminded me of something (probably the only thing) I learned in my college literature class: that a tragedy is generally the story of a hero or great man who is inevitably and irresistibly done in by an inherent personality flaw that makes his downfall inevitable.
By this standard, Rose's story is NOT a tragedy. He was without question one of the greatest players in history. But his downfall was not the result of an irresistible flaw in Rose's character, but rather a series of conscious decisions to disrespect the game. He was aware that players betting on games was an existential threat to the integrity the game. He never acknowledged and accepted moral responsibility for his actions, much less express genuine remorse. He spurned and publicly mocked efforts by Commissioners to provide a "glide path" for Rose to attain at least partial redemption.
I am agnostic as to whether Rose's accomplishments should be recognized in the Hall of Fame, as a historical reality. But if a plaque to Rose is to be installed in Cooperstown, that history should be complete. It should conclude with an epitaph along the lines of: "Pete Rose was one of the best hitters ever to play the game. He loved playing baseball. And craved recognition as King of Baseball. But he never appreciated or respected the institution of baseball, its history and traditions. He was a giant and champion on the field, but a disgrace to the game due to his actions off the field."