Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time hit king, has died at 83
(CNN) — Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time hit king and the Cincinnati Reds icon whose signature gritty hustle couldn’t outpace the gambling transgressions and obfuscation that kept him out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, has died, according to a spokesperson for the Clark County Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner in Nevada. He was 83.
Rose was one of baseball’s greats – a winning-obsessed sparkplug who topped MLB’s all-time hit list with 4,256 over a 24-season career. He stood out for his all-in effort, sliding head-first and running even when a pitcher walked him – a style that earned him the nickname, first derisively, then admiringly, “Charlie Hustle.”
He played for three World Series champion teams – the Reds’ stacked “Big Red Machine” roster in 1975 and 1976, and the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 – was voted to the National League’s All-Star team 17 times, and won both the National League Rookie of the Year award (1963) and the Most Valuable Player award (1973).
But his gambling on his own team – and his denials – ended his budding baseball managerial career and kept the sport’s most prolific hitter from enjoying its highest honor.
MLB hired a lawyer to investigate Rose in early 1989 after it received reports he bet on MLB games. MLB’s Rule 21 says personnel who bet on games in which they have a “duty to perform” will be declared permanently ineligible.
Lawyer John Dowd’s report concluded Rose bet on the sport, including Reds games – in 1985 and 1986, when he was both a Reds player and the team’s manager, and 1987, when he was just the manager. Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti banned Rose from baseball for life in August 1989, and said he could apply for reinstatement after one year after demonstrating a “redirected, reconfigured, rehabilitated life.”
But Rose was in denial in more ways than one, for years saying he didn’t bet on baseball or the Reds. On the day he was banned, he said he thought he’d be “out of baseball for a very short period of time.”
In 1991, the Baseball Hall of Fame passed a rule saying any player on the sport’s permanent ineligible list would not appear on its ballot. It wasn’t until 2004 that Rose publicly admitted betting on baseball and the Reds, though he denied ever betting against his own team. He wrote in his 2004 autobiography, “My Prison Without Bars,” that he turned to betting as a way “to recapture the high I got from winning batting titles and World Series.”
“I had huge appetites, and I was always hungry. It wasn’t that I was bored with the challenges of managing the Reds – I just didn’t want the challenges to end,” he wrote in his book.
He knew the penalty for gambling on games in which he was involved was a permanent ban, “so I denied the crime,” he wrote.
The denials – and subsequent suggestions that Rose still wasn’t telling the whole truth – were damaging. Giamatti never got to consider a reinstatement, as he died eight days after banning Rose.
In 2007, Rose told ESPN Radio that he bet on the Reds “every night” when he managed the team. But Dowd told ESPN2 the next day that Rose didn’t bet when certain Reds players pitched. That, New York Times baseball writer Murray Chass wrote, could improperly tip people that he wasn’t confident in winning those games.
In 2015, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred turned down Rose’s request for reinstatement, saying Rose admitted only to having bet on baseball in 1987 while he was just managing the Reds, and that Rose claimed he couldn’t remember evidence in Dowd’s report pointing to him betting while he still was playing in 1985 and 1986. Rose’s comments “provide me with little confidence that he has a mature understanding of his wrongful conduct,” Manfred wrote.
Later, Rose seemed to have given up on entering the Hall of Fame in his lifetime. Betting on baseball was one of the things he would take back if he could, he wrote in his 2019 autobiography, “Play Hungry.”
“I’m not a man who goes around saying sorry, but on this one, I’m truly sorry,” he wrote.
“I know that if I ever make the Hall of Fame in some way, it’s sure to be long after I’m gone from this world,” he wrote. “But I want you to know how I loved baseball, and that I lived a life dedicated to the sport, and played the game the way it should be played … always all out.”
‘You make your own skill … by trying harder than anyone’
Peter Edward Rose was born in 1941 and raised in Cincinnati, son to LaVerne and Harry Francis “Pete” Rose, a bank clerk and semi-pro baseball and football player. He idolized his dad, watching him play football until the elder Rose stopped playing in his early 40s. He focused singularly on sports to make his father proud.
“Everything I ever wanted out of life started and ended with loving my dad … and wanting to make him proud of me,” Rose wrote in “Play Hungry.”
Rose said he became a great hitter not from natural skill, but through sheer will and practice; his father’s decision to have hit from either side of the plate when he was 9; his willingness as a pro to ask for tips from great hitters like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays; and doing homework on opposing pitchers.
“I knew what every pitcher threw. I knew when he was going to throw it. … And the day of the game, I knew how I was going to approach (Sandy) Koufax or (Don) Drysdale or (Juan) Marichal or (Bob) Gibson,” Rose told “OutKick 360” in 2022.
After high school his uncle – a Reds scout – got him a tryout with the Reds, who signed him to a minor league deal in summer 1960.
By the end of first full season in the minors in 1961, the second baseman had turned heads with the second-best batting average in his league – .331 – and by running flat-out every play even after being walked. The trait would rub opponents the wrong way, but he didn’t care.
“You make your own skill by working harder and trying harder than anyone,” he wrote in “Play Hungry.”
In 1963, his first year in the majors, that effort earned him the nickname “Charlie Hustle.” Various accounts say the Yankees’ pitcher Whitey Ford gave the nickname to him sarcastically at spring training, either after seeing him run after a walk, or running in pregame practice.
But Rose’s style would grow on Cincinnati fans. He hit .273 in his Rookie of the Year campaign, and in 1965 led the league in hits (209) and a batting average of .312. That would be the first of 16 seasons in which he hit at least .300; the first of 10 seasons with 200 or more hits (a Major League record); and the first of seven years leading the league in hits.
Defense wasn’t his strength, but he was versatile: He was the only player in Major League history to play more than 500 games at five different positions: First base, second, third, left field and right field. He still earned two Gold Glove awards for fielding excellence as an outfielder in 1969 and 1970.
His hustle sometimes stirred controversy. In the 1970 All-Star game – ostensibly an exhibition – he ran over American League catcher Ray Fosse at the plate, forcing Fosse to miss the ball and allowing Rose to score the winning run. Fosse’s shoulder was fractured and he didn’t enjoy the same level of playing success afterward. “He did his job and I did mine,” Rose wrote in “Play Hungry.” “Neither of us did anything wrong.” Such a play likely wouldn’t be allowed in today’s game; a 2014 MLB rule says runners can’t collide with catchers if a slide could avoid it, and catchers can’t block the runners’ path without having the ball.
Rose played for the Reds until 1978 – often leading off for a lineup that included future Hall of Famers Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez – and the Phillies from 1979 to 1983. He played half a season for the Montreal Expos in 1984 before being traded back to Cincinnati, where he’d be both player and manager through 1986.
At age 44, he broke Ty Cobb’s Major League record of 4,191 career hits on September 11, 1985, driving No. 4,192 into left-center at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium against the San Diego Padres. The game stopped for about seven minutes as the crowd cheered, with Rose standing on first and eventually crying as he collected hugs and handshakes from opponents, teammates and his 14-year-old son, Pete Rose Jr. The Reds released him as a player the following year, but he’d manage the team until MLB banned him in 1989, ending his managerial run with a .525 winning percentage.
Rose also holds MLB records for games played (3,562) and at-bats (14,053).
He spent some of his latter years living in Las Vegas, trading on his baseball success and betting notoriety and spending hours a day selling autographs at or near various casinos. Sometimes, on the weekend of baseball Hall of Fame inductions in Cooperstown, New York, he also would hold autograph sessions at a nearby bookstore. From 2021 to at least April 2023, he worked on “Pete Rose’s Daily Picks,” a podcast where he gave sports betting advice.
While Cooperstown didn’t admit him into its Hall of Fame, the Reds got him into theirs with the commissioner’s permission. In June 2016, fans cheered as the Reds inducted him into the team’s Hall of Fame during an on-field ceremony at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park. The hometown boy described the love affair he’d had with the fans.
“You motivated me to play the way I did. … I wasn’t diving for me. I was diving for you. I was hitting for you. I was trying to score runs for you,” he said.
The Reds gave him a statue outside the ballpark in 2017, depicting him sliding head-first. That was the perfect way to capture Rose, said Johnny Bench, the Hall of Fame catcher.
“How are you going to get a line-drive statue? This (the slide) is what Pete is, and the way we’ll always remember” him, Bench told reporters in 2017.
Divorced from this first wife and separated from his second in 2011, Rose’s survivors include a longtime fiancée and children including Rose Jr., who played a month in MLB for the Reds in 1997.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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