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Jeff Passan, ESPN
Pete Rose never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling on the Cincinnati Reds team he managed, Rose was offered a lifeline by commissioner Bart Giamatti, who said at the time: “The burden to show a redirected, reconfigured, rehabilitated life is entirely Pete Rose’s.” Rose would never take on that burden, despite a cadre of influential supporters, an argument in his favor that gained immense amounts of traction throughout the years and a society that mostly wanted to forgive Rose. His habitual inability to get out of his own way stymied his opportunities to return to the game he truly loved. It couldn’t ever love him back because Rose wouldn’t let it.
Major League Baseball’s hit king died Monday at 83, and for the last 35 years of his life, Rose lived in purgatory. He existed in the orbit of the sport — as a guest at independent league ballparks, and then as a broadcaster for Fox and eventually at big league stadiums where teams on which Rose starred were honored decades later. Rose, though, believed he belonged front and center, seeing his life through the lens of his accomplishments on the field and disregarding the discoloration created by his actions.
That’s always been the difficulty with Rose: separating the artist from the art. Rose lived as he played: all id, primal to the core, aggressive bordering on reckless, with scant ability to recognize — and even less to abide by — limits. Rose’s baseball career is undeniable: 4,256 hits over 3,562 games, both major league records unlikely to ever be broken. He made 17 All-Star Games, won three World Series and earned an NL MVP award.
Reconciling that with his decisions muddles every argument about Rose. Because elements of his behavior ranged from poor to abhorrent. There were the allegations — and evidence — that Rose corked his bat. He spent five months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion charges in 1990. More recently, in 2017, ESPN’s William Weinbaum reported that a woman filed a sworn statement alleging she had a sexual relationship with Rose in the 1970s before she turned 16 years old, the age of consent in Ohio. Rose, who was 34 and married at the time of the alleged relationship, acknowledged it but said he believed it began in 1975, when the girl was 16.
The statement came as part of Rose’s lawsuit against John Dowd, who had accused Rose of statutory rape in a 2015 radio interview — a suit that was later dismissed. Dowd was speaking about Rose more than a quarter century after authoring the damning report on his gambling, commissioned by MLB and released in 1989. “In the Matter Of Peter Edward Rose” was a 228-page decimation of Rose’s career, a comprehensive look at his committing of baseball’s cardinal sin: gambling on the game.
Rule 21 is clear: “Any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible.” Rose understood this. He accepted the lifetime ban handed down by Giamatti in 1989. And yet for the next 15 years, Rose denied gambling on the game. His hubris poisoned his ability to position himself for reinstatement.
In the early 2000s, commissioner Bud Selig offered Rose an opportunity for reinstatement. It came with conditions. He would need to come clean. No more casino appearances, no more gambling. Rose could have had everything he wanted — everything everyone wanted for him. And he passed it up, a self-inflicted wound in a lifetime of them.
Only when he wrote a book in 2004 did Rose finally admit on gambling as a manager — and he rationalized it by saying he only bet on the Cincinnati Reds to win. And that was how Rose operated. Even in his efforts to redeem himself in the eyes of the gatekeepers who could allow for his return to the game, he trafficked in half-truths and questionable decisions. Years later, when ESPN reported that Rose bet as a player, he still wouldn’t admit it, even with the mountain of evidence behind it.
Nevertheless, professional sports’ full-throated embrace of gambling gave Rose another lifeline. In 2015, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred had denied his petition for reinstatement, and later attempts by Rose were greeted with similar results. Never did his supporters — ex-teammates, Hall of Famers and fans who believe baseball’s all-time hits leader warrants a place in the game regardless of his actions — stop backing Rose.
More than anything, they wanted to see Rose in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, a place already populated by men of ill repute. Players on MLB’s permanently ineligible list are not allowed to be inducted into the Hall of Fame — and in 2020, ESPN’s Don Van Natta reported that rule applies to individuals after their death after an MLB source had said that the league has no hold on banned players after they die.
The pathway to forgiveness is straight and narrow. Pete Rose lived a little crooked. He liked it that way — and people liked him for it. He thumbed his nose at MLB, happy to set up shop in Cooperstown, New York, during Hall of Fame induction weekend and sign autographs — a proto-troll of sorts. That sort of attitude persisted with him to the end, when he continued to sell signed baseballs with the inscription: “Sorry I bet on baseball.” In reality, he wasn’t sorry he bet on baseball as much as he was sorry for what betting on baseball did to him.
It gave Rose perhaps the cruelest existence imaginable for an all-time great in a sport that loves little more than celebrating its history: inconsequence. He was forever what could have been. And in the end, the greatest enemy of Rose was not Dowd, not Giamatti, not Manfred, not any of the men in suits who cast judgment on the man in uniform.
Pete Rose’s greatest enemy, sadly, was Pete Rose.
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