Pete Rose: The Fallen Hit King

September 11, 1985: Pete Rose lined a first inning single to left-center for his 4,192nd career hit:

I was in fourth grade when he hit #4192.

My father was in fourth grade when he hit #1.

Baseball is a counting sport, and I was a counting kid, and if somebody said a number was important, especially in baseball, I listened.

Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run before I was born, and Cal Ripken Jr. played in his 2,131 consecutive game when I was 18. Between those times, there was exactly one major record broken, and it was the hit record, and I was just old enough to know how big a deal it was, and it can be easy to forget this as time washes over us, but in 1985, Pete Rose was the most famous baseball player on the planet, and maybe even the second-most famous person in the entire world right then behind only Ronald Reagan for all I knew.

And indeed, he was the perfect kind of hero for the Reagan years, a man breaking one of the most storied records in the history of any game, not because he was blessed with the greatest raw athletic ability, but because he was relentless in his pursuit of maximizing what ability he had. He never hit more than 16 home runs in a single season. He never stole more than 20 bases. But he led the league in plate appearances seven times. He walked a lot more than you might expect for a man with so many hits. He was considered an elite base runner, even if not much of a base stealer. He was Charlie Hustle, the face of possibly the greatest single season team in baseball history, the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine.

If it seems like I’m building Pete Rose up to an impossibly high status, you must understand, I’m not. This is who he was. This is how he was known.

And this is why, when he fell, the fall was so incredible, so unbelievable, so jarring.

August 24, 1989: Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti banned Pete Rose from Major League Baseball. Rose had broken the one rule which could not be broken. He had gambled on baseball, while still in baseball.

April 20, 1990: Pete Rose pled guilty to two counts of federal income tax invasion. He spent five months in federal prison.

February 1, 1991: The Baseball Hall of Fame codified a long-standing unwritten rule that people banned from baseball were not eligible for Hall of Fame induction. This would have been the year that Rose would have been otherwise elected.

Nothing was bigger to me than baseball during these years, and there was no other person remotely in the orbit of Pete Rose as a famous person having done terrible things and paying the price for it all.

It wasn’t just the gambling. It was also the lying, and the general unseemliness of it all. And in later years other things would come out. Pete Rose, it seemed, just wasn’t a very good dude.

Except, it seemed, he also was. He won the Roberto Clemente Award. He was by the accounts I’ve read a fantastic teammate. He was known to be generous with his time. But, of course, he’d also literally charge you for his time.

Several years ago, Fox added Pete Rose to their commentary crew for postseason baseball. Sometimes he seemed very out of place, but sometimes you would get something like this:

I think I speak for a whole lot of people in saying that deep down, I really deeply hoped that the day would come when somehow Pete Rose would sincerely ask for forgiveness for all his transgressions, and we would all forgive him.

He did ask for forgiveness in a letter to Rob Manfred in 2022, but… who among us believed in his sincerity? After all, he didn’t ask the people. He asked the Commissioner, in an attempt to get reinstated. It’s not easy to forgive in the face of what feels like a grift.

I have written often about ambiguity, about complications. I sincerely believe that most bad things are done by good people, that the bad things don’t turn us into bad people, that it’s more complicated than that… more human.

How is one to feel about Pete Rose’s legacy? For those of us who care about such things -while it might not always get talked about like that, believe me, there are a whole lot of us who think deeply about such things - how much more complicated a thing to consider could there be than Pete Rose’s legacy?

The very qualities which made him the player he was also seemed to be the qualities which undid him. How are we supposed to process that as fans, fans who still hold out hope for heroes, role models for our kids?

I’m not sure what to think about all that, but I want you all to consider this:

You know what I learned when I was 10 years old and the most famous baseball player was banned from the game? Whatever you do in this world, DON’T GAMBLE ON BASEBALL. It wasn’t narrowly about gambling on baseball while in baseball. Gambling itself was presented as wrong.

You know what we as baseball fans are inundated with every time we watch a game? Incessant pleas to GAMBLE ON BASEBALL.

I love the game, but I deeply, thoroughly detest all of the gambling, and I would submit that if there’s one thing we should all as fans reflect upon right now, it’s that Major League Baseball and so many others have very thoroughly lost their way by embracing all of the worst of gambling. A. Bartlett Giamatti, for one, would never have greenlit what Rob Manfred has.

I wanted to find a tidier way to end this, but I think Pete Rose was the antithesis of tidy. I wish he’d have found some grace, not just for himself but for all of us. But it wasn’t to be.

The Hit King is dead at 83. The numbers don’t lie, but how much truth can they tell?