2024-10-01 01:41:00
(CNN) – Pete RoseMajor League Baseball’s all-time hitting king and Cincinnati Reds icon whose tireless efforts could not stop the trademark betting attacks and obstruction that kept him out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, died Monday, according to a spokesman for the Clark County Coroner / Office of the Medical Examiner in Nevada. He was 83 years old.
Rose was one of baseball’s greats, a hitter who topped MLB’s all-time hit list with 4,256 over a 24-season career. He was noted for his hard work, sliding at first and running even when he walked a pitcher, a style that earned him the nickname, first disparagingly and then affectionately, “Charlie Hustle.”
He played for three World Series championship teams: the Reds team known as the “Big Red Machine” in 1975 and 1976, and the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980. He was voted to the National League All-Star team 17 times and both won the National. League Rookie of the Year award (1963) and Most Valuable Player award (1973).
But his gambling within his own team, and his denials, ended his fledgling career as a baseball manager and kept the sport’s most prolific hitter from his highest honor.
MLB hired an attorney to investigate Rose in early 1989 after receiving reports that he had bet on MLB games. MLB Rule 21 states that personnel who place bets on games in which there is a “duty to perform” will be declared permanently ineligible.
Attorney John Dowd’s report concluded that Rose bet on sports, including Reds games, in 1985 and 1986, when he was both a Reds player and manager, and in 1987, when he was only a manager. Commissioner A. Bartlett disqualified Giamatti Rose for life in August 1989 and said he could apply for readmission after one year after showing a “redirected, reconfigured and rehabilitated life.”
But Rose refused in more ways than one, saying for years that he never bet on baseball or the Reds. On the day he was disabled, he said he thought he would be “out of football for a very short time”.
In 1991, the Baseball Hall of Fame passed a rule that said no player on the sport’s permanently eligible list would appear on its ballot. It was not until 2004 that Rose publicly admitted betting on baseball and the Reds, although he refused to bet against his own team. He wrote in his 2004 autobiography, “My Prison Without Bars,” that he turned to gambling as a way to “recapture the thrill of winning batting titles and World Series.”
“He had a huge appetite and was always hungry. “It’s not 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 that the penalty for betting on games he was involved in was a permanent ban, “so I denied the crime,” he wrote.
The denials, and subsequent suggestions that Rose was still not telling the whole truth, were hurtful. Giamatti never looked for a replacement, as he died eight days after Rose quit.
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 took the field. New York Times baseball writer Murray Chass noted that he could mislead people that he was not confident of winning those games.
In 2015, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred denied Rose’s request for reinstatement, stating that Rose only admitted to betting on baseball in 1987 while managing the Reds, and that Rose claimed not to remember the evidence in Dowd’s report that suggested that he still gambled in 1985 and 1986. Rose’s comments “give me little confidence that he has a mature understanding of his misconduct,” Manfred wrote.
Later, Rose seemed to have given up on making the Hall of Fame in his life. Betting on baseball was one of the things he wanted to change, he wrote in his 2019 autobiography, “Play Hungry.”
“I’m not a guy who goes around saying I’m sorry, but on this, I’m sorry,” he wrote.
“I know that if I do get into the Hall of Fame, it will certainly be long after I am gone,” he wrote. “But I want them to know how much I loved baseball, and that I lived a life dedicated to the game, and that I played the game the way it should be played.. .as long as I always can.”
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