In the years leading up to his death last September, at age 83, Pete Rose had come to accept that he would not live to see what he wanted most—his enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose was banished from the game in 1989 after betting on it, and he spent his remaining decades decrying his exile: moving to Las Vegas, signing memorabilia for cash, fumbling various attempts to gain reinstatement. His case has been dissected in sporting circles with all the gravitas of two philosophy professors debating the existence of God. Yes, Rose broke the rules and undermined the game, but he is also baseball’s Hit King, compiling 4,256 with a relentless competitiveness that few have since matched. The defining image is of Rose airborne like a superhero in the middle of a head-first slide: a portrait of desire, borderline pathological in its intensity. How do you square his athletic achievements with his moral failings?
The case had seemed closed. Until May, that is, when Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that a player’s ban expires after his death. After all, Manfred argued, how can someone damage the game’s integrity from the grave? Meaning that Rose can now earn posthumous enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, if its Classic Era Committee votes him in. The question before the committee, as framed by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, the Yale University president–turned–baseball commissioner who announced Rose’s ban, is how to untangle “the relationship of life to art.” Norman Mailer once stabbed his wife with a penknife, and Roman Polanski committed statutory rape, but to what extent should those crimes inform our understanding of Mailer’s novel An American Dream, about a psychology professor who murders his wife, or Polanski’s film Repulsion, in which a young woman experiences nightmares about sexual assault? What happens when the boundary between life and art blurs, when the shadowy subcurrents infect the performance?
In Rose’s case, his art was hitting line drives and winning pennants. As part of Cincinnati’s vaunted Big Red Machine in the 1970s, he delivered two World Series titles to the city where he was born and raised, where he once collected tolls on a ferry and worked the overnight shift unloading freight cars in the rail yards near the Reds’ Crosley Field. At the beginning of his baseball career, he lacked size—and Big League talent, or so the scouts thought—but he compensated for these perceived shortcomings with brazen ambition that would have seemed pathetic in a lesser man. In 1963, when his Reds faced the New York Yankees in spring training, he bunted for a hit, earning the scorn of Yankees stars Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, who dubbed him “Charlie Hustle.” Rose embraced the slight like a knighthood, because darn right he hustled, spring training or not. He came to embody a kind of hardscrabble resilience that the Everyman could aspire to. As a Cincinnati Enquirer columnist once wrote, Rose “is not so much a ballplayer as he is an emotion, an attitude, a symbol.”
Behind the sanitizing veil conferred by celebrity and hero worship, Rose led a checkered life. His womanizing produced two failed marriages and front-page stories about a paternity suit. He served five months in prison for tax evasion. He befriended bookmakers and mob types, racking up tens of thousands in debt because he was a terrible gambler—a fact that may have precipitated his decision to bet on his own Cincinnati Reds when he was their player-manager. Earlier, when Rose played in Philadelphia, a doctor testified about supplying him and some of his Phillies teammates with amphetamines to juice their performances. And when he was chasing the all-time hits total of Ty Cobb, he procured illegal corked bats; he denied using them in games, but how are we to believe him? Because for well over a decade, Rose denied betting on baseball, until he finally monetized his about-face by writing a book that managed to anger both his critics and his friends. Just when he seemed to be earning a measure of redemption, landing a job as a commentator at Fox Sports, news of his sexual relationship with a minor in the 1970s resurfaced, and he found himself back in purgatory.
From the start, if Rose had confessed his sins and pleaded forgiveness, adopted a posture of conciliatory chagrin—meeting with addicts, say, to discuss the pitfalls of gambling—baseball most likely would have welcomed him back. But he was constitutionally incapable of brokering such a détente, and though it may be tempting to argue that what made him great also led to his downfall, there are plenty of athletes who brought an assassin’s instinct to the playing field and stylish grace to the afterparty. In the end, we’re left with a deeply flawed man who brought joy and inspiration to a generation of fans, but whose flaws imperiled the very thing he purported to love most.
Today, we can bet on almost anything with a few taps on our smartphones, and Major League Baseball has welcomed the legalization of sports gambling as a way to increase viewership, even as amateur punters heap abuse on players when a poor performance ruins a parlay, and even as the conspiracy theories continue to multiply: The game is rigged! Meanwhile, never confessing guilt and never bowing to political correctness—Rose excelled at both—have become the touchstones of our political moment. No surprise that the current president of the United States has advocated for Rose’s enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. Commissioner Manfred has capitulated. Will the members of the committee? So far, they’ve resisted admitting the superstars most tainted by the steroids era. Maybe the committee will also relent. Long a pariah, Rose now also seems like a precursor, a foreshadowing of what was to come.
