Major League Baseball all-star Pete Rose, best known as the leader in all-time hits and games played – as well as his fall from grace for gambling on the game – has died. He was 83.
With 4,256 hits over a 24-season career and known as “Charlie Hustle” for the way he ran even when he was walked, Rose played for the Cincinnati Reds for the majority of his career, including the team’s Big Red Machine lineup from 1970 to 1979 when they dominated the league.
Rose played for three World Series champion teams – including the Reds’ roster in 1975 and 1976 and the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 – and was voted into the National League’s All-Star team 17 times. In 1963, Rose won the National League’s Rookie of the Year award and took home the Most Valuable Player award in 1973.
But Rose couldn’t outplay his own transgressions. After retiring from baseball in 1986, he began managing the Reds, where he stayed for three seasons before his gambling exploits were exposed. The MLB hired legal counsel to investigate claims Rose had bet on MLB games, including Reds’ games when he was both a player and a manager.
According to MLB’s Rule 21, personnel who bet on games in which they have a duty to perform, “shall be declared permanently ineligible.” A lawyer found that the baseball standout had indeed bet on games in 1985, 1986, and 1987 and Rose was immediately banned from baseball for life.
“The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode,” then-MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti said in a statement at the time. “One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. By choosing not to come to a hearing before me, and by choosing not to proffer any testimony or evidence contrary to the evidence and information contained in the report of the Special Counsel to the Commissioner, Mr. Rose has accepted baseball’s ultimate sanction, lifetime ineligibility.”
Rose accepted the decision, but the sanctions prevented him from ever being inducted into baseball’s highest honor: The Hall of Fame. In his 2019 memoir, “Play Hungry,” Rose wrote, “I don’t think betting is morally wrong. I don’t even think betting on baseball is morally wrong. There are legal ways, and there are illegal ways, and betting on baseball the way I did was against the rules of baseball.”
Peter Edward Rose was born April 14, 1941 in Cincinnati, Ohio and was encouraged to play sports – both baseball and football – growing up. After three seasons in the minor leagues, Rose joined the Cincinnati Reds’ roster in 1963. That winter, Rose entered the U.S. Army Reserves and was assigned to Fort Knox for basic training as a private – but he was hardly “just a private.”
After 170 hits, six home runs, and 41 RBIs during his first season in the big leagues, Rose was named Rookie of the Year by the National League – news he found out while cleaning a floor at Fort Knox.
“I was waxing the mess hall floor when I got the call from baseball that I was NL Rookie of the Year,” Rose told the U.S. Army in a 2014 interview. “Probably the only time that has ever happened.”
While at Fort Knox, Rose was assigned to Company E, 11th Batallion, 3rd Training Brigade and noted that at the time, it was common for professional athletes to join the Army when the military draft was in place.
“Being a baseball player you didn’t want to take a chance getting drafted and losing two years,” Rose said. “So you joined the Army Reserves and did basic training, then did two weeks every summer of active duty for six years.”
Despite the ultimate highs – and untimely lows – of his baseball career, Rose never forgot his time in service.
“I enjoyed the Army,” Rose said in 2014. “It was tough, but that was all part of being a good citizen.”