By Ed Piper
Over the last few days, I have devoured the 400 pages of a new book released this spring on Pete Rose, the master of singles, the all-time hit leader for the Cincinnati Reds (and later, the Philadelphia Phillies). He agreed to a lifetime ban from baseball's active list, which also means he cannot receive votes for or be voted into the Hall of Fame.
It's a lot to devour, but I was fascinated, driven forward to continue reading Keith O'Brien's well-written piece, Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, because the account is so compelling. If there's any doubt, Rose did do it: he bet on baseball, he bet on his own team. That is why he is banned.
Later in 2021, after COVID restrictions were lifted and the inveterate memorabilia autographer returned to the unofficial circuit and began signing bats, books, uniform jerseys, and any other items a person would pay $59 to have signed, Rose began signing six words--"I'm sorry I bet on baseball."
The whole episode is pretty sad, told in immense detail gained from O'Brien's research and interviews with Pete Rose himself, his wives and mistresses, his bookies and go-fers who handled all his bets and hid his pregnant girl friend while his wife Karolyn and two kids lived in Cincinnati.
We are taken back to the incredible struggle that the future baseball star made just to rise in Cincinnati, his hometown, after failing his sophomore year in high school at West High (formally Western Hills High), committing himself to baseball, the one sport where his small size at the time would allow him to excel just off effort and fanatical (should I say compulsive?) practice. Rose played his "second" sophomore year when he returned to school, then his junior year, but high school rules in Ohio at the time didn't allow him to play during his senior year due to an age limit (not the case in CIF here in California, with many "holdbacks" playing in all sports as older seniors).
So he went to what we now call travel teams, and made his grade there, outside of school.
His father, a local semipro football legend, Big Pete, made his son fight-fight-fight as a puny little kid by consigning him to a trainer who used an empty swimming pool as the boxing ring. Little Pete learned to use his fists, after getting walloped in his initial training bouts.
It's quite a story of, literally, fighting your way up through the ranks and all the circumstances that can drag you back down to become a hometown hero.
Pete Rose bet all along. That's how he spent his free time. With his later contracts supplying him enough money to place bets, support his family, and his mistresses as well, his habit became a compulsion that, from all reports, became an addiction that he just can't control--and refuses to seek help for.
So Rose, who eclipsed Ty Cobb's immortal hit total near the end of his career, signing with the Phillies because he couldn't get the money he thought he deserved from the Reds and leading the Phillies to a World Series championship, continues his double-speak, unable-to-tell-the-truth vigil at autograph tables in Las Vegas as an 80-year-old, banished from having contact with other people in baseball due his lifetime agreed-upon ban.
His former friends, including ones who placed his bets and carried his wads of cash to pay off the gambling debts, say all he had to do was admit he bet on his own team, accept then-Commissioner Bart Giamatti's punishment (Giamatti died soon afterward of poor health), and go on tour talking to young people and others about the evils of gambling. But he just couldn't, and wouldn't, do it.
Every MLB clubhouse door has the rule Pete violated posted on it about betting on one's own team. Pete Rose walked past that sign every time he entered the Reds' and Phillies' clubhouses. When he took the added step of not just betting on football and basketball, but now baseball, too--and his own team--he had gone a bridge too far, seemingly too far to ever come back. He has lost his family, his kids, all his old friends. A lesson to be learned, from an outstanding athlete and ballplayer who made the most of his skills on the field, but who couldn't duplicate the same in his private life.
