Pete Rose, Baseball Star Who Earned Glory and Shame, Dies at 83 - The New York Times

Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds, the team with which he spent most of his career. No cause was given.

For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.

Few sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.

Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.

A lifelong adrenaline junkie who often operated out of sheer gall, Rose was long known to baseball officials as a fevered horse player with a network of unsavory associates and a rumored out-of-control gambling habit. During his nonpareil career as a player, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team, he was warned repeatedly by major league officials to curtail his gambling, and in the late 1980s, Rose, then the Reds manager, was investigated by baseball to determine if any of his activity was illegal.

The report by the investigator, John Dowd, revealed that Rose had bet regularly with bookmakers on a variety of sports, and though Rose vehemently denied it, baseball included. In August 1989, he was   banned   from the game by the commissioner,   A. Bartlett Giamatti , and he was subsequently declared ineligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which would otherwise have been a certainty.

One of the tawdrier episodes in baseball history and one of the most public — Rose’s farewell news conference was televised nationally — it was also, for Rose, monumentally costly. Not only did he lose his livelihood; he subsequently spent several months in jail for   evasion of taxes   related to his gambling income as well as his baseball memorabilia sales and autograph appearances. (For Giamatti, a former president of Yale who had served as baseball commissioner for only five months, the aftermath was far worse. A heavy smoker, he died at 51 a week after announcing his decision, the stress of the Rose case possibly contributing to the heart attack that killed him.)

Hoping for eventual reinstatement, the possibility of managing again and restoring his candidacy for the Hall, Rose perpetuated his lie for 13 years, steadfastly claiming, against a preponderance of evidence, that though he gambled on other sports, he never bet on his own. It was not until 2002 that he admitted to the baseball commissioner at the time, Bud Selig, that he had.

The confession was made public two years later in an autobiography, “Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars,” written with Rick Hill. In the book he acknowledged that he had told Selig that he had bet regularly on baseball, including on games played by the Reds while he was their manager, though never against them, he claimed, asserting at one point that he “would rather die than lose a baseball game.”

The possibility of his reinstatement never seemed to vanish entirely. But neither Selig nor the subsequent commissioner, Rob Manfred, lifted the ban, and Rose lived the remainder of his days under a cloud. Even so, among other honors, he was named to Major League Baseball’s official all-century team in 1999, and he refused to leave the scene quietly. Voluble and vulgar, self-indulgent and self-justifying, Rose never gave up gambling at the track. He was perceived by many, after the publication of his book, not so much as a contrite penitent as a crass opportunist.

“This is a man who admitted something in a forum in which he can make money,” the sportswriter Peter Gammons wrote. “He has no remorse, no respect for anything but his next bet.”

In 2017, Rose’s reputation was further tarnished when an allegation that he had once had sex with a minor came to light in a defamation lawsuit that he filed against Dowd, who had led the investigation into Rose’s gambling. The lawsuit stemmed from remarks Dowd had made on a radio program saying that Rose had had sex with “12- to 14-year-old girls.”

In testimony from that case, an unidentified woman said she had sex with Rose when she was under 16. Rose responded that he had believed that she was 16, the age of consent in Ohio. He never faced any charges related to underage sex, the statute of limitation having expired.

Despite the black marks against him, Rose remained an enormously popular figure among fans, regularly drawing large crowds for memorabilia shows and signings, including in Cooperstown, N.Y., the home of the Hall of Fame, during its annual induction weekends.

The best-known precedent for Rose’s banishment from baseball was the 1921 decision by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s newly installed first commissioner, to permanently expel from the game eight members of the Chicago White Sox who had accepted bribes to throw the 1919 World Series. That decision has kept at least one of them, Joe Jackson (known by the nickname Shoeless Joe), one of the great hitters from the early part of the 20th century, from the Hall of Fame, which was established in 1939.

(Others have also been banished for gambling and even for the appearance of it; among them were Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, who in 1979, well after their careers were over, drew the censure of commissioner Bowie Kuhn when they took paid public relations jobs at Atlantic City casinos; they were reinstated by Kuhn’s successor, Peter Ueberroth. The last person to be permanently banned for gambling before Rose was William A. Cox, the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1943.)

Still, proponents of Rose’s cause rightly point out that the Hall of Fame has inducted its share of drunks and bigots, and that though Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and other admitted or suspected steroid users have not been voted into the Hall, they haven’t been disqualified or banished from the game, and many have continued to work in baseball. The question of whether Rose’s punishment fits his crime is one of baseball’s enduring moral conundrums.

“The Rose predicament leads to big questions,” Rose’s biographer Kostya Kennedy wrote in “Pete Rose: An American Dilemma” (2014). “What is the price of sin? And what price is just? Should forgiveness be granted only to the contrite?”

As for Rose the player, there is no debate. Known as Charlie Hustle for his indefatigable motor, he was one of baseball’s most recognizable figures on the field, a bobblehead of a man, tightly wound and never at rest. Squat and broad-shouldered with a block body, a distinctive haircut — early on a flattop crew cut and later a floppy Prince Valiant-style pageboy — he exhibited the yapping, twitchy demeanor of an oversize terrier, except perhaps when he was at bat.

At the plate he was fiercely attentive. A switch-hitter who faced the pitcher from both sides of the plate in a coiled crouch, he swung with a crisp fury — a spring sprung — and bolted from the batter’s box on contact. In fact, he didn’t even need contact; famously, he sprinted to first base after a walk and was wont to launch himself headfirst, Superman-style, and belly flop into second, third and home even when the play wasn’t all that close.

Teammates, opponents, sportswriters and fans marveled at his energy, his concentration, a competitive fire sustained inning to inning, game to game for 24 seasons and beyond his 45th birthday. He was nothing less than a hero in Cincinnati, where he played the bulk of his career with the Reds, a team that in the 1970s, known as the Big Red Machine, dominated the National League, going to the World Series four times and winning twice. His teammates included three Hall of Famers — Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez — and he competed against several others, among them Mike Schmidt, Ferguson Jenkins and Tom Seaver, but it was Rose who was named player of the decade by The Sporting News.

It was on Sept. 11, 1985, that Rose, playing for Philadelphia, became the career hits leader, eclipsing the total of the great Ty Cobb with No. 4,192, a looping single to left-center field off Eric Show of the San Diego Padres. (Baseball researchers have concluded that Cobb’s total was actually 4,189.) But that was only Rose’s most famous record.

He also got on base more often (5,929 times), played in more big-league games (3,852) and came to bat more times (15,890) than anyone else. He had the most singles in history (3,215) and the second most doubles. (Tris Speaker had 792, Rose 746.)

A star from beginning to end, Rose was National League rookie of the year in 1963. He was the league’s most valuable player in 1973, the World Series M.V.P. in 1975 and, in 1978, at age 37, he hit safely in 44 consecutive games, the second-longest streak of the 20th century (Joe DiMaggio’s in 1941 was 56 games) and the longest ever in the National League. He won three batting titles and batted over .300 in 15 seasons.

Not especially fast or graceful and without an especially powerful throwing arm, Rose nonetheless won two Gold Gloves and was remarkably versatile in the field, making the All-Star team at five different positions: second base, right field, left field, third base and first base. Overall, he appeared in 17 All-Star games, and the National League won 16 of them, including the 1970 game, which was played in Cincinnati and featured perhaps the signature moment of Rose’s career.

Rose didn’t start the game; he replaced Hank Aaron in right field in the fifth inning and was later shifted to left. The National League, behind 4-1, scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game, a rally killed by Rose, who struck out for the third out with a man on first. In the 12th inning, however, with the score still tied at 4 and the California Angels’ Clyde Wright on the mound, Rose singled with two out and no one on and was pushed to second on a hit by the Dodgers’ Billy Grabarkewitz.

The next hitter, Jim Hickman of the Chicago Cubs, lined a single to center, and Rose, determined to score, tore around third and headed to the plate as the throw came in from the center fielder Amos Otis and the catcher Ray Fosse braced for it, blocking the plate. In the moments before the ball arrived, a bounce hopping up from the artificial surface of Riverfront Stadium, Rose lowered his head and bulldozed into Fosse, toppling him backward and permanently damaging his left shoulder.

A young star with a promising future at the time, Fosse played reasonably well the following season, but he was never the same player after the collision, and the debate among baseball obsessives has endured ever since: Was this, as those who lament the cost to Fosse’s career would have it, a dangerously lunatic play by Rose in a game that was essentially an inconsequential exhibition? Or was it, as Rose and his supporters believe, proof of Rose’s greatness and his character as an athlete, the act of a consummate competitor with only one objective, no matter the contest?

“I don’t know any other way to play baseball,” Rose said, defending himself, “except to win.”

Born on Opening Day

Peter Edward Rose was born in Cincinnati on April 14, 1941, opening day of the major league baseball season, and grew up in the Anderson Ferry neighborhood along the Ohio River in the western part of the city. His father, Harry Francis Rose, known as Pete (or Big Pete), was a bank teller and accountant by profession and a well-known local athlete who boxed, played baseball and was especially celebrated for his exploits as a semipro football player.

Multiple biographical sources, as well as Rose himself, have said that Big Pete was the biggest influence on his son and his toughest critic, imbuing him with the relentlessness and drive that characterized his play; it was at his insistence that young Pete, at age 8, learned to switch-hit.

Rose’s mother, LaVerne (Bloebaum) Rose, called Rosie, was the disciplinarian in the family. “He was a real easygoing person,” she said of her husband, “and I wasn’t.” Just about every biographical source about her son recounts her openness, her lack of pretension and her reputation for brawling.

“I didn’t take nothing from nobody,” Ms. Rose told Michael Sokolove for his book “Hustle: The Myth, Life and Lies of Pete Rose” (1990). “I wouldn’t stand back from a fight. A couple of times I pulled a girl out of a bar and whooped the hell out of her.”

Small and slight through his high school years, Rose was fearsomely competitive and obsessively devoted to honing his skills even as a boy. At Western Hills High School — whose other alumni include the big leaguers Don Zimmer and Ed Brinkman — he excelled as an elusive runner in football as well as in baseball, though he was ineligible to play as a senior because he had had to repeat his sophomore year after flunking out.

Instead, he played semipro ball; his uncle, Buddy Bloebaum, a former minor leaguer (and reportedly a skilled pool hustler), was a sometime scout for the Reds, and he put in a word for his nephew, who signed a minor-league contract and began his professional career in 1960 with the Class D Geneva Redlegs, for whom he played second base and hit .277 in 85 games.

Three years later, having grown two inches, added nearly 40 pounds and impressed Reds manager Fred Hutchinson with his savvy and hustle, Rose was in the big leagues. Indefatigably brash, he refused to play the traditional rookie role of going along to get along, and he was disliked by most of his teammates, especially after he displaced the veteran second baseman Don Blasingame in the starting lineup and Blasingame was traded.

Rose found his niche in the clubhouse with the Reds’ Black stars, Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, who responded to Rose with sympathy, recognizing ostracism when they saw it. The liaison was unusual in baseball of the early civil rights era; Sokolove reported that Rose was pressured by many, including Hutchinson and Big Pete, to seek society within his race. But as Rose himself wrote in a 1970 autobiography, “The Pete Rose Story,” he told a Reds official, “Listen, these colored guys are the ones who treat me like I’m a human being.” (The subject of several biographies and a contributor to others, Rose told one of his co-authors, the eminent sportswriter Roger Kahn, “I’ve written more damn books than I’ve read.”)

Rose won the admiration of his teammates more easily on the field. The league’s best rookie, he hit .273 with 170 hits. Two years later, he made his first All-Star team, reached 200 hits and batted over .300 for the first time. In 1968 and 1969 he won consecutive batting crowns, averaging .335 and .348, respectively. The Reds made the World Series in 1970 and 1972 (losing both times) and nearly did so again in 1973.

That year they were foiled by the Mets in the best-of-five National League Championship Series, though you couldn’t blame Rose, who had 230 hits that year, batted .338 to win the batting title and was the league M.V.P. He tied Game 1 with a home run off Tom Seaver in the eighth inning (Bench homered in the ninth to win it) and won Game 4 with a home run in the 12th. He had two of the Reds’ seven hits in the Game 5 loss, and hit .381 for the series.

He also sparked a famous contretemps, sliding hard into the Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson in an unsuccessful attempt to break up a double play during Game 3 in New York. Rose, who may or may not have thrown an elbow as he slid in, and Harrelson, a pixie by comparison, tangled furiously at second base, initiating a bench-clearing ruckus.

No one was ejected or seriously hurt — in the aftermath Pedro Borbon, a Reds pitcher, absent-mindedly put a Mets cap on his head and, seeing his mistake, took a bite out of it — but when Rose went out to left field the next inning, the fans threw debris at him, and Sparky Anderson, the Reds’ manager, pulled his team off the field. The game was delayed, and the Mets, who were well ahead, were in danger of having to forfeit until their manager, Yogi Berra, and players including Willie Mays and Seaver, walked out to left field and implored the fans to cut it out.

“I’m no little girl out there,” Rose later said about his aggressive slide. “I’m supposed to give the fans their money’s worth, and try to bust up double plays — and shortstops.”

That was an attitude that paid special rewards in 1975, when Rose’s Reds won their first championship, defeating the Red Sox in seven games in one of history’s most memorable World Series. Rose was the series M.V.P., batting .370 for the seven games, but better known may be the often-told story about Game 6, a famously taut thriller won by Boston on a home run by the catcher Carlton Fisk. At bat in the 10th inning, Rose turned to Fisk and marveled aloud about what a great game it was; he repeated the sentiment after it was over to Anderson, his manager, who pointed out that the Reds had lost.

“But it was a great game, wasn’t it?” Rose said.

In Game 7, won by the Reds, 4-3, on a ninth-inning hit by Joe Morgan, Rose had two hits, drove in the tying run with a single in the seventh and walked ahead of Morgan in the ninth to push the eventual winning run into scoring position. But his biggest contribution came earlier and is easily overlooked, because it doesn’t show up in the statistics.

In the sixth inning, the Reds were trailing 3-0; with one out and Rose on first, Bench hit a grounder to short that looked like a sure double play that would have ended the inning. But as he did with Harrelson, Rose, who was out, slid hard into second, forcing a bad throw by the Red Sox second baseman, Denny Doyle, and prolonging the inning. The next batter, Tony Perez, homered.

“Reds cognoscenti will never forget that it was a first-to-second-base hustle-and-slide on a routine ground ball,” Kostya Kennedy wrote in “An American Dilemma,” “a simple effort play that anyone could push to make but few do, which made the difference.”

The Reds swept the Yankees in the Series in 1976, but the Big Red Machine began grinding down after that, and Rose, who became a free agent after the 1978 season, left for the Phillies. His best seasons were behind him, but he hit .331 in 1979 and led the league in on-base percentage, led the league in doubles in 1980 and in hits in 1981, a season shortened by a players’ strike. The Phillies won the World Series in 1980, their first championship, defeating the Kansas City Royals in six games, and featuring another Rose career highlight.

In the ninth inning of the final game, the Phillies led, 4-1, but the Royals had loaded the bases with one out. Frank White of the Royals lifted a pop foul toward the first base dugout, and the Phils’ catcher, Bob Boone, slid over to make the catch, but as the ball came down it ticked off Boone’s glove, and for a moment it seemed that the Royals were being given the gift of an extra out — under the circumstances a harbinger of good fortune as palpable as pixie dust.

Astonishingly, however, Rose, who was playing first base, had also edged toward the dugout, and when the ball jumped from Boone’s glove, as though a payoff for years of hustling to back up a play, he was close enough to snatch it out of the air. White was out, and moments later the series was over.

Rose played five seasons in Philadelphia, then part of a season for the Montreal Expos before returning in 1984 to Cincinnati, where he was a player-manager until his retirement after the 1986 season. He continued to manage until his banishment in 1989, though he was suspended for 30 days in 1988 by Giamatti, who was then the president of the National League, for shoving an umpire, Dave Pallone, during an argument over a call.

His career average was .303. He hit 160 home runs and had 1,314 runs batted in and 2,165 runs scored, sixth most in history. In six seasons as a manager, his Reds teams were 412-373, finishing second four times but never first.

Rose’s personal life was tumultuous. He was married and divorced twice, and he had four children with his wives: two daughters, Fawn and Cara; and two sons, Tyler and Pete Jr., who played and managed in the minor leagues and was briefly with the Reds in 1997.

But Rose was an admitted philanderer, and as the object of a paternity suit, he eventually acknowledged that he was the father of another daughter, Megan Erin Rubio.

Rose had a partner, Kiana Kim, and grandchildren as well. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

In recent years, Rose earned a living in a variety of businesses, including restaurants and horse breeding. He occasionally worked as a commentator on baseball broadcasts and, with Ms. Kim, starred in a short-lived reality television series, “Hits and Mrs.” He entertained thousands of fans at autograph signings in Las Vegas. For more than a quarter century he maintained a chattery, pesky presence on the baseball fringe, making his case for reinstatement.

“My actions, which I thought were benign, call the integrity of the game into question,” Rose wrote in “My Prison Without Bars.” “And there’s no excuse for that, but there’s also no reason to punish me forever.”