How Pete Rose Fell

Sports serves many purposes in modern life, practical and moral instruction chief among them. Football “teaches you discipline and helps you develop a sense of leadership and courage and camaraderie with your friends and teammates,” the NFL cornerback Richard Sherman said when explaining why he would encourage his son to pursue the sport. “It shows you how to work with a group and how to depend on one another, how to trust someone to do their jobs and how to be dependable in your job. These are things you learn that are essential throughout your life.” Such lessons are usually directed at the young, but not always. Coaches and other prominent athletes are overrepresented in the ranks of motivational speakers, who extoll teamwork and sacrifice at trade association conferences and corporate retreats.

No sports parable is more popular than the one about the athlete who overcomes modest innate gifts through hard work, dedication, and competitive fire. The broader lesson requires no interpretation: if any of us were to try much harder, we too could achieve far more in our professional and personal lives. When an interviewed athlete talks about not being especially big or strong or fast, he is invariably humblebragging, praising himself for having outworked more talented peers.

Some athletes do indeed work harder than others, but even the least capable professional athlete is far more gifted than you or I. America’s oldest team sport, baseball, played professionally since the late nineteenth century, has had millions of sandlot aspirants. But only 23,000 men have advanced to play even one game in the major leagues. A crowd that size would leave many big-league ballparks half-empty.

Encouraging hard work and pushing against obstacles really is sound advice, but so is the adage that the four most important words in the English language are “up to a point.” Telling people to compensate for their modest capabilities with focused exertion neglects the possibility that the very gifted can also work heroically. Michael Jordan, who led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA titles in the 1990s, was a “supremely talented overachiever,” in the words of sports commentator Skip Bayless. “He was better than anyone else, and he worked harder than anyone else and, in the end, it was just unfair.” If every player in the game, from the most to the least capable, is equally avid about fulfilling his potential, then the question of who wants it more becomes moot. Outcomes will depend entirely on differences in ability: every race goes to the swift, every battle to the strong. If they staged a rematch, as the sportswriters used to say, the smart money would still be on Goliath.

The baseball player Pete Rose, who died last month at the age of 83, built a career, a persona, and an entire life on the foundation of exertion and unyielding determination. In the early 1960s when he was breaking in with the Cincinnati Reds, the venerable National League franchise in his native city, veteran players derided him as “Charlie Hustle” for trying too hard and too obviously, going so far as to sprint to first after receiving a base on balls. (The play-by-play announcers describe that event as a “walk,” and most players act accordingly.) Rose turned others’ mockery into his own boast, happily embracing the nickname for the rest of his 24-year playing career. “People say I don’t have great tools,” Rose once said. “I make up for it in other ways, by putting out a little bit more. That’s my theory, to go through life hustling.”

In addition to getting the most out of his own talents, Rose searched for every edge to make his opponents’ workday difficult, and their chance of winning a game a bit smaller. These measures included aggressive slides on the basepaths that sometimes precipitated fights and injured opposing players. “Winning makes all the difference in the world,” he said in one of his as-told-to autobiographies. “Winning is fun. Losing is not. Losing sucks.”

Passionate commitment would be Rose’s claim to the fame that increased steadily over the three decades he wore a baseball uniform. In 1978 there was a Pete Rose Day in Washington. After meeting President Carter in the White House, Rose went to Capitol Hill, where one congressman extolled his “exemplary behavior, legendary hustle, and zeal.” Seven years later, as Rose was closing in on Ty Cobb’s record for most hits in a baseball career, an Ohio politician argued for naming a Cincinnati street after Rose to honor the local legend’s “[h]ard work, hustle, aggressiveness, and competitiveness.”

More Than Hustle

The idea that Rose overcame limited abilities was not entirely well-founded. In his twenties, he was among the fastest players in the game. (One of his minor league managers said that Rose ran “like a scalded dog.”) His father, “Big Pete,” was determined that his son achieve the athletic glory that had eluded him in his own youth. At Big Pete’s insistence, Rose become a switch-hitter at eight years old. He even benefitted from some nepotism in launching his baseball career: his mother’s brother, a Cincinnati Reds scout, persuaded the reluctant front office to give his nephew a tryout, which resulted in a contract offer with a modest $6,000 signing bonus. In any case, no amount of extra practice would matter without exceptional hand-eye coordination, which was crucial to Rose’s most famous achievements: amassing 4,256 base hits, the most in baseball history; leading the majors in total hits seven different seasons, including in 1981 when he was 40 years old; and setting a National League record by hitting safely in 44 consecutive games.

For all that, Rose really did have a robust claim to being “the most ordinary extraordinary athlete in the history of American sports,” as Keith O’Brien wrote in Charlie Hustle, a biography published earlier this year. For one thing, Rose did not have a strong throwing arm or natural position on the field. Over the years, he played at second, right field, left field, third base, and first. Some players who make modest defensive contributions end up as designated hitters in the modern game, but Rose would have been a doubtful prospect for that role even if the option had been available when he played. “His .375 lifetime on-base percentage is good but not legendary,” the peerless sportswriter Joe Posnanski has pointed out. And Rose never hit for power, reaching his career peak of 16 home runs twice during his first seven seasons. Over his final eight seasons in baseball, a tenure prolonged solely to surpass Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 career hits, Rose managed a total of ten home runs.

Taking these strengths and limitations into account, Rose is clearly in the top percentile of the 23,000 major league players. A comprehensive, esoteric new statistical tool, Wins Above Replacement, reflects everything a player contributes on the field that increases the odds the team he plays for will win baseball games, both by helping his team score runs and by preventing the opposition from scoring. WAR makes it possible to compare pitchers with position players as well as ballplayers from one era against those of another. By that measure, Rose had the 66th-best career in baseball history, making him one of the greats.

But not one of the greatest of the greats: Rose’s career WAR of 79.5 is just over half as much as that of Willie Mays, 156.2, the fifth-highest figure of all time. Babe Ruth ranks first with 182.6. Among position players, Rose ranks right behind Houston Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell, who had a lifetime WAR of 79.9 despite a career that was nine years shorter than Rose’s. Posnanski’s The Baseball 100 (2021) ranks Rose the 60th-best player of all time, just behind Reggie Jackson and just ahead of Joesph “Arky” Vaughan, a shortstop who played for the Pirates in the 1930s and the Dodgers in the 1940s. Posnanski calls Vaughan “the least-known great Major League Baseball player.” (Bonus fact: Vaughan played pee wee football in southern California with Richard Nixon, who was ten months younger.)

For the final 35 years of his life, of course, all questions about Rose’s athletic achievements were subordinated to ones about his personal conduct and character. In 1989 Rose signed an agreement with Major League Baseball (MLB) accepting permanent ineligibility from participating in baseball in any fashion. He did so after an MLB investigation led by a former federal prosecutor, John Dowd, amassed overwhelming evidence that Rose, while managing the Reds in the 1980s, had placed bets on major league games, including ones his team was playing. There is as little doubt that Rose made these bets as there is that they violated baseball’s rules. Every big league clubhouse posts Rule 21 prominently. Section d states that a player or other participant who bets on a baseball game in which he was not involved shall be declared ineligible for one year, and anyone who bets on a game in which he is involved shall be declared “permanently ineligible.”

Rule 21’s purpose is to ensure that there will never be another “Black Sox” scandal. Eight players on the 1919 Chicago White Sox agreed that, in return for bribes from gamblers, they would intentionally lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, precipitating a crisis of trust and credibility that nearly destroyed the sport. Rule 21(a) addresses this nightmare directly. It mandates permanent ineligibility for any player, coach, or other participant who “shall promise or agree to lose, or to attempt to lose, or to fail to give his best efforts towards the winning of any baseball game with which he is or may be in any way concerned….”

In his consuming effort to win reinstatement from the baseball commissioner and eligibility for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, Pete Rose’s last line of defense was that although he had bet on Reds games while managing the team, he never bet on his team to lose, which rendered his gambling activity a misdemeanor compared to the felonies committed by the Black Sox conspirators. Unlike them, that is, he and his team were giving an honest effort every game. This claim hardly solves the problem. For one thing, we have only Rose’s word on the question, and no one should treat that as conclusive. In this year’s HBO documentary, “Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose,” sportswriter Larry Keith says without rancor that whether or not Rose belongs in baseball’s Hall of Fame, he’ll be a prime candidate in case somebody opens a hall of fame for lying. For 15 years after MLB imposed its death sentence, Rose insisted he never bet on any baseball games, though he had no coherent explanation for why he had accepted MLB’s permanent ban if it was for transgressions he never committed. John Dowd told an interviewer in 2002 that his investigation had been pursuing evidence that Rose did indeed bet against his own team, but that Rose’s decision to accept the permanent ban brought the investigation to a halt, leaving the question unresolved.

Criminals and Sleazeballs

Even if we stipulate that Rose did not bet against the Reds while managing them, his conduct inflicted grave damage on the sport. Letting it slide would have guaranteed, someday, a second Black Sox scandal. As Keith O’Brien explains in Charlie Hustle, any manger in the position Rose had placed himself “could overuse a pitcher or refuse to rest a starter in pursuit of his own financial gain, and what he wagered—or didn’t wager—could move markets in the underworld.” In 2002 Dowd said his investigators had determined that Rose never bet on the Reds to win whenever two particular pitchers were scheduled to start, which “sent a message through the gambling community” that the smart money, equipped with inside knowledge, should bet against Cincinnati on those days. In baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti’s press conference announcing Rose’s banishment, he said, in O’Brien’s summary, that “a competitor placing bets on his own games—‘covert’ and ‘conspiratorial’ bets—was a player with a conflict of interest, more invested in himself than he was in the team, and more beholden to outside forces than any commissioner could tolerate.”

The third section of Charlie Hustle, covering the years of growing gambling problems and association with criminals and sleazeballs is titled “Fall.” The final section about Rose’s life after being forced out of baseball, which included five months in federal prison for tax evasion, is “Wreckage.” Pete Rose’s life and reputation after the Dowd Report was, O’Brien says, “one of America’s great tragedies.”

The central element of a tragic story is that the protagonist is brought low by a fatal flaw, a character trait that guarantees his ruin. Tragedies are especially profound when the character flaw is the same trait as, or thoroughly bound up with, the virtue that made the doomed character admirable in the first place. Rose’s determination to do whatever victory required served him well during his playing career, but also fed his refusal to address a gambling addiction, or to work out a face-saving accommodation with the baseball commissioner. Posnanski and O’Brien agree that MLB, far from having a vendetta against Rose, searched desperately for a path that would preserve the integrity of the game without humiliating one of its biggest stars. Rose, however, wanted nothing less than complete exoneration, in the form of the commissioner’s office endorsing his fantasy that he had never bet on any baseball games. (The picture that emerges from Charlie Hustle, Posnanski’s essays, and the HBO documentary is that Rose was invested completely in the George Costanza rule: it’s not a lie…if you believe it.)

In the summer of 1989, when everything was on the line, Rose repeatedly rejected options that could have mitigated the damage to his career and reputation. “The same qualities that made him a successful baseball player—and one of the greatest hitters of all time—ensured his failure now,” O’Brien writes. “Pete wasn’t going to let Paul Janszen [a former gofer and bagman who had become Rose’s chief accuser] win, if that’s what this was about. He was going to fight his fight….” Rose rejected MLB’s framework for a settlement: he must admit to having bet on baseball and seek help for his gambling problem, in exchange for promises that future requests for reinstatement in the game would be considered without prejudice. The “victory” that Rose won instead, the right to insist that he and MLB simply disagreed on the question of whether he had broken Rule 21, was pyrrhic. “In his effort not to appear weak,” O’Brien concludes, “Pete had ended up looking stupid, doomed by his own choices, failed by his advisors in Cincinnati, and outwitted by smarter men in New York….”

By 2004 even Rose realized that MLB was not going to relent, which meant that his campaign to be reinstated and made eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame was at a dead end if he did not admit that he had gambled on baseball. His vehicle for confessing was a book, My Prison Without Bars, that did little to advance Rose’s cause. As even the title suggests, the rehabilitation campaign reflected self-pity more than contrition. The dominant theme of Rose’s multi-decade campaign to talk his way into Cooperstown was that he had been punished enough, that the penalty far outweighed the crimes. More disciplined as an athlete than a speaker, Rose found it hard to press his case without migrating toward the message, inimical to his goal, that his gambling on baseball wasn’t really that big a deal.

Hit King

In his obituary, published on the Esquire magazine website, Joe Posnanski said that he routinely asks audiences at public events whether Rose should be in the Hall of Fame, and invariably finds the audience split 50-50. It’s hard to see how Rose’s death moves the needle. For his supporters, induction now is less likely to be viewed as a posthumous honor than a cruel denial of the recognition and absolution that Rose had craved so openly as his time was running out. For his detractors, a plaque in the Hall means that the resolve MLB showed in insisting on the importance of Rule 21 will be squandered under circumstances in which it cannot appease Rose and will not propitiate his most loyal fans. The Hall of Fame, according to The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1985), “is a self-defining institution that has manifestly failed to define itself.” James meant that no one can authoritatively delineate the minimum level of skill and accomplishment separating players who deserve to be in the Hall of Fame from those who don’t quite measure up. But his view is equally applicable to the question of breaking rules and dishonoring the game, the one at the heart of the controversy posed by Pete Rose, or by players credibly accused of using banned performance-enhancing drugs.

“Hustle” is an interesting word. It is good to hustle, to work hard, but bad to be a hustler. Hustlers, too, are often diligent, but they apply themselves to deceiving and cheating their victims, people who will eventually realize and resent that they’ve been hustled. Charlie Hustle always hustled, but over time succumbed to becoming a hustler—relying on a coterie of users and losers to both pursue and conceal his gambling habit, assuming that a deferential press corps would be endlessly sycophantic. On the ballfield, his single-minded pursuit of victory depended on underestimating his athletic abilities. In conference rooms, media appearances, and courtrooms, his relentless effort to salvage his career was undone because he overestimated his reputation, foolishly convinced that commissioners, investigators, and prosecutors would be too intimidated by Charlie Hustle the legend to confront Pete Rose the man.

It turns out that the moral of the Pete Rose story, now concluded, is more complex and disquieting than the moral imparted 50 years ago, when the story was a work in progress. Like courage, hard work and competitiveness are indeed virtues, but instrumental ones—never better than the goal you’re working to achieve, the victory you’re trying to secure. And for all that hustling can accomplish, it can’t make us any wiser about choosing objectives. In some cases, like Rose’s, hard work impairs people’s judgment by making them too smug about the power of diligence and too dismissive about the other virtues needed to choose wisely and live well.

The Pete Rose story should, at the least, demonstrate the danger of outsourcing moral instruction to athletes who work tirelessly from childhood to hone a very specific set of skills. That experience is more likely to culminate in tunnel vision than to confer wisdom and perspective. “I’m not paid to be a role model,” said Charles Barkley in a 1993 Nike commercial. “I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.” In the HBO documentary we see Pete Rose wearing shirts with collar stitching that spells out “Hit King.” He earned the right to make that boast, but we do ourselves and our sports stars a disservice by treating them as philosopher kings.

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