Baseball legend Pete Rose has passed away at the age of 83.
Farewell to the great Charlie Hustle. Five bucks says they will put him in Cooperstown next year.
I see what you did there.
I was wondering if anybody would catch that LOL. I didn’t think about the irony at first. That being said, this one gets me in my feels as a Cincinnati Reds fan.
An excellent player, who became obsessed with his own numbers and fame, and was incapable of admitting that he screwed up, or showing any contrition.
I am absolutely convinced he would have been reinstated, and elected to the Hall of Fame, twenty years ago, if he’d actually been able to admit what he’d done, and stick with an apology, rather than backtracking, and continuing to hang out with gamblers.
If I recall correctly, he accepted a lifetime ban, so I would have no problem with him being inducted into the Hall of Fame now.
He did, but he was also told that he could apply for reinstatement – which he did, several times, but neither Faye Vincent nor Bud Selig (the first two MLB Commissioners to whom he applied) ever acted on it.
Rose then applied to the current commissioner, Rob Manfred, who rejected the application outright. As per Wikipedia:
It has always been clear to me that Rose desperately wanted to be in the Hall, but his ego and his inability to not continue to gamble precluded it. Interviews I had seen with him in recent years suggested, to me, that he was very bitter about having been told that he could apply for reinstatement, but was never actually reinstated.
Totally agree with this statement. It’s a travesty that the all-time hits leader isn’t in the HOF.
As I posted in the Death thread, I didn’t much like him as a player, manager, or person, but he deserves to be in the Hall.
Oh, and he was one of the worst baseball announcers ever.
This may be a matter of semantics, but it looks like the technical term for Rose’s status (as well as that of Shoeless Joe Jackson and others) is “permanently ineligible.”
Also the all-time outs leader.
Which is, for me, why I’m a little more ambivalent about the “Rose in the Hall” debate. Rose got his last few hundred hits by writing his own name into the lineup every day, even when there were better players who merited playing ahead of him. Rose was sufficiently fixated on Cobb’s record that he couldn’t do what was best for the team, and I think that’s a strike against him - and if he had done what was best, it’s doubtful he would have made the MLB record (he had the NL hits record for a long time).
He always claimed never to have bet against his own team, but never came to grips with how it was that betting on his own team could change the way he managed depending on how his bets were laid.
Still a big part of baseball’s history. HIs 44-game hitting streak in 1978 is one of my first memories of the game. Deserves the HoF because of fame - but for the honor of it? That I’m not quite as sure of.
I mean, it’s amazing to me that people seem to forget this, or didn’t know it. To me the record is a bit of a sham for that reason.
But, suppose he had actually opted out and not done that – do you think his numbers were still good enough to be HOF? It’s still a lot of damn hits.
Me too but mainly because I think they did him dirty. I can see getting disciplined for it and maybe even suspended for a time but this guy paid for it his whole life. I see some of these athletes doing soooo much worse with little to no repercussions.
In professional sports, the one and true “line that cannot be crossed” is betting on the sport you’re playing. It has to be. Otherwise, it’s too easy to claim the fix is in. Call it the “Arnold Rothstein Rule” if you’d like. Your team, other teams, it doesn’t matter. It’s too easy for you, as an insider, to have information that the average gambler doesn’t have. And all of the sports have realized that if people lose faith in the gambling on the sports, then they quit betting. Then they quit watching because they have nothing on the line. Then the sweet, sweet dollars go away. And they can’t have that. So the hard and fast rule applies.
Pete would be in now if he had admitted his transgressions, apologized, and QUIT GAMBLING. He couldn’t. It was on him.
Rose apologized at one point, but made it clear in his apology that he was doing it to get into the Hall. That it, it was insincere. An apology without contrition is just a bunch of empty words. My impression at the time was that he was incapable of seeing things from any point of view but his own.
IMO, he’d have gotten into the Hall easily if not for the gambling scandal. He wasn’t a top-tier player, like Mays or Aaron, but he was very good for a long time. The press corps, who do the voting, admired him for his hustle and love of the game.
Objectively, he almost undoubtedly had the stats for inclusion in the Hall, even beyond the all-time hits record (which, as already noted, he got to in the end by being a player-manager, and putting himself in the lineup).
In his career, he earned:
- An MVP award (and finished in the top five in voting four other times)
- A World Series MVP award
- A Rookie of the Year award
- Three batting titles
- Two Gold Gloves
- One Silver Slugger
- Led the NL in hits five times
- Let the NL in doubles five times
- 17 All-Star Games
Even if he stuck around too long (playing until age 45), in pursuit of Cobb’s hit title, he remained a very effective hitter and ballplayer for a long time: in 1980, at 40, he hit .282, and led the NL in doubles. The following season, at 41, he hit .325, and led the NL in base hits.
And, though we didn’t know about sabermetric stats like WAR when he was playing, Baseball Reference calculates him as having a bWAR score of 5.0+ in eight seasons.
The back to back World Series in 75/76 were some of the most exciting baseball I’ve ever seen. He was truly Charley Hustle. It was a great lineup.
Well yeah, he was a hell of a player in his prime.
Rose managed from mid-1984 through 1989. He played for ‘himself’ in 1984, 1985, and 1986. He broke the record in September of 1985, a season in which he played 119 games. He played in just 72 games in 1986.
Saying that he wrote himself into the lineup ‘every day’ is a bit of a stretch. Were there players better than him? Perhaps. But the Reds won 89 games in 1985, so obviously he was doing something right. And he batted .264.
Rose was given many chances to atone to MLB, and continued to flip them off.
Gambling on the sport has always very clearly defined as the absolute cardinal rule to not break. There is no worse.
Other than maybe repeated statutory rape, but luckily Charlie Hustle also had that in the bag. I continue to be amazed that people want to defend that piece of garbage.
I sympathize with Rose and understand the addictive nature of gambling. But if he was given many chances to apologize, I don’t blame the Hall of Fame for not electing him despite worthy statistics and many impressive accomplishments. These are not really changed by whether or not he would be elected.