Baseball Legend and Notorious Sports Bettor Pete Rose Dead at 83

Pete Rose, the baseball legend who did for sports betting what Edward Snowden did for whistleblowing, died at his Las Vegas home on Monday. He was 83. No cause of death has been determined yet.

Rose, nicknamed “Charlie Hustle” for his habit of sprinting to first base even on a walk, was Major League Baseball’s career hits leader (4,256). During an exceptional career that saw him play 19 of his 24 years with his hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds, Rose was also a 17-time All-Star, a three-time World Series champion, a National League MVP, and a World Series MVP.

Rose also managed to maintain an astounding career batting average of .303.

Every summer, three things are going to happen,” Rose once said, “the grass is going to get green, the weather is going to get hot, and Pete Rose is going to get 200 hits and bat .300.”

Few players were more of a shoo-in for the Baseball Hall of Fame, where baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth once promised “a prominent spot” reserved for him.

But that was not to be.

Hall of Shame

In March 1989, Rose was at the center of a betting scandal second in infamy only to the Chicago Black Sox brouhaha of 1919, in which several members of that team were expelled for throwing that year’s World Series.

As the manager of the Reds, Rose was discovered to have bet on games in which his team played.

Though Rose denied all wrongdoing, Ueberroth’s investigation found that the “accumulated testimony of witnesses, together with the documentary evidence and telephone records, reveal extensive betting activity by Pete Rose in connection with professional baseball and, in particular, Cincinnati Reds games, during the 1985, 1986, and 1987 baseball seasons.”

By all accounts, Rose never bet against his team, like the Black Sox members did. However, that didn’t matter because MLB rules don’t discern between betting on your team to win or lose.

Betting on a game in which your team plays triggers an automatic lifetime ban from baseball. This left Rose ineligible for the Hall of Fame and probably set legalized sports betting back a decade.

Rose’s fall from grace was all the harder because no one lived and breathed baseball more than him. Rose recalled minutia from long-ago games and obscure player statistics.

In July, Rose claimed the scandal cost him $100 million.

“That’s what I’d have made in baseball if I hadn’t got suspended,” Rose told an LA screening audience for the first episode of the HBO documentary series “Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose.”

With nothing left to lose, Rose continued betting on baseball in casinos in Nevada, the only state where that was legal until 2018.

I don’t think betting is morally wrong,” Rose wrote in “Play Hungry,” his 2019 autobiography. “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.”

Signing merchandise for his forgiving fans wasn’t just a living that Rose made. It seemed to heal his troubled psyche to listen to opinions that regarded the good he did for baseball as more important than the bad.