“Top” Ten Losses of 2024: Pete Rose (#10)

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Once upon a time, this man’s death would have topped this list and probably spawned a month’s worth of tributes from me. Regardless of what he did after the fact, ON THE FIELD he was the best player I ever saw play the game with my own four eyes. Let’s start the list of the most personally significant obituaries of 2024 with this man. #10: Pete Rose Rose, he knows he’s such a credit to the game But the Yankees grabbed the headlines every time (Billy Joel, “Zanzibar”) Billy Joel so brilliantly articulated part of my problem with Pete Rose in that line. Rose, as I said, was unquestionably the best player I ever saw play in person. I saw him in all three uniforms, too: many, many times as a Red (at Crosley Field and Riverfront Stadium), once in Philadelphia with the Phillies (a friend of mine was graduating from college and we went to a game together), and once as an Expo (when he was in Cincinnati, as a visitor, sitting on 3,999 hits…he walked four times in the game). They called him “Charlie Hustle,” and he DID. The man ran to first base after a walk or a hit-by-pitch. But Rose had an arrogant streak in him that I’ve only seen rivaled by politicians. And, waddaya know, ol’ Pete could LIE like a politician, too. You probably know the story: in 1989 he was banned from baseball after it was discovered that he had bet on baseball games. Shortly after Bart Giamatti announced the ban, Rose appeared on Cincinnati TV (carried live to everyone, courtesy of ESPN) and told the world that Giamatti was a lying sack of bull excrement, that he’d NEVER bet on baseball games, and he was looking forward to his newborn daughter’s first birthday so he could apply for reinstatement. Giamatti died of a heart attack a week after announcing the ban, many of his friends believing the stress of the investigation helped contribute to his death (along with his smoking habit). On and on we went through the 90s, with Pete taking every opportunity to deny the findings of the report that resulted in his lifetime ban. He screamed “fake news!” about the Dowd Report, about his income tax charges, and about anything that didn’t present him as the living embodiment of baseball and human perfection. Yeah, right. In 2004, Rose wrote a book called My Prison Without Walls. All of those vehement denials he had made about betting on baseball? In the words of Colonel Potter, “Buffalo bagels.” He admitted it. Even worse, taking a cue from Toby Keith’s song “I Wanna Talk About Me,” every year during the Hall of Fame week in Cooperstown, Rose would get a booth near the Hall of Fame and sign autographs (reports were that he was making at least a million dollars a year just signing autographs). He dubbed himself “the Hit King,” which, while true (he holds the records for most hits in baseball, at 4,256), just reeks of self-aggrandizement. Everything was about Pete. Ironic, I guess, that he died a day after a memorabilia autograph session, and died of the same thing that killed his nemesis Giamatti (heart problems). There was a great movie in 1948 called The Fallen Idol; and, while Rose didn’t commit physical murder as was depicted in the film, he certainly killed a lot of dreams and opinions in baseball. Pete Rose Born Peter Edward Rose, April 14, 1941, Cincinnati, Ohio Died September 30, 2024, Las Vegas, Nevada (atherosclerotic heart disease) (age 83) HALL OF FAME: Cincinnati Reds A retrospective of Rose’s career: