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.
Rose’s agent, Ryan Fiterman, confirmed the death to TMZ. 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.”
A full obituary will follow.
The post Pete Rose, Baseball Star Who Earned Glory and Shame, Dies at 83 appeared first on New York Times.
