Pete Rose

American baseball player

• Born: April 14, 1941
• Place of Birth: Cincinnati, Ohio

Rose broke Ty Cobb’s major league baseball record of 4,191 career hits in 1985 and established a new record of 4,256 hits by the time he retired in 1986. He lost an assured place in baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1989 when he was banned from the sport for betting on baseball games.

Early Life

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Pete Rose was born to Harry Francis Rose and LaVerne Bloebaum Rose. His parents had four children: two girls (Jackie and Caryl) and two boys (Pete and Dave). The Rose children attended Saylor Park Elementary School. As a child, Rose was obsessed with baseball. His father was a famous local athlete, a semiprofessional football player, who, along with his uncle, Ed (Buddy) Bloebaum, devoted special time to teaching Rose how to play baseball. Harry rolled and pitched baseballs to his firstborn son in the backyard of the house. At the age of four, Rose hit one of his father’s pitches through a back window. Harry treasured the broken pane as a sign of his son’s future baseball prowess; it was covered but never replaced while the parents lived in the house.

As Rose grew older, his father began drilling him in baseball skills. They both loved to play the game, but his dad dictated that he play to win. Because of Rose’s small stature during his youth, both agreed that he should work on getting hits rather than trying to be a home-run hitter like Babe Ruth. At the age of nine, Rose became a member of the Knothole Club, which sponsored baseball leagues in Bold Face Park. He “banged out line drive after line drive” on the same diamond on which his grandfather and father once had played.

Uncle Buddy began training Rose to prepare for a professional baseball career. He and Harry decided to teach him to be a switch-hitter. Before going to bed each night, Rose would swing the bat one hundred times left-handed and one hundred times right-handed. He worked hard to perfect the technique, as his hitting records later proved. Rose started as a catcher and, after two years, began to play third base. However, he valued the experience behind the plate as a catcher as a quick learning position for a baseball player.

Rose attended Western Hills High School. In 1955, when he entered his freshman year, the baseball coach was Paul “Pappy” Nohr, who had sent several high-school players into the major leagues. Counting on playing on the varsity football team as a sophomore, Rose was devastated when he was not invited to try out because of his small size. He lost interest, skipped classes and school, bummed around town, and flunked his second year. He lost a year of his eligibility and was forced to repeat his sophomore studies. He did play two years on the varsity football and baseball teams but stood on the sidelines most of his senior year.

Two baseball openings filled the void of his final year in high school. First, sports watchdog John Brosnan got Rose into a Cincinnati Reds uniform to catch fly balls during the team’s batting practice when they were in town. Second, Rose’s uncle helped place him on the roster of the Lebanon team in the Dayton Amateur League. Rose loved the experience; he played at second base, and his team was soon “tearing the league apart.” The day after Rose graduated from high school in 1960, his uncle and dad took him to the Reds’ Crosley Field offices, where he was offered a contract to play on one of the Reds’ minor league teams.

After completing boot camp for the Ohio National Guard, Rose married Karolyn Ann Engelhardt on January 25, 1964, in Cincinnati. They had two children: a son named Pete, Jr., and a daughter named Fawn. The couple divorced in 1980. Pete Rose, Jr., followed his father into professional baseball for a sixteen-year career in the minors, playing briefly for the Reds during September, 1997.

Life’s Work

Rose got an early start on his ambition to become a professional baseball player. He signed his first contract on June 18, 1960, and flew to Geneva, New York, to join the Geneva Red Legs of the Class D New York-Penn League. He earned $400 per month. The team manager moved the second baseman to third base to make room for Rose. He batted .227 and made thirty-six errors in the eighty-five games of his first season for a team that finished last in the league, yet the Reds kept him on the roster for a second season.

That winter Rose attended the instructional league in Florida to improve his game skills, then returned to a job unloading freight cars for a Cincinnati firm to build his strength. He was able to increase his weight to 175 pounds (and by this time was five-feet-eleven) before he reported to spring training in Tampa, Florida, where he joined the Class A Florida State League. Rose led the league with thirty triples for the year and batted .331 but led the league in errors, too. His third season was spent in Macon, Georgia, with the South Atlantic League, where the Reds sent their best prospects. His credentials continued to improve: He batted .330, led the league with 136 runs and 17 triples, and hit 9 home runs.

In 1963, Rose was invited to the Reds’ spring training camp along with several others from the minor league. During the opening game of the Florida preseason, manager Fred Hutchinson put Rose in as a pinch runner. He stayed in the game to hit two doubles and score the game-winning run. Hutchinson started Rose at second base in the Reds’ opening-day game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on April 8, 1963, and issued him his first major-league baseball contract. When introduced to the sold-out Crosley Field audience, including his parents, he was given a standing ovation that he never forgot. It was not until April 13, however, that he got his first major league hit, a triple. Rose batted .273 his first season and won the Rookie of the Year Award for 1963. In 1965 he made the all-star team for the first time. During his career, he was named to the National League all-star team sixteen times more and started in five different positions: second base, left field, right field, third base, and first base.

Hutchinson died in 1964, and Dave Bristol became the Reds’ manager. He moved Rose to left field to make a place for Tommy Helms. During the late 1960s, Rose won his first batting titles, hitting .335 in 1968 and .348 in 1969. Perhaps the most famous single play of his career occurred during the 1970 All-Star Game, held in the new Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. With the score tied in the bottom of the twelfth inning, Rose singled and then moved to second base on another player’s single. When Jim Hickman sent a base hit into center field, Rose took off at the crack of the bat and barreled over catcher Ray Fosse before the ball got to home plate, winning the game 5-4. It provided one of baseball’s most famous action photographs.

Rose played for the Reds as a powerful switch-hitter from 1963 through 1978. He was the lead-off hitter during the winning era of Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” assembled by general manager Bob Howsam and managed by George “Sparky” Anderson, which included catcher Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey, George Foster, and Cesar Geronimo. Anderson asked Rose to be the team captain and build a sense of unity among the players. Although his 1974 fielding percentage of .997 set a National League record for outfielders, Rose moved to third base to accommodate Foster, who could then play in left field. The team won four pennants and back-to-back World Series in 1975 and 1976.

In 1979, as a free agent, Rose accepted a four-year contract worth $3.2 million with the Philadelphia Phillies, making him the highest salaried player in baseball. He helped the Phillies win the World Series title in 1980 and the National League pennant in 1983. He moved to the Montreal Expos in 1984, only to return to Cincinnati later that season to lead the Reds as a player-manager. On September 11, 1985, again in a Reds uniform, Rose reached 4,192 career hits, finally beating Ty Cobb’s long-standing major-league record set in 1928. Rose’s final at bat, during which he struck out, came on August 17, 1986. He continued as manager another two years, but in 1989 was forced into retirement. Rose had married Carol Woliung on April 11, 1984, and had two children: a boy named Tyler and a girl named Cara Chae.

During his career, Rose amassed two hundred hits or more per season ten times, averaged over .300 for nine straight years (1965–73), and scored over one hundred runs ten times. He was voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1973 and won Golden Glove awards in 1969 and 1970 as an outfielder. In 1978 he hit safely in forty-four consecutive games, setting a National League record for a single season. (He had seven streaks of hitting safely in more than twenty games, another record.) As manager, Rose won 426 games and lost 388. He won the Roberto Clemente Award in 1976 and Sporting News magazine’s player of the year (1968), sportsman of the year (1985), and player of the decade for the 1970s. Rose’s father died of a heart attack on December 9, 1970, but had lived long enough to see his son reach stardom.

An incident in which Rose shoved umpire Dave Pallone during a game against the New York Mets in 1988 prompted baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti to suspend Rose for thirty days. In August, 1989, came a much more serious charge from Giamatti: An investigation by attorney John Dowd concluded that Rose had violated baseball rules by betting on baseball games. It was alleged that Rose placed bets in favor of the Reds fifty-two times while playing or managing the team and that he was deeply in debt to bookies. The published summary of the investigation became known as the Dowd Report. As a result, Giamatti banned Rose from baseball for life. The lifetime suspension, however, included the right to apply for reinstatement after one year. Rose accepted the agreement but denied having betted on baseball games. A few days after the agreement was signed, Giamatti died of a heart attack at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

In April, 1990, Rose also pled guilty to two counts of filing false federal income-tax returns. His penalty included a prison sentence of five months and a fine. After his release, he returned to live with his family near Plant City, Florida. A vote at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, designated him permanently ineligible for induction. However, the question did not end with that vote. Rose applied for reinstatement in September, 1997, but Commissioner Bud Selig did not act on the application, and the ban remained in place.

Even with the National Baseball Hall of Fame being closed to him, Rose received superstar honors. Before the second game of the 1999 World Series, he had been named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. Fans in the stadium responded with an overwhelming ovation. Also in 1999, Rose was ranked twenty-fifth on the Sporting News list of one hundred greatest baseball players. In 2002 he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the first inductee in its celebrity wing. Rose had participated in WWE’s WrestleMania between 1998 and 2000.

In his 2004 autobiography, My Prison without Bars, Rose admitted to having gambled and even frequently betted on (but not against) the Reds; he reiterated this during television interviews. However, he emphasized that the gambling grew out of his intense competitiveness. In any case, his enthusiasm for baseball never flagged. He often attended events with former teammates, and in 2005 became a weekly participant in Stars Live 365 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, a venue bringing together fans and sports celebrities. In 2011, he filed for divorce from his second wife, Carol; he had begun a relationship with model Kianna Kim. With Kim, Rose starred in the 2013 reality-television program Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs., which also featured Kim's two children. As the years passed, Rose became more forthright about his gambling, while still asserting that he only bet on his team to win. However, he remained banned from baseball and shut out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame over the following years, and in 2022, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reaffirmed Rose's ban from the league after Rose appealed through a written letter.

Significance

Rose proved to be a versatile major league baseball player for twenty-four years, with his greatest achievement coming when he broke Cobb’s record one year before he retired in 1986. By that time, he had appeared in a record 3,562 regular-season games and had amassed 14,053 at bats, 4,256 hits, and 3,215 singles. He also accumulated twenty-three straight one-hundred-hit seasons and a lifetime batting average of .303. Moreover, he ranked fifth in career runs (2,165) and second in career doubles (746). He continued to manage the Reds through twenty-three games during the 1988 season, when he was forced to retire. Rose also authored or coauthored several autobiographical accounts of his life and career and books on baseball techniques.

The true hallmark of Rose was his gritty determination to play baseball aggressively in every inning regardless of the score, a style that earned him the nickname Charlie Hustle. Even after earning a walk, he would run to first base, and when stealing a base, he regularly slid in head-first, a dangerous but swift technique. He set a keen example for the field of athletics by playing to win regardless of his own physical risk and the position assigned to him. His rambunctious and optimistic outlook characterized his actions on and off the baseball diamond. In retirement, he continued to believe he would be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but the sport's commissioners have routinely denied him that honor. In 2024, Rose was the subject of a new documentary, Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose, which examined both his accomplishments as a player and his complicated legacy off the field. The documentary premiered on the streaming service Max.

Bibliography

Blum, Ronald. "Manfred Has No Intention of Altering Pete Rose’s Lifetime Ban From Baseball." Associated Press, 11 July 2023, apnews.com/article/pete-rose-manfred-lifetime-ban-gambling-hall-7a5b5e950a8861ce5a9b0516d33ed1b1. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Chavkin, Daniel. "Rob Manfred Responds to Pete Rose's Latest Hall of Fame Plea." Sports Illustrated, 18 Nov. 2022, www.si.com/mlb/2022/11/18/pete-rose-hall-of-fame-letter-rob-manfred-response-eligibility-cooperstown. Accessed 17 June 2024.

Freedman, Lew. Game of My Life, Cincinnati Reds: Memorable Stories of Reds Baseball. New York: Sports, 2013. Print.

Gilbert, Thomas W. Pete Rose. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea, 1995.

Jordan, David. Pete Rose: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Print.

Reston, James, Jr. Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti. New York: Burlingame, 1991. Print.

Posnanski, Joe. The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series—The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. New York: Harper, 2010. Print.

Rose, Pete. The Pete Rose Story: An Autobiography. New York: World, 1970. Print.

Rose, Pete, and Hal Bodley. Countdown to Cobb: My Diary of the Record-Breaking 1985 Season. St. Louis, MO: Sporting News, 1985. Print.

Rose, Pete, and Bob Hertzel. Charlie Hustle. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1975. Print.

Rose, Pete, and Rick Hill. My Prison Without Bars. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Books, 2004.

Rose, Pete, and Roger Kahn. Pete Rose: My Story. New York: Macmillan, 1989.

Scalia, Christopher J. "A New HBO Documentary Clarifies Pete Rose’s Greatness as a Ballplayer and Shortcomings as a Man." Washington Examiner, 9 Aug. 2024, www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-life-arts/3114243/a-new-hbo-documentary-clarifies-pete-roses-greatness-as-a-ballplayer-and-shortcomings-as-a-man/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Sokolove, Michael Y. Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

Standen, Jeffrey. "Pete Rose and Baseball's Rule 21." Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 18.2 (2010): 134–40. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.