PETE ROSE SHOULD REACH THE HALL OF FAME, BUT NOT UNTIL IT’S MUCH TOO LATE

No hero was more contentious than Rose, who gambled away his all-time career before dying at 83, and how hypocritical to watch the commissioner try to save a sport by doing open business with casinos

     No one swung a bat with more success. No one assailed rules with more failure. As the aggressor of any man’s best pitch, Pete Rose remains baseball’s all-time Hit King, as he enjoyed calling himself with punch-me-out hubris, and what did I know when I stumbled into Cincinnati at 25 and had to cover him as a local columnist?

     He would break Ty Cobb’s record, ending at 4,256 knocks, but who knew he would plunge into a cesspool with drug dealers and creepy thugs? Who knew Rose would bet on games, including those involving the Reds, eventually acknowledging guilt? He was banned for life, the correct call until Rob Manfred piggybacked the Supreme Court and went into business with too many sportsbooks. Last year, America gambled legally on $120 billion. The commissioner wanted a piece of the dirtballism.

     Never mind Rose.

     So wasn’t it wild to see him smile at the absurdity of Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter? Ippei Mizuhara stole almost $17 million from his day/night partner and the master of his life. He impersonated Ohtani at the bank about 24 times, which remains shocking as he made 19,000 wagers in 26 months. The greatest player of our time, probably of all time, didn’t know anything about Mizuhara’s bizarre mood swings in that period? Ugly activity on his account? Really? If so, he would have encountered trouble in California, where gambling is illegal and he’d have been exposed to problems with MLB.

     There was Rose, as Manfred was “investigating,” still keen on oddball laughter.

     “Well, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I wish I’d had an interpreter. I’d be scot-free,” he said, staring into a video cam.

     Sometime soon, Hall of Fame voters should see the discrepancy in a posthumous moment. Baseball cannot cash in on gambling and keep Rose out of Cooperstown. If Manfred had remained true to a non-betting window, sure, continue to ban him. But in trying to save the sport from falling so disturbingly behind football that few people care about the playoffs, which start Tuesday, the commissioner carried on with FanDuel and DraftKings while gambling malfeasance was in full display at ballparks. That includes venerable Wrigley Field, where Rose once tied Cobb’s hits record.

     He is dead at 83. Manfred and Bud Selig did not kill him. Bart Giamatti, who removed him from the game, did not kill him. His tragedy did weigh on him, enormously. A family member found Rose, and for now, police have seen no indications of foul play. How can we forget his comments from June?

     “What, are they waiting for me to die?” Rose said. “Wouldn’t that be horrible if I died next week and then next year they reinstated me?”

     Then he delivered his final base hit, ever. “If I’m gone, it don’t matter,” he said. “Who the f— wants to go in when you’re dead?”

     A reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer said he paused. “Although the Hall of Fame is for your family,” Rose said. “I just got to outlive ‘em.”

     How fascinating that he would zero in on the current boss. “One guy is responsible. Manfred. He’s the one guy who can say yay or nay,” he said.

     Manfred always said nay. Why is gambling so pervasive internally when Rose is so rotten? “They don’t care about gambling. They don’t care about gambling on baseball,” he said. “That’s why they got these windows inside ballparks. That’s why ESPN updates the games in the fifth inning, and they make other odds for the rest of the game.”

     To the end, he knew. Cincinnati remained his town, with Pete Rose Way remaining by the riverfront. The city is in mourning, recalling his headfirst slides and shaggy hair. He won championships in 1975 and 1976, when he was the most contentious player in sports, and another in Philadelphia. By then, his legacy was in chaos, with off-the-field rumblings about affairs and underaged women. Later, he couldn’t stay away from the hoodlums who made him feel good when so many hated him.

     The first spring training I covered him, he wouldn’t stop talking about the college basketball season, mentioning his bets. I told our editor-in-chief, at the Cincinnati Post, that steroid fiends were in and out of his clubhouse when he was managing. No one wanted to bust Rose in that town. Peter Ueberroth, in charge after his 1984 Summer Olympics presidency, fired the first flame. Giamatti pulled the plug before dying himself. What I’ll remember was Rose’s passion, even if so much of it was involved in wagering. He had to win. And keep winning for a quarter-century, until they buried him.

     “Every summer, three things are going to happen,” he 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.”

     It was five years ago when he wondered if gambling was so bad. It is, but he always rambled anyway. “I don’t think betting is morally wrong. I don’t even think betting on baseball is morally wrong,” he wrote in a memoir. “There are legal ways, and there are illegal ways, and betting on baseball the way I did was against the rules of baseball.” You knew he would pick up on Manfred and pick up on Ohtani. He wasn’t alone.

     Suddenly, when so much money was on the table, the commissioner grabbed it. Pete Rose will be honored at the Hall. It will be the biggest ceremony in many years.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.