Tag Archives: Pete Rose

Enough, already

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Pete Rose

Pete Rose, shown before a Reds game in Great American Ballpark in 2018. His letter to commissioner Rob Manfred should receive a single-word answer.

Last Friday, TMZ revealed Pete Rose sent a letter to commissioner Rob Manfred four days earlier. Just how TMZ obtained the letter is open to speculation. Some might suspect someone in Manfred’s office leaked it; some might suspect Rose himself. Neither suspicion is implausible.

If you’re inclined toward charitable thought, Rose’s letter is a letter of apology, an acknowledgement of accountability, a plea for forgiveness from a man who’s been punished enough via the opprobrium he still receives as baseball’s most prominent exile.

But if you temper charity with realism, it’s yet another example of what The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal describes as words ringing hollow from a man who can’t get out of his own way. A man who still doesn’t get it. A man whose most stubborn remaining partisans still don’t get it, either.

“[F]or Rose,” Rosenthal writes, “untrustworthy behaviour is nothing new.

He spent the first fourteen years of his ban denying that he bet on baseball, including in his 1989 autobiography, Pete Rose: My Story. He served five months in prison in 1990 for filing false income tax returns. A secret meeting in Milwaukee with former commissioner Bud Selig in 2002, during which he admitted betting on baseball as a manager for the first time, also apparently went awry. News of the meeting leaked, and Rose promptly followed it with an appearance at a sports book in Las Vegas.

Two years later, Rose released a second autobiography, My Prison Without Bars, as the Hall of Fame prepared to induct two new members, Dennis Eckersley and Paul Molitor. Rose said the timing wasn’t his fault. Nothing is ever his fault . . .

For all Manfred knows, he could reinstate Rose and then be subjected to some other bombshell. Rose has admitted to betting on baseball only after his playing career ended. But in June 2015, ESPN obtained copies of betting records from 1986 that provided the first written corroboration Rose had gambled on games as the Reds’ player-manager. It’s always something.

In August, the proof that it’s always something reared grotesquely enough after Manfred agreed to allow Rose to take part in the Phillies’ commemoration of their 1980 World Series title. Rose made it far less about that 1980 team and far more about himself.

It took nothing more than Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Alex Coffey doing nothing worse than her job, asking Rose whether his presence—considering that only the statute of limitations kept him from facing consequences over an early-1970s extramarital affair with a teenage girl—thus sent a negative message to women. Saying he wasn’t at Citizens Bank Park to talk about that, Rose added, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”

“Put aside for one moment (and only one) the message Rose’s cavalier dismissal and term of address to Coffey,” I wrote then. “Consider that his presence Sunday sent a negative message to women and men as well as baseball. For a few grotesque moments the Phillies looked like a team that couldn’t have cared less about anything beyond a cocktail of nostalgic self-celebration and the ballpark gate.”

That’s the Rose effect. He makes it all about him. In the same moment, he can and often does make it impossible to look for what he insisted to Manfred should be sought and kept under full focus.

That’s the man who hired on as a baseball predictions analyst for online sports betting site UpickTrade last year and told a presser, “For those people who are worried about the Hall of Fame, you’ve got to remember I got suspended in 1989. That’s 32 years ago. I’m not going to live the rest of my life worried about going to baseball’s Hall of Fame.” (Suspended?)

Until he is, that is. “Despite my many mistakes,” Rose wrote to Manfred now, “I am so proud of what I accomplished as a baseball player—I am the Hit King and it is my dream to be considered for the Hall of Fame. Like all of us, I believe in accountability. I am 81 years old and know that I have been held accountable and that I hold myself accountable. I write now to ask for another chance.”

A man who hung around as a player above and beyond his actual shelf life on behalf of the self-elevating pursuit of Ty Cobb’s career hits record is only slightly more hubristic than the teams enabling him to do it regardless of his actual on-field value. The publicity factor overrode the honest competition factor often enough then and still does, often enough.

Hubris often leads to tunnel vision. It did for Rose. He couldn’t (wouldn’t?) get that he could have retired right after that 1980 Phillies world championship with a no-questions-asked Hall of Fame case even if it meant falling short of Cobb by about 632 hits. There were people (including Rose himself, sometimes) who believed he had some preternatural entitlement to pass Cobb despite his actual playing value.

Rose’s wins above replacement-level [WAR] from his rookie 1963 in Cincinnati to his 1983 World Series ring with Philadelphia: 80.4. Rose’s WAR from 1981-86, when he finally surrendered to Father Time and took himself out of the Reds lineup to stay: -0.8.*

Rose being a Hit King shouldn’t make a single bit of difference to Manfred. Not now, not ever. Rose’s pride in his playing accomplishments shouldn’t make a single bit of difference. Nor, for that matter, should any of MLB’s promotional deals with this or that online legal gambling operation. (Don’t go there, Roseophiles: Gambling isn’t the only legal activity for which your employers can discipline or fire you for indulging on the job. Just ask anyone who ever lost a job for showing up high as a kite, wired up the kazoo, or bombed out of his or her trees.)

There’s only one thing Manfred should consider. It’s called Rule 21(d). The rule against betting on baseball. The rule that makes no distinction between whether you bet on or against your team. The rule that calls for permanent, not “lifetime” banishment. The rule that prompted the Hall of Fame itself—faced with the prospect of Rose’s election despite its mandated punishment—to enact its own rule barring those on baseball’s permanently ineligible list from standing for election on any Hall ballot.

Rose “can continue pleading to Manfred, appealing to public sympathy. But Rose, to borrow a term from horse racing, one of his favorite sports, is getting left at the gate,” Rosenthal writes. “His race for Cooperstown remains permanently stalled, and it’s no one’s fault but his own.”

Accordingly, the commissioner’s sole answer to Rose now and forever should be, “No.” As for any and everyone else, the answer now and forever should be, but probably won’t be, Enough, already.

——————————————————————————————————

* By contrast, Hall of Famers Henry Aaron, Nolan Ryan, and Cal Ripken, Jr. pulled up on the positive side of the WAR ledger when they broke revered career records. Aaron, the year he broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record: 2.1. Ryan, the year he broke Hall of Famer Walter Johnson’s career strikeout record: 2.6. Ripken, the year he broke Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak: 3.9.

Come to think of it, when Ryan threw a bullet past Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson to record lifetime strikeout number 5,000—with then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in the ballpark itching to pump his fist celebrating the milestone—he was having an All-Star caliber 5.1 WAR season in the bargain.

Ryan, of course, was an outlier even among outliers, a point forgotten often enough and conveniently enough by the ill-informed who insist on comparing pitchers since to him and wondering why simply no one has his one-of-a-kind endurance. 

Pete Rose’s ongoing grotesquery

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Pete Rose

Pete Rose talks at a commemoration of the Phillies’ 1980 World Series conquest and exposes himself as a moral idiot. Again.

So long as he remains on baseball’s permanently ineligible list, Pete Rose’s presence at any major league team event sends a negative message as things stand already. But when he appeared at Citizens Bank Park to join the commemoration of the Phillies’ 1980 World Series winner, the mere negative went to grotesque in the same speed of light by which Rose made it so in the first place.

Not because of Rose’s Rule 21(d) violations that got him banished from baseball in the first place, but because Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Alex Coffey had the temerity to do her job Sunday afternoon.

“I asked Pete Rose what he would say to people who say his presence here sends a negative message to women,” Coffey tweeted. “His response: ‘No, I’m not here to talk about that. Sorry about that. It was 55 years ago babe’.” What “that” was is the early 1970s extramarital affair he conducted with a girl who wasn’t quite at the legal age of consent when it began.

That revelation first emerged in court in 2017, during Rose’s defamation lawsuit against John Dowd, the attorney who first investigated the depth of his baseball gambling under the aegis of then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. Two years earlier, Dowd gave a radio interview in which he said Michael Bertolini—through whom Rose often bet on baseball and whose notebooks had notes aplenty on those bets—told investigators Rose had “underage girls” brought to him during a spring training and, shall we say, engaged sexually with them.

The specific girl in question, the one who prompted Coffey’s question to Rose in the first place, provided the court a sworn statement in a motion. It amounted to saying Rose committed statutory rape, since the legal age of sexual consent in Ohio then and now (Rose was with the Reds at the time) is sixteen years old. (Both sides dropped the suit later.)

Rose was fortunate that he was beyond arrest and prosecution over that, since the statute of limitations for statutory rape expired long before that affair came to light. Morally, of course, it was another stain upon him well before he couldn’t help himself with Ms. Coffey.

“It was 55 years ago, babe?”

Put aside for one moment (and only one) the message Rose’s cavalier dismissal and term of address to Coffey. Consider that his presence Sunday sent a negative message to women and men as well as baseball. For a few grotesque moments the Phillies looked like a team that couldn’t have cared less about anything beyond a cocktail of nostalgic self-celebration and the ballpark gate.

After Sunday’s on-field ceremony, the Inquirer itself noted, Rose was made available to the press and asked about Coffey’s question and his comment. “I’m going to tell you one more time. I’m here for the Philly fans,” Rose replied. “I’m here for my teammates. I’m here for the Phillies organization. And who cares what happened fifty years ago? You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t be talking about it, because you weren’t born. If you don’t know a damn thing about it, don’t talk about it.”

That’s the man who once said of Cincinnati naming a street after him that they “should have named an alley after me, the way I acted in school” and who once displayed a knowledge of baseball history that was almost as encyclopedic as his at-the-ready knowledge of his own statistics. (“We’re going down,” Rose once told a teammate when the Reds’ flight hit harsh turbulence, “and I have a .300 lifetime batting average to take with me. Do you?”)

He must have missed or ignored history classes having nothing to do with baseball and everything of the very anchorage that says teachers teach and students learn and discuss events far older than a mere half century.

“He’s an intellectual from Yale, but he’s very intelligent,” Rose said of Giamatti’s successor Fay Vincent. What would Rose know about intellect or intelligence above and beyond ninety feet between the bases, sixty feet from the pitching rubber to the rear point of home plate, and how to make enough occasions involving his old teams about himself above them?

What Rose does know is selectivity. Once upon a time it was the kind that enabled him to become (if you didn’t believe it, he’d tell you proudly) baseball’s first million-dollar singles hitter. Today it enables him to dismiss such inconvenient truths as his lifetime banishment for violating Rule 21(d) (he says of it that he was “suspended”) and his ancient but no less disgraceful extramarital dalliances with a girl who should have been thinking of the prom instead of the ballplayer old enough at minimum to have been her father.

Rose’s permanent banishment, of course, means that any of his teams who wish to include him in certain event must ask permission from the commissioner’s office. It’s probably a stretch to presume Rob Manfred will dismiss future such requests after Rose’s Sunday grotesquery, since this is a commissioner to whom the common good of the game usually involves making money for it first and Rose remains perversely good box office.

But if Rose hadn’t been so bluntly dismissive of Ms. Coffey’s very legitimate question, maybe the worst that would have come forth from Sunday’s doings and undoings would have been Rose’s 1980 Phillies teammate Bob Boone.

Bad enough that Boone had “no idea” whether Rose’s ancient dalliance with a teenager was considered when other 1980 Phillies insisted he be part of the celebration. Almost as bad: Boone saying, “This is the best hitter we’ve ever had. And he did some things wrong. If you want to, put something on the board that says he did these things wrong, but I always felt he has to be in there. He’s not in there, but I’m telling you, he’s the greatest hitter to ever play.”

This is the best hitter we’ve ever had?

Well, now. The best hitter on the 1980 Phillies posted a 1.004 OPS. He played his entire career with the Phillies, has a franchise-high 106.8 wins above a replacement-level player (WAR), and has the highest Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances), .626, of any Hall of Fame third baseman who played in the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era.

If Rose hadn’t written the script that got him banished not just from baseball but from standing for Hall of Fame election, he would be one of twelve postwar/post-integration/night-ball era Hall of Famers with a sub-.490 RBA. (Rose’s is .483.)

The best hitter the Phillies have ever had—who just so happens to have been named both the 1980 National League’s Most Valuable Player (one of his three such awards) and the Most Valuable Player of the 1980 World Series—was unable to attend Sunday’s doings because he tested positive for COVID-19. “I’m sorry that I can’t be with my championship brothers,” said Mike Schmidt in a video statement to be shared for the occasion.

“To have his body,” Rose once said of Schmidt, “I’d trade him mine and my wife’s and I’d throw in some cash.” To have Rose’s self-inflicted (and permanent, not “lifetime”) banishment from baseball and the Hall of Fame, self-soiled reputation, and self-imposed image as a statutory rapist who eluded account for it simply because of the statute of limitations and, we assume, his one-time teen paramour’s longtime reluctance to speak up and out, Schmidt probably wouldn’t trade even one brain cell.

Blackmon doesn’t quite open the door for Rose

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Charlie Blackmon, Pete Rose

Blackmon (left) has an endorsement deal with a legal Colorado sports book. It doesn’t mean Rose (right) comes off the permanent hook against betting on baseball. (Photo montage by Outkick.)

Almost four years ago, MGM Resorts and Major League Baseball agreed to a promotional deal, MGM Resorts owning several hotel/casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Almost as if by a script, it prompted Pete Rose’s partisans to demand his “rightful” reinstatement to baseball. And it was dismissed simply enough, most profoundly by Craig Calcaterra, then an NBC Sports baseball analyst.

“While there may be the broadest, most cosmic level of discontinuity between baseball going into business with a casino given its ban on players, coaches and umpires gambling,” Calcaterra began, “there is no practical inconsistency or hypocrisy or irony or anything else about it.”

This is because baseball’s ban on gambling was never, ever about gambling being some moral abomination that cannot be countenanced in any way. It was about the manner in which gambling compromised the competitive integrity of the game and thus imperiled baseball as a going concern. Players were gambling on baseball and cozying up to gamblers to throw baseball games. That had to be stopped and it was stopped. Full stop.

What, then, to make of Rockies outfielder Charlie Blackmon signing an endorsement deal with a Colorado sportsbook, MaximBet? Does the first known endorsement deal between an active major league player and a sportsbook—made possible by clauses in the new collective bargaining agreement—equal the open door through which baseball’s most notorious living gambling exile returns to the game’s good graces and, thus, to the Hall of Fame?

Rose’s partisans seem to think yes. Post haste. So does Rose himself. The bad news for them is that they are wrong, on more than one ground. Ground one: As ESPN writer David Purdum noted, MLB policy enjoins Blackmon from promoting baseball betting specifically. Blackmon can promote MaximBet itself as a company but he can’t promote or encourage anything the company does that involves betting on his own sport.

Ground two: Baseball has had promotional partnerships with brewers and distillers in the past. It didn’t and still doesn’t mean that a player, a coach, a manager, or an umpire can get bombed out of their skulls before or during a game. Just let Shohei Ohtani walk out to the mound or check in at the plate with a bottle of sake and a glass in his hand and see if he goes unpunished.

Ground three: If Blackmon were foolish enough to think his MaximBet deal gives him an opening to bet on baseball himself, you can, ahem, bet on it. MaximBet would be obligated to blow the whistle at once, thus subjecting Blackmon to discipline under Rule 21(d), the punishment depending upon whether Blackmon bet on games not involving his Rockies or whether he bet on Rockies games for which he was in the lineup.

Bet on games in which your team isn’t playing, the punishment is one year’s ineligibility to be part of organised baseball. Bet on teams in which your team is playing, and you’re in the lineup, coaching, or managing, and the punishment in plain language is permanent ineligibility.

Do you need one further reminder? Rule 21(d)’s language does not distinguish between whether you bet on your own team or against your own team. The rule also extends to off-field, non-playing personnel from the most obscure ballpark ticket taker to the most visible team owner to the commissioner of baseball himself.

Just because MLB has a promotional deal with MGM Resorts, it doesn’t mean Rob Manfred himself can belly up to the nearest sports book and drop a bet on tonight’s Dodgers-Padres game. Just because Charlie Blackmon has an endorsement deal with a sports book now up and running in Colorado but planning (according to Purdom) to expand to Iowa and Indiana, it doesn’t mean he’s allowed to drop a bet even on whether the Tigers’ future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera will nail career hit 3,000 in his first, second, third, or fourth plate appearance against the Rockies tonight.

“I just came up at the wrong time,” Rose said to USA Today when the Blackmon deal with MaximBet became known. “I was thirty years too early. Baseball is pretty much in bed with gambling now.”

Look, I [fornicated] up. I messed up when I did what I did, ok? I can’t bring it back. However, I would wish baseball would just give me an opportunity to be on the [Hall of Fame] ballot. Not, put me in, let the writers decide. I’ve been suspended since ’89, 33 years ago. That’s a long time. And to be honest with you, it probably cost me $100 million. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying I’ve been punished pretty severely.

Baseball is “pretty much in bed with” legal gambling. Rose seems to forget that one of the most powerful pieces of evidence against him is a notebook recording a considerable volume of his baseball bets—made and kept by Michael Bertolini, a bookmaker outside the lines of legal gambling, through whom Rose bet on baseball including on his Reds while he was still an active player as well as the team’s manager.

Blackmon’s MaximBet deal isn’t necessarily a great look, depending upon your point of view, even if it’s major relief that Blackmon will be on a very tight leash that keeps him away from just promoting baseball betting, never mind betting on the game himself. But the deal doesn’t quite open the door for Rose’s return from baseball’s Phantom Zone, either. And it still isn’t up to MLB to put him on a Hall of Fame ballot.

The Hall itself, not governed by MLB, passed a rule denying those permanently ineligible from appearing on Hall ballots. Rose seems almost as forgetful of that distinction as he and his remaining partisans seem of the distinction between “lifetime” and “permanent.”

No, Roberto Alomar wasn’t Pete Rosed

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Roberto Alomar

Roberto Alomar’s new baseball ineligibility doesn’t mean a backdoor pass into Cooperstown for Charlie Hustler.

Let’s get this out of the way first and foremost, since (it almost figures) at least a few social media tweeters raised it. Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar’s fresh ineligibility to work in baseball doesn’t mean Pete Rose suddenly gets a pass to stand for Hall of Fame election.

The news broke Friday that Alomar—working as an advisor to baseball’s government and a Blue Jays special assistant concurrently—is now on baseball’s ineligible list over sexual misconduct said to have occurred in 2014, at the sad expense of a baseball industry employee. He’d been elected to Cooperstown on his second try in 2011.

“Roberto Alomar got Pete Rose’d today,” tweeted Ice Cat Sports Cards, from South Dakota. “If Roberto Alomar is on the Ineligible list,” asked a tweet by someone handling himself ElScorcho, “how can he stay in the Hall of Fame? I mean that says Pete Rose should be in right?”

Wrong.

Specific details of Alomar’s sexual misconduct aren’t disclosed as I write. But it happened three years after he was elected and inducted into the Hall of Fame. (To its credit, the commissioner’s office engaged an independent law firm to investigate.) If he’d committed the misconduct that now has him purged before 2011, Alomar wouldn’t have even been on the ballot, never mind elected.

Rose violated Rule 21(d) before he would have made his first Hall ballot. The very likelihood that he might be elected despite his ban prompted the Hall to rule: if you’re ineligible to associate with organised baseball, you’re not eligible to appear on a ballot conferring the game’s highest honour.

No, ladies and gentlemen, Roberto Alomar did not get Pete Rosed on Friday. Any drumbeating for shoving Rose into the Hall of Fame on the basis of Alomar’s banishment is factual and moral idiocy. So don’t even think about hammering the Hall of Fame for refusing to purge Alomar.

“When he was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in the Class of 2011, Alomar was an eligible candidate in good standing,” the Hall said in a formal Friday statement. “His plaque will remain on display in the Hall of Fame in recognition of his accomplishments in the game, and his enshrinement reflects his eligibility and the perspective of the [Baseball Writers Association of America] voters at that time.”

Alomar isn’t the first to land on baseball’s permanently ineligible list over sexual misconduct or its concurrent behaviours. Former Astros assistant general manager Brandon Taubman got there for crowing he was so [fornicating] glad they obtained relief pitcher Roberto Osuna while Osuna was still under investigation for domestic abuse. A rant delivered in the presence of three female reporters in the Astro clubhouse after they won the 2019 American League Championship Series.

The persona non grata list also includes one-time Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa, thanks to his being caught red-handed hacking into the Astros’ databases. It also includes former Braves general manager John Coppolella, after he inflated or deflated signing bonuses for Dominican prospects to maneuver around baseball’s international signing rules.

Maybe the BBWAA will fume over the Hall of Fame refusing to purge Alomar. But at least  one member might advise not so fast. “I don’t disagree with the Hall’s more measured response,” wrote Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiMinno Friday, after commissioner Rob Manfred announced the Alomar termination and purge.

It would be insupportable to retroactively banish someone from Cooperstown when egregious conduct comes to light. Just imagine going backwards in time and stripping a player of that specific honour, a summation of career brilliance, for behaviour which is now recognized as reprehensible but wasn’t then. So many scoundrels are in the Hall and, at least figuratively, their statues would have to be toppled.

Please don’t ask which such scoundrels not named Cap Anson and Kenesaw Mountain Landis would be removed from the Hall right now. You won’t like a lot of the answers. They might or might not only begin with Babe Ruth.

Lisa Banks, the attorney for the unnamed woman at the center of the Alomar purge, sent a statement out as well. Quoted by DiManno, Banks said, “We applaud MLB for having this matter thoroughly investigated and for taking meaningful action against Mr. Alomar . . . My client has no plans to file a lawsuit or take further action. She has not exposed Mr. Alomar’s behaviour for notoriety or for money and looks forward to moving on with her life. She simply wants to ensure that Mr. Alomar is held accountable.”

But DiManno goes forward saying that while baseball has a perfect right to purge someone over particular misbehaviours, since being in professional baseball is not an absolute right but an absolute privilege, something about the Alomar case isn’t quite passing the proverbial smell test yet.

. . . I don’t know what Alomar is alleged to have done and Manfred isn’t telling. I do know that some accusations, when exposed in a court of law, criminal or civil, do not rise to the threshold of conviction. And nowhere have I seen a claim that Alomar’s conduct was criminal. It might or might not pass the sniff test of a human rights complaint. It clearly did not pass scrutiny of the MLB investigation — conducted independently by an external legal firm . . .

I wish there were more details disclosed about the alleged incident, which surely could have been done without identifying the complainant . . . I’ve covered enough legal proceedings on this subject to understand that a great deal of nuance separates accusation from even the lower bar of civil action proof. The vacuum of information leaves a worrisome gap for warranting so ham-fisted a decision.

And that, she continues, “comes from someone who was once called a [fornicating (four-letter euphemism for ‘vagina’ starting with ‘c’)] by a player in the Jays clubhouse; who, on another occasion, had a player simulate pelvis thrusting from the rear while I was bending over to conduct an interview with another player at his stall. These were not incidents I reported to the club or to my employer. I’m just not that delicate a flower.”

The Blue Jays will disappear Alomar’s presence promptly enough, the team has said, including pulling his commemorative banner down from Rogers Centre and removing him from its Level of Excellence. The Jays also said in their own statement they’re committed to an environment of respect for everyone in their organisation, applauding concurrently the unnamed woman who stepped forward in the first place.

This is not a pleasant denouement for the man who hit what DiMinno says remains, arguably, the single most important home run in Blue Jays history. That would be the Game Four-tying two-run homer off Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley in the top of the ninth, finishing a comeback from a five-run deficit, pushing the Jays to the eleven-inning win that gave them a 3-1 American League Championship Series advantage in 1992. En route their first World Series conquest.

I’m not entirely convinced that launch compares to Joe Carter’s World Series-winning three-run bomb in 1993. But you can’t convince me Alomar’s blast off Dennis the Menace wasn’t just as important in Jays history. “Emotional bonds are difficult to sever,” DiManno opened. “Historical facts can’t be expunged.”

Neither can a Hall of Famer eligible for election and getting elected well enough before the acts that got him banished from baseball eligibility. Alomar’s behaviour as a three-year Hall incumbent is terrible enough, without using it to argue Rose into the Hall when Rose’s rule breaking got him blocked before he was eligible for a Cooperstown ballot at all.

Pete Rose, without the other stuff

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Pete Rose

Pete Rose, fresh young Red . . . without Rule 21(d) and the Cobb-chase circus, how was he really as a player?

Is it strange to think of Pete Rose at eighty years old? Of course it is, especially for those old enough to have seen half or better of his playing career. But eighty he is, as of Wednesday past, and he is also freshly employed by UpickTrade—to sell baseball predictions to subscribers for $89 a month.

“Picks provided for MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, Tennis, Golf and major Horse Races. Grow your sports bankroll with the Hit King.” Thus Upick ballyhoos Rose’s prognostications. During a media conference on his birthday Wednesday, Rose insisted he wouldn’t be betting, merely picking based on his baseball experience and knowledge.

Baseball’s most notorious gambling exile this side of the Black Sox, tying himself to a Website picking events for bettors to bet, giving himself one more dubious look in a life full of them, is purely coincidental. Right? Rose wouldn’t exactly agree.

“For those people who are worried about the Hall of Fame,” he told that Wednesday presser, “you’ve got to remember I got suspended in 1989.”

That’s 32 years ago. I’m not going to live the rest of my life worried about going to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

If I’m ever bestowed that honor, I’ll be the happiest guy in the world. I don’t think me picking games—not betting on games, I have to keep saying that—picking games for customers will not in any way, shape or form hurt my opportunity to get to the Hall of Fame someday. I’m not the only guy that’s ever made a bet in the world of baseball. I probably bet today less than any of them.

“Suspended?” Have it your way, Pete.

I’m not going to re-argue the Rose “suspension” now. The mountain range of evidence, the long and pitiful record of the lies Rose told for decades, and especially the plain language of Rule 21(d) should have put paid to that argument long ago. So should the Hall of Fame itself deciding, quite appropriately, that those ineligible for standing in organised professional baseball had no business appearing on ballots through which they might be conferred baseball’s highest honour.

(To those who insist baseball’s recent agreements with certain legal gambling enterprises mean Rose should be un-banned, remember that just because it’s legal doesn’t mean your employer lacks the right to ban you from doing it when it involves your job.)

But I would like to do one thing. For argument’s sake, I’d like to make as though Rose’s violations of Rule 21(d) never happened, that he was never banished from the game for which he continues professing his deepest love, then ask and answer the following question: How absolutely great was Pete Rose as a player?

The eternal image of Rose the player is that of a junkyard dog clawing his way to whatever he gained on the field, at the plate, on the bases. His lifetime partisans hoist the near-constant image of headfirst slides and praise him irrevocably as evoking all that was once right and proper about the game. But his .375 on-base percentage ranks 215th all-time. And his percentage of extra bases taken on followup hits was yanked down to 49 percent thanks to his six-year decline while still chasing Ty Cobb’s hits record.

Speaking of which, let’s put the Hit King business to bed. Allen Barra tried, in his 2002 book Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century. Rose in his view was “an arrogant, shallow, self-centered jerk who hung around years after he had any value on the field simply to eclipse [Ty] Cobb’s [career hits] record. You’re a fan, you want to pay money to watch that kind of circus junk, then you pay your money. I stopped caring about the so-called record two years before Rose surpassed it.”

Was Barra out of line? From his Rookie of the Year season 1963 through the end of his first regular season with the Phillies, his first eighteen seasons, Rose collected 3,557 hits. He could have retired right then and there, after playing on the 1980 Phillies’ World Series winner, and had himself a very Hall of Fame worthy career, plus a hit total a lot of Hall of Famers might have envied still.

Rose’s most emphatic partisans will find ten 200-hit seasons among those eighteen years and insist that that plus eventually breaking Cobb’s career hit record make him the Hit King indeed. Barra didn’t have the stomach for that, and neither do I. Perhaps audaciously, he asked whom you think is baseball’s greatest hitter, ever, and lo! many of the answers to that turn up . . . well . . .

Many say Ted Williams, but Teddy Ballgame never had one 200+ hit season. Many say Mickey Mantle, and he never had one, either. Many say Willie Mays, and he had only one. Many say Henry Aaron, but he has something else in common with Babe Ruth: only three 200+ hit seasons. (And don’t many still say the Babe?) Many say Stan Musial; he had a measly six. Many say that Mike Trout is in their league—and he is—but the most hits he’s collected in a single season thus far is 190.

Those players one and all were (are, in Trout’s case) better batters than Pete Rose was. Says who? Says my Real Batting Average (RBA) metric: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances, says who:

Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Ted Williams 9788 4884 2021 243 57* 39 .740
Mike Trout 5514 2642 838 104 52 84 .675
Mickey Mantle 9907 4511 1733 148 47 13 .651
Stan Musial 12718 6134 1599 298 110* 53 .644
Willie Mays 12496 6066 1464 214 91 44 .631
Henry Aaron 13941 6856 1402 293 121 32 .624
Pete Rose 15890 5752 1566 167 79 107 .483

If you believe a lifetime .483 batter was better than a lifetime .740 batter, be my guest. But you say that doesn’t really prove anything? Well, now. How about the extra base hit percentages for each of these fellows? Be forewarned: Rose is going to come up smelling like a thorn.

Player H 2B 3B HR XBH XBH%
Mike Trout 1,396 264 48 306 618 .44
Ted Williams 2,654 525 71 521 1,117 .42
Mickey Mantle 2,415 344 72 536 952 .39
Henry Aaron 3,771 624 98 755 1.477 .39
Stan Musial 3,630 725 177 475 1,377 .38
Willie Mays 3,283 523 140 660 1,323 .35
Pete Rose 4,256 746 135 160 1,041 .24

By the way, since he spent so much of his late baseball life obsessed with catching and passing Ty Cobb, be advised that Cobb’s extra base hit percentage is three points higher than Rose’s.

Rose also doesn’t look like such a Hit King when compared to two more of his own contemporaries who both belong in the Hall of Fame and may well get there the next time the Golden Era Committee meets later this year:

Player H 2B 3B HR XBH XBH%
Dick Allen 1,848 320 79 351 750 .41
Tony Oliva 1,917 329 48 220 597 .31
Pete Rose 4,256 746 135 160 1,041 .24

There’s a guy whose career overlapped Rose’s by a few years before Rose retired as a player—a guy who’s a match for Rose’s skill set: an early-in-the-order batter with a little power and a near-surrealistic ability to reach base. (Barra once pointed out that, in each player’s fifteen best seasons, this guy reached base more often than Rose and used fewer outs to do it.)

Player H 2B 3B HR XBH XBH%
Tim Raines 2,605 430 113 170 713 .27
Pete Rose 4,256 746 135 160 1,041 .24

Now, let’s look at Allen, Oliva, Raines, and Rose according to RBA. (You may also find yourself breaking the grip longevity alone might have on you, since you’re going to see a very wide difference between Rose’s career longevity and career value.)

Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Dick Allen 7315 3379 894 138 53 16 .612
Tony Oliva 6880 3002 448 131 57 59 .537
Tim Raines 10359 3771 1330 148 76 42 .518
Pete Rose 15890 5752 1566 167 79 107 .483

Remove, too, that business about Rose playing in “more winning games than any player, ever.” Saying it almost implies that his teams absolutely wouldn’t have won without him. His actual offensive winning percentage is 67 percent as a Red through 1978 and 55 percent for the rest of his career. Frank Robinson’s OWP as a Red is 74 percent; Joe Morgan’s as a Red is 76 percent.

Which leads to a point I can’t remember people talking much about: whether Rose was the absolute best player on his teams during his absolute prime, the first eighteen seasons of his playing career during which he played on three World Series winners and several division winners and reasonably high in other pennant races.

I ran down Rose’s wins above replacement-level player (WAR) in each of those seasons, from his Rookie of the Year 1963 through 1980, when he ended the Phillies’ World Series win with that staggering foul catch. Except for two of those seasons, Rose was one of his teams’ top ten players and thirteen times one of his teams’ top five. But my guess is that you’ll have one of two reactions to the deets, disbelief or an overwhelming desire to shoot the messenger:

Year Pete Rose WAR/Rank Team Leader/WAR Team Finish
1963 2.4 (8) Vada Pinson (6.4) 5th
1964 1.3 (15) Frank Robinson (7.9) 2nd
1965 5.6 (2) Jim Maloney (9.0) 4th
1966 4.1 (2) Jim Maloney (7.4) 7th
1967 4.8 (4) Gary Nolan (6.0) 4th
1968 5.5 (2) Tony Perez (5.9) 4th
1969 6.6 (1) – 3rd
1970 4.8 (4) Johnny Bench (7.4) 1st
1971 5.1 (2) Lee May (5.4) 4th
1972 6.1 (3) Joe Morgan (9.3) 1st
1973 8.3 (2) Joe Morgan (9.3) 1st
1974 5.9 (4) Joe Morgan (8.6) 2nd
1975 4.1 (5) Joe Morgan (11.0) 1st **
1976 7.0 (2) Joe Morgan (9.6) 1st **
1977 2.9 (7) George Foster (8.4) 2nd
1978 3.4 (6) George Foster (4.9) 2nd
1979 3.1 (5) Mike Schmidt (7.9) 4th
1980 -0.3 (20) Steve Carlton (10.2) 1st **

Once. Only once did Pete Rose lead his team in WAR for a season, only once was he the absolute best player on his team, and that was a season in which the Reds stood on the threshold of becoming the Big Red Machine despite their third-place finish.

Twice Rose was the best position player on a team where WAR determined the team’s best player period was a pitcher, and those teams finished in fourth and seventh place. And, in five straight seasons of the Big Red Machine’s heyday, Rose finished second twice, third once, fourth once, and fifth once to Joe Morgan, the overwhelming best player the Machine had.

Rose was a well-established, well-seasoned veteran when Morgan came to the Reds, but it’s absolutely arguable that those Reds would not have won without Morgan. Remember that Morgan’s offensive winning percentage as a Red is 76 percent. For the same seven seasons they were Reds teammates, Rose’s OWP is 68 percent. The Big Red Machine had better chances of winning races because of Morgan than because of Rose.

Which reminds me: what was Rose doing winning the 1973 National League’s Most Valuable Player award (the only MVP of his career) when Morgan was that much better? Easy: Rose led the league in “batting average” while playing on a division winner. So help me, if they’d known about and measured according to RBA they’d have seen the pair a lot differently:

Player, 1973 PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Joe Morgan 698 284 111 3 4 6 .585
Pete Rose 752 297 65 6 0 6 .497

I saw Rose play often enough during his entire career. I saw the headfirst sliding, the running to first base on walks, the hard-nosed style that so often crosses lines to bull headed (or beyond reasonable bounds, as in blasting Ray Fosse at the plate in the 1970 All-Star Game without even thinking of a mere takeout slide) and wasn’t exactly something on which Rose held the franchise.

He was very lucky that playing the game that way didn’t shorten his career by about ten seasons and maybe more. Baseball is littered with similar players who played their bodies right out of the game long before Rose finally did, playing themselves out of providing too much further real value to their teams before their bodies or their brains finally told them to retire or else.

If you remove the issues that sent Rose to organised baseball’s Phantom Zone, and compelled the Hall of Fame to enact a rule denying that men considered persona non grata should be considered for the game’s highest honour, this is how I see him:

Pete Rose would have been a Hall of Famer even if he hadn’t clung to and consummated the pursuit of Ty Cobb’s career hits record, though I also think his 44-game hitting streak in 1978 really kick-started the final discussions about his true or reputed status as a legend. (So did making good on his once oft-stated oath to become baseball’s first million-dollar singles hitter.)

There’s no shame in Rose being a 76 percent singles hitter; so was Tony Gwynn. But I’m going to tell you Tony Gwynn was more valuable at the plate than Pete Rose was. (It isn’t Gwynn’s fault that he lacked the caliber of teammates in his career that Rose enjoyed in his.) Says who? You guessed it: RBA, says who:

PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Mr. Padre 10232 4259 790 203 85 24 .524
Charlie Hustle 15890 5752 1566 167 79 107 .483

Rose wasn’t close to being the greatest all-around player of his or any era. Yes, he was a multi-position player who played 500+ games each at five different positions. Except for the 673 games he played in left field, he was double-digits below average for run prevention while being worth 52 runs saved above his league average in left field. For nineteen percent of all the games he played.

He was foolish for behaving practically as though he was entitled to take a shot at breaking Cobb’s record despite the fact that, for his final six seasons as a player, his real value to his teams was below that of a replacement-level player. Whether you’re in your prime or a veteran looking to boost your legacy, there’s no such thing as being “entitled” to break a record, revered or otherwise.

Cal Ripken, Jr. put up with a large load of crap pursuing Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak. Yet Ripken didn’t behave as though it was his entitlement, unless you think saying often enough that it was part of his profession to show up and play every day equals entitlement. Ripken also had far more value to his teams while chasing and passing Gehrig than Rose did while chasing and passing Cobb.

Injuries reduced Albert Pujols to barely replacement-level player after his first year as an Angel. It’s been sad to see for anyone who remembers when he was a Cardinal. But Pujols doesn’t seem to behave as though he was entitled to achieve certain milestones,  the last of which was passing Willie Mays on the all-time home run list.

The circus surrounding Rose’s pursuit of and passing Cobb did exactly as Allen Barra described: it “overwhelm[ed] discussion of Rose’s other qualities and deficiencies as a ballplayer.” He’s the Hit King by accumulation alone. He wasn’t close to being the greatest hitter of the post World War II-post integration-night ball era; he wasn’t the best player on his teams in his prime with one exception.

Should I go one step beyond? OK, you talked me into it, and please remember we’re still discussing as though violating Rule 21(d) hadn’t banished Rose to the Phantom Zone. With a  circus-less look at his record as it was, Rose might (underline that, ladies and gentlemen) have had to wait one or even two tries before getting his plaque. He wouldn’t have been either the first or the last of the genuine, Hall of Fame greats to enter as a slightly overrated player.

Remember, too, that slightly beats the living daylights out of being very overrated, or being in Cooperstown despite having little to no business being there in the first place. Just ask Harold Baines, Clark Griffith, Chick Hafey, Waite Hoyt, Travis Jackson, George Kelly, Freddie Lindstrom, Tommy McCarthy, and Phil Rizzuto. (The Scooter does belong in Cooperstown—as a broadcaster. Really.) Among others.

It would have been mad fun to have that discussion involving Pete Rose. Absolutely. I’d imagine the passions on all sides of that argument would have been brought to as much of a boil as those on all sides of the argument about, you know, that other stuff.

Unfortunately, only one man was and remains responsible for that other stuff.

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* Recall if you will from a previous essay: The sacrifice fly wasn’t made an official statistic until the 1954 season. Several Hall of Famers including Ted Williams and Stan Musial played a third or more of their seasons prior to the rule coming on line. I took Williams’s and Musial’s (and the others’) recorded sac flies, divided them by the number of seasons they played after the rule took force, then took that result and multiplied it by the number of Show seasons they actually played.

In simple math, the formula is SF/SRS [sac fly rule seasons] x MLB seasons. It was the best I could develop for getting the total sac flies you could have expected Williams and Musial (and the others) to hit all career long.

** World Series winners.