Thirty-five years after Pete Rose was banned from baseball for betting on games , the question of whether his punishment fits the crime generates as much debate as ever. While HBO ’s new documentary Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose won’t settle the controversy, it will remind audiences of why Rose’s case inspires so much passion.
Directed by Mark Monroe and featuring extensive archival footage, extensive interviews with Rose himself, and insights from many of his allies and detractors, the four-part series is a fascinating account of the star’s career, disgrace, and ongoing quest for reconciliation. It also illustrates that Rose’s fate is among the most tragic and frustrating not only in American sports but in all of modern American life.
Rose’s exile from baseball is painful in part because he and the game shaped each other. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Peter Edward Rose grew up in the city’s working-class west side. He’s the first to admit that he was never the best athlete, just the hardest worker. He earned his famous nickname before his rookie season in 1963: Yankees greats Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford called him Charlie Hustle when he made an aggressive play in spring training. They meant it as an insult — the kid was trying too hard. He took it as a compliment because he considered his style a tribute to his fans. “I was a mouthpiece for the people,” he explains in the first episode. “The people wanted people to play like me.”
He won the National League Rookie of the Year in 1963, earned the first of his 17 All-Star selections in 1965, won consecutive batting titles in 1968 and 1969, and was National League MVP in 1973 despite hitting only five home runs. The second episode of the series takes us deep inside the Big Red Machine, one of the best teams to ever take the field and winners of the World Series in 1975 (Rose was that series’ MVP) and 1976. And as Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt explains, Rose’s arrival in Philadelphia pushed the Phillies to win their first World Series in 1980. And then there are the hits. Rose’s 44-game hit streak in 1978 remains a National League record, and the account of his breaking Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record in 1985 is an especially moving segment as both Rose and his son explain their emotions during the nearly 10-minute standing ovation from Cincinnati’s fans.
Rose’s grit also earned him criticism. Legendary broadcaster Jon Miller echoes the conventional wisdom when he rebukes Rose for barreling into catcher Ray Fosse to win the 1970 All-Star Game, supposedly ruining Fosse’s career. (That narrative crumbles when you look up Fosse’s stats.) During the 1973 playoffs, Rose nearly started a riot when he slid hard into the Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson to break up a double play. Unlike many other all-time greats, Rose didn’t make things look easy. He stood at the plate like a hunchback with a club. His trademark head-first slide into base was bullish, not balletic. It didn’t help that his heyday was the 1970s, the ugliest decade in Western civilization. He barreled around the bases on rain-stained artificial turf. His suits were garish. His haircut seems to have been inspired by Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch and Lou Ferrigno from The Incredible Hulk.
For all of his greatness on the field, Rose lived a seedy and unseemly life off it. In 1978, the Reds front office suspected that Rose was involved in illegal gambling, which is why they let him sign with the Phillies. Back in Cincinnati as player-manager during the mid-'80s, he developed relationships with bookies and drug dealers. Eventually one of his go-betweens, frustrated that Rose wouldn’t pay him back, contacted the MLB. New Commissioner Bart Giamatti, a former scholar of Renaissance literature and president of Yale University, hired attorney John Dowd to lead an investigation. The ensuing report suggested that Rose had bet on baseball and was in debt nearly a half-million dollars to bookies connected to organized crime.
When Giamatti confronted him with the allegations, Rose signed an agreement making him “permanently ineligible in accordance with Major League Rule 21 and placed on the Ineligible List.” Rose insists that he had believed Giamatti would reinstate him in a year, but Giamatti died of a heart attack only days after Rose’s banishment. For Giamatti to have reinstated him, though, Rose would probably have had to admit to betting on the game, which he didn’t do until 2004.
One detail people forget about Rose’s punishment is that Giamatti did not ban him from the Hall of Fame; instead, the Hall changed its rules to ensure that players banned from the MLB could not appear on ballots for the Hall. In addition to being punished by the league, Rose served time for failing to report income he earned from signing autographs and making public appearances. When the Reds won the World Series the year after his ban, Rose watched from prison.
Fair-minded, the documentary lets us hear from staunch Rose defenders like Schmidt, actor Chad Lowe, and former Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman. We see counsel Jeffrey Lenkov (who is also credited as an executive producer) work on Rose’s behalf for the league’s forgiveness — and we cringe as Rose blows up his chances. We hear from fierce critics like Dowd, journalist Ted Keith, and, most powerfully, Tommy Gioiosa, who as a young man idolized Rose and became his close associate before getting tangled in his mentor’s web.
Me, I’m a Pete partisan. The national coverage of his chase for the hits record made him my first favorite player and the Reds my favorite team. But it’s impossible to defend Rose’s rule-breaking, lying, and myriad of self-destructive acts, not to mention his womanizing. And there are moments in these interviews when Rose is either misremembering his past or simply lying about it.
On the other hand, how can anyone not feel sympathy for him now? Limping to and from public appearances at casinos, signing baseballs at memorabilia shops, recording birthday greetings for devoted fans, always wearing a white ballcap and dress shirts with Hit King stitched on the collar — it’s a different kind of hustle. There’s a glimpse of redemption at the end of the documentary as Rose suggests that his gambling days are behind him. I hope so, but it’s probably too late to make a difference.
Meanwhile, the MLB has become addicted to gambling . The league signed contracts with betting companies in 2019 and last year signed an exclusive deal with FanDuel. “Sports gaming can be an important source of fan engagement,” current Commissioner Rob Manfred declares. (Funny how removing the middle letters from gambling makes it more palatable.) It can be a source of problems too. This past spring, the interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani pleaded guilty to charges related to transferring millions of dollars from Ohtani’s bank account to pay for his own bets. In June, the league banned one player and suspended four others for betting on games. It’s hard to shake the feeling that more trouble lies ahead.
Those who see through Rose-colored glasses may hope this new gambling-friendly environment helps the case for his reinstatement. How can the league punish him for gambling when it otherwise promotes gambling so aggressively? More likely, though, the commissioner will want to emphasize the distinction between fans betting on the game and players doing so. Welcoming the league’s most notorious gambler back into the game could blur that line. Now it's not just Rose's love of gambling that will cost him — it's baseball's love of it too.
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Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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