Pete Rose died, marking a clash of fame and arrogance

Pete Rose recently died, and if you don’t know what that means, you’re probably not a baseball fan.

That’s okay. It took me years to realize that it was okay not to be a baseball fan. I mean, I was happily married for 49 years to someone who went to baseball games for dinner. Or maybe it was the music. All I know is that she went to maybe a million games with me and only occasionally noticed who was winning.

But if you care at all about baseball, you probably also care that Pete Rose recently died at the age of 83. And if you know anything about his story, you know that the word “Shakespearean” comes up a lot, a word you’ll probably never see in a box score.

Rose is baseball’s ultimate version of a tragic hero, the flawed figure who flew too close to the sun — that is, when he wasn’t hanging out with gamblers and criminals in a nearby gutter.

He turned himself into one of baseball’s biggest stars, the celebrated “Hit King,” who holds the record for most hits in a career. He wasn’t the fastest or most graceful athlete – he was built more like a tractor than a gazelle, and played the game like one – but he also played the game harder and with more enthusiasm and what you might call religious fervor than everyone I’ve ever seen.

Tug McGraw, the former relief pitcher and baseball nut, once said, “If anyone plays harder than Pete Rose, he must be an outpatient.”

It wasn’t just that Rose famously ran to first base on a walk or that he famously plowed into catchers or that he dove into every base whether he needed to or not.

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He made the game fun, which you think is a requirement for an athlete, but we all know better. Fans loved him, and he loved being loved.

It’s a sad coincidence that Rose died on the same day as Dikembe Mutombo – the great Denver Nuggets center who fans also loved and loved to be loved, but who was also a commanding presence off the court. Mutombo was not only a top athlete, but also a steadfast human being and humanitarian. He was not only loved, but also genuinely admired.

After making himself a star, Rose would make himself one of the game’s great pariahs. He was the baseball legend who repeatedly broke baseball’s First Commandment: You can’t bet on games; it is placed in every Major League clubhouse – without a second thought and who told more lies in covering up his crimes than he ever got hits, and he got 4,256.

And so he was banned from the game for life. With no chance of parole. It’s been the rule since the players who took part in the 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal.

The punishment is where we enter Shakespearean territory. Or perhaps Greek tragedy is closer.

Let’s just say that compared to Rose, Sisyphus, who pushed that boulder up the hill forever, got off easy.

While Rose was barred from playing baseball, she was also banished from the Hall of Fame. There are many halls of fame, from rugby to rock ‘n’ roll and rock collecting. But in the sports world, the one that surpasses all others is the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is housed in a beautiful museum in the picturesque village of Cooperstown, New York, where baseball should have started, but probably didn’t.

That’s perfect, though, because baseball is the sport where mythology and history are forever intertwined. Where numbers – like Rose’s 4,256 hits and his 44-game hit streak and his 17 All-Star Game selections at five different positions – are sacrosanct.

Where Rose’s grades can only be talked about in whispers.

Because Major League Baseball, along with its Baseball Hall of Fame, long ago declared Rose a non-person and had him written out of baseball history, which no one made more of than Rose.

He wasn’t just banished from the Hall of Fame. He wasn’t even allowed to be on the ballot. The great players whose careers were colored by steroid use – Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire et al – were allowed on the ballot, but did not receive enough votes from sportswriters to make it into the Hall. Rose was not given that privilege.

Baseball without memory isn’t really baseball at all, which is why Rose belongs in Cooperstown.

Still, I don’t really feel sorry for him. He deserved punishment. And in real life he wasn’t a hero at all. He is known to have cheated on his wives. He was accused of having a relationship with an underage girl.

He would spend five months in prison for tax evasion. I suspect if you had asked him which punishment hurt more – months in prison or a lifetime ban from the Hall of Fame – he wouldn’t have hesitated.

And yet.

Every chance he got at rehabilitation – and he did get a few – he sabotaged it. Yes, he was a gambling addict. And if it’s brutally ironic that baseball, which now partners with FanDuel and DraftKings and all the rest, is banning Rose for gambling while embracing it, it’s not an irony we should be concerned about.

He knew the rules. He broke them. He didn’t believe any rules applied to him. And for that – breaking the rules and never taking responsibility – he was exiled and sentenced to essentially deal in baseball memorabilia for the rest of his life, hanging around the track and begging the baseball masters to hire him back.

For fifteen years after he was banned, Rose repeatedly denied gambling, even though the evidence gathered against him was overwhelming. Then in 2004 he wrote a book – ‘My Prison Without Bars’ – in which he admitted that he had bet on baseball, that he had bet on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, when he was managing them.

Why did he finally admit it?

Well, here’s a Pete Rose story with a different kind of song. As sportswriter and baseball scholar Jayson Stark explained in a mournful eulogy to Rose: “Twenty years after the book’s publication, Rose—a regular on the autograph circuit from Las Vegas casinos to Cooperstown hobby shops—asked on his website $174.99 for a signed baseball. with a special inscription: ‘Sorry I Bet On Baseball.’”

That was probably as sincere an apology as Rose could ever muster. I wonder what Shakespeare would think of that. Maybe this: “It is not in the stars to control our destiny, but in ourselves.”

Rose knew that about baseball. Here’s the tragedy: he apparently never learned about life.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He reported on Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the snow of New Hampshire and Iowa.. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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