pete rose if he had a bust in the hall of fame

By Douglas V. Gibbs

Yes, this blog typically has political and constitutional posts on it, but as a huge baseball fan I had to write the following piece about Pete Rose.  He was, after all, one of my favorite players as a child.  I fell in love with baseball during the 1970s.  I was nine when I played my first Little League game in Bellflower, California.  My first baseball card was Tony Perez of the Reds before that.  So, by virtue of a connection to those two teams as a kid, they were my original favorite teams.  The Mets made me familiar with players like Tom Seaver, Ron Hodges, Dave Kingman, Rusty Staub, and for a while Manager Yogi Berra who left the team before that 1975 season was over.  The Cincinnati Reds, however, thanks to that Tony Perez baseball card half a decade earlier, caught my attention first.  And it was fun to love the Reds, since my family was all about the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

The Big Red Machine of the mid-1970s was phenomenal.  To this day I can easily name them all.  Johnny Bench at catcher, Dan Driessen or Tony Perez (depending on the year) at First Base, Joe Morgan at Second, Dave Concepcion at Shortstop, Pete Rose at Third Base, and in the outfield George Foster, Cesar Geronimo, and Ken Griffey, Sr.  As for the pitchers of that era, Don Gullett, Pedro Borbon, and Clay Carroll stick out most in my mind.  Tom Seaver, like Driessen, joined the Reds in 1977.

Pete Rose and Johnny Bench were the ones that caught my attention most, though speedy Joe Morgan was among my favorites, too. 

That first year in Little League I watched the grass grow in the outfield, with a ball rarely reaching beyond the infield.  I had no talent, no throwing arm, and couldn’t hit the baseball if it was the size of a beach ball.  I got better, eventually, and enjoyed stints at Second Base most of the time in my later years, but Third Base was what I usually wanted to play because of Charlie Hustle.  Pete Rose stood out in ways that the other players didn’t.  He was all-in all of the time.  I loved the scrappers who played the game with grit.  Later, Darin Erstad of the Angels would be the guy that also earned that title in my world of baseball. 

Pete Rose was just about the biggest name in baseball, when I was in Little League, too.  He was so popular that even when my family took me to Dodger games there would be cheers (and of course a bunch of jeers, too) inside the stadium when Pete walked out on the field. 

Pete Rose was a throwback, when players played the game for the love of it, and with all of the grit they could muster.  He wasn’t about trying to hit the ball out of the park; he just put the ball in play and then ran the snot out of each chance he could around the bases.  He dove for balls at the hot corner, and fired his strikes to First Base even if it meant that his body fell to the ground due to the enhanced effort.  His uniform was always dirty, usually down the front since he loved to slide hands first. 

Pete Rose was all about baseball.  In his interviews that’s all he really talked about.  He was born to play ball, and that’s all he ever wanted to do.  Nobody played harder, nobody got dirtier, and nobody loved the game more.

His famous slide at home plate during the 1970 MLB All-Star Game pretty much summed up his attitude.  It was an All-Star Game.  Basically a show for the fans.  Yet, it was still about putting everything into the game, from Pete Rose’s point of view.  It was the 12th inning, game was tied, and Rose barreled into home plate to win the game as if the whole season was on the line.  Fosse missed catching the ball, and Fosse’s shoulder was dislocated as a result.  Fosse’s shoulder was never the same, but the clip continued to play as long as I could remember.  The funniest part about it is that Fosse and Rose considered themselves to be friends, and in fact got together to hang out after that game.  Rose played for all of the marbles, played hard and with grit, but was also liked by even his rivals.  I suppose you could say back then he was the ultimate ambassador for the game.  Good guy, hard player, and a passionate baseball marvel who was liked by pretty much everyone.

In the 1975 World Series, the first one that I really paid attention to since it was also my first year to play ball, Rose and the Cincinnati Reds squared off against the Boston Red Sox.  It was a brutal series that went a full seven games.  Pete Rose got the MVP Award, hitting well over .300 and probably could have gotten over .400 with a few more at bats.  During that postseason I got to know the players quite well from the games, becoming a fan of a number of players from Boston, Pittsburgh and Oakland, as well.  Later, I heard that Rose said to someone during the game, “Isn’t this just great?! Aren’t we lucky?! Can you think of anything you’d rather be doing?!”  I don’t remember who he said it to, or if the statement is just another part of baseball lore that may or may not be true, but it sounds exactly like something Pete Rose would say.

To my absolute joy, the following year the Reds spanked the Yankees four-straight.  It was a thing of beauty, and I was already not a fan of the evil empire from New York.  Johnny Bench’s play outshined Pete Rose’s, that time, but I was good with it.  Bench was my other favorite Reds player.

Pete Rose’s career lasted 24 years, more than twice what was needed to qualify for the Hall of Fame.  He broke Ty Cobb’s lifetime hits record, joining the very small 4,000 hit club.  I collected magazines with Rose on the cover.  TIME, Sports Illustrated, and others.  I saved newspaper clippings.  I have baseball cards of Pete Rose going back to 1972.  I think my love of Pete Rose was a key part of why I adopted Doug DeCinces of the Angels (post-Baltimore) during the years he was in Anaheim.  DeCinces played with grit, and he was, you know, at Third Base.

Pete Rose finished his career with a .303 Batting Average, 4,256 hits, and a .987 fielding percentage.  He played in 17 All-Star Games, he’s a three-time World Series Champion, won the Rookie of the Year award in 1963, won the NL MVP in 1973, had two Gold Gloves, one Silver Slugger Award, and finished with the top Batting Average in the National League three times.  He not only owns the hits record, but his 3,562 games is another record we may never see broken.  He’s also first all-time with 14,053 At Bats, first all-time with 15,890 Plate Appearances, second all-time with 746 doubles, first all-time with 3,215 singles, first all-time with 5,929 times on base, enjoyed a 44-game hitting streak in 1978, and ranks among the top defensive players of all-time.  He’s also the only player to play at least 500 games at five different positions (1B, LF, 3B, 2B, and RF), carries four switch-hitter records (Runs, Doubles, Walks and Total Bases), and a ton of other records that fills a list too long to put here.  In the post-season he had a batting average of .321, and ranks high on a long list of other post-season honors, as well.

Pete Rose loved baseball, and he WAS baseball.  Then, accusations arose.  The Black Sox scandal way back in 1919 had made gambling a gigantic no-no in baseball, and according to certain pieces of evidence that I believed at the time failed to be absolute proof, Pete Rose was accused of betting on baseball, and some of those games being ones he was a part of.  He denied it, and then got banished from baseball, including his otherwise inevitable inclusion into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  In 2004, he admitted publicly to betting on baseball, and even Reds games.  In 2007, he told ESPN when he bet on his team, he always bet his team would win, and “I loved my team, I believed in my team … I did everything in my power every night to win that game.”

The kid who began as a member of the Cincinnati Reds in 1960, a dream come true since he was a local kid from Cincinnati, then spent time with the Phillies doing the player-manager thing for a bit, and then back to the Reds (with a single season with the Montreal Expos tucked in between)  He was the player who outshined the best and was an all-around threat on the diamond.  Pete was the man who became known as Charlie Hustle (a name, they say, he got from Mickey Mantle after the famous Yankee watched Rose during a spring training game – though most will argue it was also a variation of the “Joe Hustle” nickname he earned during his minor league days), and was possibly the greatest player ever to play the game; yet, he is not in the Hall of Fame, and he died before that error could be corrected.

Pete Rose died at the age of 83 on September 30, 2024.  The outfielder turned Third Baseman and First Baseman (but began at Second Base) died at his home in Las Vegas.  The day before he was in Nashville, surrounded by other members of the Big Red Machine, continuing to talk about the game he loved.  He was in a wheelchair in Tennessee, with Concepcion, Foster, Perez and Griffey by his side.  The day before Johnny Bench was there, too.  Despite being in pain (he said his back was hurting, that day) he got to be with his Big Red Machine buddies.  It was a highlight for him, no doubt.  He also signed around 200 autographs in Nashville the day before he died, and posted for photos with fans.

A friend of mine was frank with me when we discussed Charlie Hustle’s death.  “I won’t visit the Hall of Fame,” he told me, “until Pete Rose is in it.”

I’ve been there before, myself, in Cooperstown to see the grand Baseball Hall of Fame.  It’s a wonderful visit.  But, I agree, Pete Rose needs to be there.  It’s incomplete without him.

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