Pete Rose, Controversial Baseball Player, Dead at 83

There are some athletes who are universally beloved, whose feats of skill are balanced out by admirable conduct off the field; figures whose reputations are thoroughly intact. Dig deeply enough into most athletes’ biographies — into most people’s biographies, full stop — and you’re likely to find paradoxes, complexities and outright awful moments. To think about the life of Pete Rose — who died today at the age of 83 — is to reckon with all of those things.

Rose remains Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader with 4,256. His time in the sport, with included a long stint with the Cincinnatti Reds as well as time spent playing for the Phillies and Expos, could be described as a Hall of Fame career, except for the matter of his lifetime ban from the game for gambling on the sport at the time that he was the Reds’ player/manager.

With Rose’s passing, the league posted a tribute to him on Twitter/X. “Major League Baseball extends its deepest condolences to Pete Rose’s family, his friends across the game, and the fans of his hometown of Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Montreal and beyond who admired his greatness, grit and determination on the field of play,” the league wrote. “May he rest in peace.”

The matter of betting on MLB games isn’t the only incident that’s left Rose’s reputation tarnished in the years since the 1989 ban went into effect. Sportswriter Sara Sanchez addressed the breadth of Rose’s legacy in a concise thread on social media.

“Pete Rose is a very good example of a man who had a unique skill & drive that made him better at one thing (getting hits) than anyone in the history of the world,” she wrote. “He was also undeniably flawed in important & honestly, criminal, ways that should not be ignored today or any day.”

A New Biography Explores the Paradox of Pete Rose

Keith O’Brien discusses his book “Charlie Hustle”

Earlier this year, the publication of Keith O’Brien’s biography Charlie Hustle prompted a new look at Rose’s legacy, for good and for ill. In an interview with InsideHook, O’Brien described encountering “people out there who love him and would walk through a wall of fire for Pete Rose” and “people out there whose intersection with Pete forever changed their lives in negative ways” over the course of working on his book.

In the 35 years since his lifetime ban from baseball went into effect, Rose has remained a complex, contradictory figure in the sports world. With the rise of legalized sports betting in the U.S., the debates over his legacy are still very much with us, and can’t be ignored.