On the field, Pete Rose racked up hit after hit. Off the field, he accumulated gambling debts. Although persistence at the plate rewarded him with baseball’s all-time hitting record, his play resulted in severe punishment—a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball and, eventually, the Hall of Fame. A new book revisits this dramatic narrative – Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose and the Last Days of Baseball’s Glory, by veteran journalist Keith O’Brien.
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“I feel like in the last 35 years, since Pete Rose was banned from baseball and made mistake after mistake off the field, we’ve forgotten why we cared about him,” O’Brien says. “The first thing I wanted to do was go back to that whole story, that whole arc.”
Taking its title from Rose’s nickname, the book has added resonance in the wake of the most recent gambling scandal to hit the major leagues: Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for MLB standout Shohei Ohtani, is accused of stealing $16 million from the star to pay off Mizuhara’s gambling debts. Ohtani insists that he did not play sports and was not aware of having paid off any of Mizuhara’s gambling debts.
It remains illegal for Major League Baseball players to bet on their own sport or team. The latter would trigger the same lifetime ban issued to Rose by then-Commissioner A Bartlett Giamatti in 1989. An investigation led by Marine Corps veteran and Department of Justice alumnus John Dowd indicated that Rose, as the Reds’ player-coach, bet on your own games. Rose denied it, but accepted Giamatti’s punishment. The commissioner’s sudden death that fall further turned public opinion against Rose, according to the book.
Today, attitudes toward gambling have changed over the six years since the Supreme Court opened the door to sports betting in the US, according to the author.
“There has been a huge shift in the cultural acceptance of the game,” says O’Brien. “It’s fundamentally changing how we connect to sports, how we talk about sports. I think it’s fundamentally changing American culture right now.”
If Rose were gambling today, the author points out, he might have found legal ways to get involved in gambling, like getting a sponsorship from FanDuel or DraftKings.
“If you think about well-known or notorious players in American history,” O’Brien says, “Pete Rose will be in that conversation.”
Raised in Cincinnati, the author had many conversations with Rose for the book, covering 27 hours of interviews, before the calls ended up unanswered.
“Interacting with Pete, you kind of see everything,” says O’Brien. “He’s rude, he’s brash, he’s arrogant, he’s funny, he’s a good storyteller… The only thing that’s really palpable is that Pete has a charisma,” that “our most talented politicians have, that our most popular actors and rock stars have ”.
“Whether you root for him today or not,” says the author, “objectively he was one of the most iconic athletes of the 20th century, who often found himself in the middle of some of baseball’s greatest moments.”
The book vividly details two such moments – Rose’s 12th-inning collision at home plate with Cleveland catcher Ray Fosse to win the 1970 All-Star Game in Cincinnati, and the first of his three World Series championships, in the epic seven-game contest against the Boston Red Sox in 1975. Both moments were shown in front of tens of millions of viewers on national television.
Of the collision with Fosse, O’Brien says: “I would say this is the moment where Pete Rose becomes Pete Rose… It gilds the mythology of Charlie Hustle. This was a guy who would do anything to win, including walking into home plate in a meaningless game. It will also forever define Ray Fosse, who was never the same, never the same player.”
Five years later, Rose was part of the Big Red Machine that included stars Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, George Foster and Ken Griffey Sr. Although the series is largely remembered for its pulsating Game 6 – a Sox victory in extra innings , punctuated by Home run by Carlton Fisk – there was a seventh game, and it was for Rose and the Reds. Rose took home Most Valuable Player honors in the series.
In Game 7, he proved that sometimes his contributions went beyond the scoreboard. With Cincinnati trailing, he broke up a double play with a hard throw to second base. The next hitter, Perez, hit a home run out of Fenway Park to cut the deficit to one.
“After the game, their own coach, future Hall of Famer Sparky Anderson, told the press that if Pete Rose doesn’t stop the double play, the Reds probably won’t win the game,” says O’Brien.
The Reds repeated as champions with a victory over the New York Yankees in 1976. Two years later, Rose compiled a 44-game hitting streak, the best in the National League and second only to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game winning streak in 1941. After Leaving Cincinnati in the off-season via free agency, Rose won his third Fall Classic as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980. Even before his departure for Philadelphia, his play had become a concern.
“In the mid-1970s, at least one player on his team was concerned about his relationships off the field,” says O’Brien. “In 1978, based on my reporting, Major League Baseball was concerned about his play. It seems to continue to get worse.”
In Rose’s first season as Phillie, her marriage to her wife of 15 years, Karolyn, ended in divorce. The book claims he had affairs during his marriage, including one in the early 1970s with a high school student who later said he was underage when the marriage began. The book addresses allegations of a baby born out of wedlock to another woman, Terry Rubio. A second marriage to Carol Woliung also ended in divorce.
“I chronicled all of this in the book – not for salacious reasons, but because I think it helps portray how Pete was unraveling as a man at the same time he was having his greatest success as a player.” says O’Brien, whose long list of interviewees includes Karolyn Rose and Terry Rubio (now Terry Rubio Fernandez).
Rose returned to the Reds as player-coach and made history in 1985 by breaking Ty Cobb’s career hitting record of 4,191. (He would finish with 4,256 hits.) However, the following year represented a very different watershed – the book claims that this was when Rose began betting on baseball, in addition to other sports.
“I think my reporting makes it clear that Pete Rose was addicted to gambling,” says O’Brien. “A gambling addict will make destructive choices. I think that’s why Pete Rose ended up betting on baseball.”
The book seeks to dispel what the author sees as myths about Giamatti’s subsequent investigation into Rose’s gambling in 1989. O’Brien argues that the new commissioner did not want to catch Rose, nor did he have a vendetta against him, while on the part of Rose, he liked Giamatti and appreciated his love of baseball.
However, O’Brien explains: “Bart was also a purist, an idealist. When presented with – first – rumors, then evidence that Pete had bet on baseball, he knew he needed to act. What Pete did was against the rules of baseball. Probably the most well-known rule in baseball is against betting. Pete violated that. Now he would have to pay the price for it.”
When O’Brien and Rose were still on speaking terms, the author accompanied Rose to autograph sessions, where people paid to line up to get a signature from the man who remains his idol. These days, upon request, Rose adds an apology for betting on baseball — an acknowledgment that would have been welcome 35 years earlier.
“That belief that he could do anything really helped him as a player,” reflects O’Brien. “He was full of confidence as a player, always believing, as a hitter, that he would win, hit, get on base… The same quality, the belief that he could do anything, the belief that he would win in the end, was, in many aspects, his undoing off the field.
