From the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s, Pete Rose was my favorite baseball player.
I never thought he was the best player in the game and I rarely thought he was even the best player on his team. But I loved the way he played the game and I loved it when he said he would walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.
I interviewed him four times — twice in one-on-one interviews — between 1982 and 1995, in Philadelphia, St. Louis (twice) and an offseason banquet in Ontario, California.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that my last interview with Rose was the last baseball story I wrote as a print journalist.
By then I had come to realize that the player I had admired so much at age 15 was not a man who deserved to be admired. It was the only one of my four interviews that came after he had been banned from baseball for gambling. He was denying it then, and of course he denied it when I asked him about it.
Nine years later, in 2004, he admitted it.
Last Monday, he died at the age of 83.
He battled for years in the court of public opinion to be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. If there was one thing on which most people seemed to agree it was that if Rose were ever to get there, it would be posthumously.
There’s an irony in the above picture of Rose walking into the corn at the Field of Dreams, it’s that the field was built to give Shoeless Joe Jackson and his banned Black Sox teammates a chance to play.
Rose appropriated the title of “Hit King” for himself because he played long enough to get 4,256 hits, but his lifetime .303 batting average wasn’t even close to the best in his own era, let alone all time.
He couldn’t have carried Joe Jackson’s bat. Jackson had 9,000 fewer at-bats than Rose. but had 1,772 hits and a .356 career average. Ty Cobb said Jackson was the best hitter he ever saw, and Babe Ruth modeled his swing after Jackson’s.
The memory of Rose I’ll never forget was late in the 1978 season when he challenged Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. He made it to 44 and the Braves stopped him in Atlanta. Rose embarrassed himself when he said pitcher Gene Garber shouldn’t have been bearing down on him so hard in his last at-bat.
So the question is whether Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. I go back and forth on this, and I think Rose needs to be lumped with Jackson, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro and Alex Rodriguez. If you look at those names — particularly the last six — you realize keeping them out leaves a huge hole in baseball history.
I suppose the way I look at it now is that I would let them in and not even keep them separate from the others. What I would do, though, is add a line or two on each of their plaques explaining why they were kept out for so long. “Banned for gambling,” “Banned for throwing the 1919 World Series,” “Banned for steroid use,” etc.
Let them in, but tell the whole story.