Pete Rose, baseball’s hit king who was banned from the sport, dies at 83

Pete Rose, whose boundless competitive zeal helped make him one of the most triumphant and tragic figures in sports history, rising to the top of Major League Baseball’s career hits list but earning a lifetime ban for gambling on his own team, died on Monday, the Cincinnati Reds confirmed. No cause of death was given.

Rose, who was 83, collected 4,256 hits, the most in MLB history, across a 24-year playing career spent mostly with his hometown Reds. But while serving as Reds manager in 1989, he received baseball’s ultimate penalty for violating the sport’s most sacred rule: he placed bets on his own team.

His placement on the permanently ineligible list has also made Rose ineligible for election to the Hall of Fame, the sport’s highest honor. While artifacts from Rose’s career are displayed in the museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., there is no plaque in the hallowed gallery for the man who played more games than any other.

“The hardest thing in sports to do is to hit a baseball, and I did it successfully more than anybody in the history of the world,” Rose told the New York Post in 2019. “Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time Hit King, will always make me stand out in sports.”

Yet Rose’s swift and devastating downfall, less than four years after breaking Ty Cobb’s hits record in September 1985, gave him an almost singular notoriety in the sport he loved. In the span of nearly a century, from the mid-1920s to the mid-2020s, Rose was the only person in uniform to be banned for life for gambling.

Rose exuded child-like joy on the field, belly-flopping into bases on slides and sprinting to first base on walks, a habit that earned him the nickname “Charlie Hustle,” bestowed sarcastically by Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle, hard-bitten Yankee veterans, at spring training in 1963.

But Rose also played with sharp-edged, even frightening ferocity, bowling over a catcher at an All-Star Game, brawling with an infielder in the playoffs. He was a study in extremes, professionally and personally; he never drank or smoked, but otherwise lived recklessly.

In 2017, a woman alleged that Rose had sex with her when she was 14 or 15 years old, in the early 1970s, when he would have been in his 30s. Rose – who claimed that he believed the woman had been 16 – was then removed from inclusion in a Wall of Fame ceremony for the Philadelphia Phillies, a team he had led to a championship. When the Phillies eventually honored Rose as part of a reunion event – the league approved his attendance – the fans gave him a standing ovation.

That was typical of Rose’s long, awkward endgame, as the sport grappled with the grand yet grimy legacy of a figure who never strayed far from the fringes.

Rose opened a restaurant, hosted a talk show, worked as a studio analyst for Fox Sports, filmed a shoe commercial, promoted a gambling app and authored several books. He also spent 15 years vigorously denying that he had bet on baseball, despite the league’s detailed evidence to the contrary.

Then, in a 2004 book – titled “My Prison Without Bars,” underscoring his perceived victimhood – Rose finally admitted that, yes, he had bet on the Reds. It would prove to be a canny move in the memorabilia enterprise he depended on for income.

Twenty years after the book’s publication, Rose – a regular on the autograph circuit from Las Vegas casinos to Cooperstown hobby shops – was charging $174.99 at his website for a signed baseball with a special inscription: “Sorry I Bet On Baseball”.

By then, Rose was synonymous not just with hitting, but with winning – although it took a while to validate the greatness of the Machine.

In the 1972 World Series, Rose had come to bat as the potential winning run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 against Rollie Fingers, the magnificent Oakland closer. Rose was not a power hitter but had pulled a homer in Game 5, and another would make the Reds champions. Fingers threw Rose a high, outside fastball, guessing correctly that Rose could not hit it for an opposite-field homer. He flied out to left to end the season.

The next season, Rose hit an NL-best .338 and won his only Most Valuable Player award. But that October brought still more frustration. After a victory in the NLCS opener against the Mets, Cincinnati had been shut out in Game 2. Buddy Harrelson, the Mets’ light-hitting shortstop, had said that the Reds looked tentative at the plate, a comment that rankled Rose and led to a wild melee in Game 3.

The Reds would lose the series and miss the playoffs in 1974, their fourth season of the decade with at least 95 victories but no championship. In the 1975 World Series, with a three-games-to-two-advantage over the Red Sox at Fenway Park, the Reds blew a late lead in Game 6, which extended deep into extra innings. Carlton Fisk’s 12th inning homer would win the game, and the Red Sox led the finale, 3-0, with one out and Rose on first base in the sixth inning.

Johnny Bench, the star catcher, tapped a ground ball to shortstop that should have ended the inning. But there came Rose, barreling into second base, upending Denny Doyle and causing him to throw wildly to first. The inning continued, and the next batter, the slugger Tony Perez, bashed Bill Lee’s eephus pitch over the Green Monster. The Reds went on to win by a run, and Rose, who batted .370 with a Series-leading 10 hits, was named MVP.

They repeated the next season, sweeping the Phillies and Yankees to become the only team in the playoff era to go undefeated in the postseason.

Rose would bolt for Philadelphia in 1979, but not without one last spectacle as a Reds superstar. In June 1978, a month after his 3,000th career hit, Rose began a hitting streak that would captivate the country. No hitter had seriously challenged Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game streak in 1941, and nobody since has come as close as Rose did in 1978: 44 in a row, a stretch that finally ended on Aug. 1 in Atlanta.

Rose was ingracious after the game, a 16-4 loss that ended with Gene Garber striking him out on a changeup. The same player who had flattened a catcher to win an All-Star Game was livid that a pitcher would have the audacity not to throw him a fastball.

“Garber pitched me like it was the seventh game of the World Series, throwing changeups, especially on 2-2,” Rose snarled later, adding that he hoped he would face Garber the next night. “I want to hit one right back up the middle at him, and I mean hard.”

Such a blatant lack of sportsmanship would be hotly debated today. But Rose at the time was widely heralded as a national treasure. A day after the streak ended, the Miami Herald sports editor, Edwin Pope, wrote a column typical of the coverage, starting it this way: “I want to thank Pete Rose,” and ending it with an assertion that “heroes are heroes. God knows none ever fit sports’ mold better than Rose.”

In September, a bigger fan would salute Rose in person: President Jimmy Carter, who welcomed Rose, his wife Karolyn, and their two children to the White House.

“We’re really proud of you, Pete,” Carter said.

The Reds made a half-hearted effort to keep Rose as a free agent, offering him a contract that would not have even made him the highest-paid player on the team. Rose had bigger plans and found a motivated suitor in the Phillies, a veteran team desperate for a leader and a championship. The rest of MLB’s original 16 franchises had all won a title, and the Phillies were in danger of squandering their best chance: three years in a row, they’d lost in the NLCS.

As a Phillie, Rose switched from third base to first, where he developed a typically showy move: whenever he caught the last out of an inning, Rose would spike the ball high off the Veterans Stadium turf. He batted .331 in his first year with the Phillies, and The Sporting News hailed him player of the decade.

In 1980, just as the Phillies had hoped, Rose pushed them to the top. In the playoffs in Houston, he leveled catcher Bruce Bochy with a forearm to the face to score a crucial run. In the World Series, just before Tug McGraw’s clinching strikeout in Game 6 against the Royals at the Vet, a pop-up squirted loose from catcher Bob Boone’s mitt with the bases loaded. A disaster, perhaps, until Rose swooped in, snagging the ball from midair.

That was Rose, always hustling, always there for the team, and the honors and accolades piled up rapidly from there.

In 1981, Rose broke Stan Musial’s National League hits record and chatted up President Reagan after the game, his Mizuno batting glove gripping a red phone at a chummy news conference. “How ya doing?” Rose greeted Reagan, to laughs, after a long wait for the President to take the line. “We were gonna give you five more minutes, and that was it.”

Rose moved on to Montreal in 1984 – doubling off the Phillies’ Jerry Koosman that April for his 4,000th hit – but as Cobb’s record came into view, the Reds decided to capitalize. They had finished in last place two years in a row and brought their ultimate drawing card back to town, trading utility man Tom Lawless to the Expos that August and making Rose the player/manager, a once-common title that has never been used in the majors since.

After batting just .259 with the Expos, he surged to a .365 average (35 for 96) with the Reds. His off-field life also had the veneer of a fairy tale: Rose had moved from a West Side condo to a five-acre spread with a horse barn in the tony Indian Hill neighborhood. That fall, Rose and his new wife, Carol, welcomed a son, Ty – named, of course, for Cobb.

At the time, Cobb was credited with 4,191 hits (a total since reduced by two, after research proved that two of those hits had been counted twice).

The moment unfolded on Sept. 11, before 47,237 at Riverfront, when Rose sliced a first-inning single to left off the Padres’ Eric Show. The crowd roared for seven minutes, a red Corvette rolled onto the field (license plate: PR 4192) and, as Rose wept at first base, 15-year-old Pete II, in uniform as a bat boy, bolted to his dad’s side.

“I was afraid he was going to tell me to get back in the dugout,” Rose II told Sports Illustrated in 1997. “But when I got up to him, he threw his arms around me. That was the first time he ever hugged me, as far as I can remember.”

For all the trappings of wholesomeness, Rose’s gambling was becoming more brazen. His habit had been on MLB’s radar since the early 1970s, when the league’s head of security, a former FBI man named Henry Fitzgibbon, heard that Rose gambled heavily and frequented race tracks. Rose would always deny wrongdoing and insist he owed no debts to bookies.

Fitzgibbon told Sokolove that he continued to meet annually with Rose – “My idea was to counsel him and keep him clean,” he said – until his retirement from MLB in 1981. Whatever they discussed apparently had no impact on Rose, whose sense of invincibility grew with his fame.

“By 1984,” Keith O’Brien wrote in “Charlie Hustle,” his 2024 Rose biography, “Pete had graduated from placing bets with friendly West Side bookies… to hanging around shady, small-time mobsters and established East Coast criminals.”

Late in his Reds career, Rose had met Tommy Gioiosa, a young man who would come to play a major part in his descent through the 1980s. Gioiosa was a college baseball player who had played stickball with Pete II at the team hotel. Rose took a liking to him, and the starry-eyed Gioiosa came to serve as Rose’s housemate and gofer, a loyal sidekick who would live in his limelight.

He also ran bets for Rose, who gambled more as he earned more in salaries, endorsements and the booming memorabilia business.

“I was like a kid in a candy store,” Rose wrote in “My Prison Without Bars,” referring to easy cash from autograph shows. “I was able to get my hands on a lot of fresh ‘candy.’”

And Rose gobbled it up, indulging his gambling fix through a network of bookmakers and go-betweens, often tallying tens of thousands of dollars in debts. Gioiosa, as Rose’s shadow and runner, was often responsible for settling up with the bookies – or trying to – while also juggling his own vices.

Gioiosa worked at a Gold’s Gym in suburban Cincinnati whose owners, Mike Fry and Don Stenger, were also dealing cocaine. A bodybuilder at the gym, Paul Janszen, supplied Gioiosa with steroids. Through Gioiosa, all would become part of Rose’s swelling circle of friends and gambling contacts. Especially after his career as a player ended in 1986 – with a strikeout against Goose Gossage – Rose craved the action and rush of gambling.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was pushing toward disaster,” Rose wrote in his 2004 book. “A part of me was still looking for ways to recapture the high I got from winning batting titles and World Series championships. If I couldn’t get the high from playing baseball, then I needed a substitute to keep from getting depressed.”

Rose lost about $25,000 on the 1985-86 NFL playoffs, he wrote, and while he has never specified when he first bet on baseball, he said that the first time he spoke openly about it around others was in October 1986, while watching the NLCS between the Mets and Astros.

In early 1987, Rose cut ties with Gioiosa, paying him off with a $34,000 check to cover gambling debts he owed to Ron Peters, a bookie Gioiosa knew from Gold’s Gym. Now it was Janszen running Rose’s bets, traveling to spring training with him and filling the role of primary lackey.

As O’Brien details in his book, both Gioiosa and Janszen were also helping Stenger distribute the cocaine he bought from a Florida man named Norman Janowitz. After the authorities arrested Janowitz, with Stenger’s help, in March 1988, they came after Janszen.

After meeting with FBI agents in the Janowitz probe, Janszen needed money for his own defense and sought it from Rose’s longtime lawyer, Reuven Katz. Janszen believed Rose owed him $44,000 in gambling debts, but Rose agreed only to a $10,000 payment. This infuriated Janszen, who began working with the FBI to take down Peters – yet another Rose associate who was dealing cocaine.

MLB had been tipped off again that Rose was involved with bookies, but waited for the FBI’s Gold’s Gym case to play out. When the FBI did not file charges against Rose, the league was free to investigate – but it needed a push from Janszen. Still frustrated with Rose’s unpaid debt, Janszen cold-called Sports Illustrated in mid-February 1989, hoping to sell a blockbuster story: Rose had been betting on baseball and the Reds. The magazine launched its own probe of Rose, and outgoing MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth found out. His successor, Bart Giamatti, would have to act.

Rose and Giamatti had collided the year before, when Giamatti, then the NL president, had suspended Rose 30 days for bumping umpire Dave Pallone. Giamatti and his deputy, Fay Vincent, summoned Rose from spring training in Florida to a meeting at MLB headquarters in New York. Rose insisted he had never bet on baseball.

MLB’s gambling punishments are clear, and posted in every clubhouse: Rule 21 (d) specifies that betting on another team’s game carries a one-year suspension, and betting on one’s own team results in a lifetime ban – “permanently ineligible,” to be precise. The rule was enacted after eight members of the Chicago White Sox accepted money (or had knowledge of the plot) to lose the 1919 World Series.

It is the most serious rule in the sport, and while MLB was initially inclined to believe Rose, it hired a lawyer from Washington, John Dowd, to see what he could find. Dowd, who had led a major Mafia investigation for the Justice Department, met with Janszen, Peters and others, gathering damning evidence on a target who refused to back down. Deep into the process, Vincent went to Cincinnati to meet with Katz, whose stance – as recounted in Vincent’s memoir, “The Last Commissioner” – crystallized the notion that Rose considered himself untouchable.

“Pete believes he is a national treasure,” said Katz, who suggested a fine, community service and a vague acknowledgment of “regrettable” actions, but no admission of gambling on baseball. Giamatti, Vincent wrote, called the lawyer’s response “pathetic.”

The league had Rose, and knew it: Dowd’s 225-page report (with nine volumes of exhibits covering thousands more pages) details the gambling by Rose as Reds manager, backed up by betting slips and phone records. In a span of less than three months in 1987, he bet on 412 baseball games, including 52 on the Reds, usually $2,000 per game. Rose won more than he lost: 228-184 overall, and 29-23 on the Reds.

Baseball’s rule offers no leniency on a person who bets on his team to win. When a manager is betting on his team to win, after all, his strategic decisions could reflect the added urgency; in theory, he could risk a pitcher’s health to get a few critical outs.

And while Rose always bet on the Reds to win – he didn’t always bet on the Reds. Rose had little confidence in starters Mario Soto and Bill Gullickson and often did not bet on their games, even when he bet on other MLB games on days they pitched. It was the kind of omission that could easily have stood out to the wrong people.

“The problem is,” Janszen told the Cincinnati Post in 2007, “if you’re betting with bookies, which he was, if you take the Reds for six straight games and then you don’t take them, doesn’t that signal that you’re not real hot on your team that given night?”

Dowd filed his report in May 1989, and the scrutiny intensified as the season wore on. On Aug. 21, a Monday, Rose managed the Reds to a win at Wrigley Field, then left the team for Cincinnati to be with Carol as she delivered the couple’s second child, a daughter named Kara, on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the day before Giamatti would announce Rose’s punishment – effectively his final day of eligibility in the sport that once defined him – Rose flew on a private jet from Cincinnati to Minneapolis for a live appearance on a home shopping network. He hawked photos and jerseys, balls and bats. But he didn’t mention another signature, one he had just scrawled on the flight to Minnesota, which would prove to be the most important one of his life.

The five-page agreement, announced on August 23, 1989, makes a series of contradictions. Rose acknowledged in it that Giamatti “has a factual basis to impose the penalty,” and that he had accepted the penalty without a hearing. Yet the document also states that “the Commissioner will not make any formal findings” that Rose bet on baseball, and that nothing within “shall be deemed either an admission or a denial” by Rose that he bet on games.

To MLB, what mattered most was one sentence on page 4: “Peter Edward Rose is hereby declared permanently ineligible in accordance with Major League Rule 21 and placed on the Ineligible List.” Rose – who would proclaim for the rest of his life that his favorite record was his participation in 1,972 victories – had been defeated, outfoxed by his opposite: the erudite Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar and former president of Yale University.

“The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode,” Giamatti began, reading from prepared remarks at a news conference in Manhattan. “One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts.”

Legalese aside, Giamatti was asked at the news conference if he, personally, believed that Rose had bet on baseball.

“In the absence of a hearing and therefore in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I am confronted by the factual record of the Dowd report,” Giamatti said. “And on the basis of that, yes, I have concluded that he bet on baseball.”

And, Giamatti added, on the Reds.

The answer stunned Rose, who held his own news conference in Cincinnati that day and, naturally, denied that he had bet on baseball or the Reds. He planned to exercise his right to apply for reinstatement in a year.

But eight days later, Giamatti died of a heart attack on Martha’s Vineyard at 51 years old.

Rose hit the interview circuit in the aftermath of his banishment; he had always been able to charm reporters. But his past haunted him, and in April 1990 he pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return. He was sentenced to five months in federal prison in Marion, Ill., and watched from there as the Reds – a team he could not lift higher than second place as manager – stormed to a World Series title without him.

The next year, 1991, would mark five years since Rose’s final game as a player, thus making him eligible for the Hall of Fame ballot that would be mailed to voters after the season. But that January, the Hall’s board approved a change to the eligibility criteria: going forward, players on MLB’s permanently ineligible list would also be ineligible for Cooperstown.

Rose could never bring himself to apologize. He could never acknowledge what he’d done, ask for forgiveness or admit that he had a gambling problem. He told O’Brien that he went to two or three counseling sessions and quit when he felt out of place.

“These people were stealing to make bets and stuff like that,” Rose said. “All I did was bet on baseball games, and I just quit going because it made me feel real funny.”

Rose had his supporters; idols are not easily toppled. In 1999, he was cleared to participate in an on-field ceremony for the “All-Century Team” before a World Series game in Atlanta. The NBC reporter, Jim Gray, asked Rose in a live interview if he would show contrition and admit that he’d bet on baseball, casting Rose – “I’m not gonna admit something that didn’t happen,” he said – as a victim of an ambush. The next game, the Yankees’ Chad Curtis refused to talk to Gray after a game-winning home run, saying that the team had voted to boycott him in support of Rose.

A decade after his banishment, Rose was the story of the World Series. And as long as he continued to deny the facts, the possibility of reinstatement persisted. He had met with Commissioner Bud Selig in 1997 and again in 2002, but Selig never ruled on his appeal.

By profiting from his long-awaited confession with the 2004 book, Rose destroyed whatever goodwill had been percolating with MLB. There was little of the contrition the league had sought, or evidence that Rose had made meaningful life changes.

I’m sure that I’m supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I’ve accepted that I’ve done something wrong,” Rose wrote in the book. “But you see, I’m just not built that way.”

Rose acknowledged “real emotion buried somewhere deep inside,” and said he was “sorry it happened.” But a solemn, well-rehearsed apology tour would never have fit a man whose defiance had helped him carve a singular place in baseball history, and a title no document could ever take away: the Hit King.

In a 2024 podcast with Bret Boone, a former player, Rose noted that two of his grandsons were impressive amateur hitters.

“But neither one of them are gonna break my record, and if they did, I’d have them assassinated the day before they were approaching it,” Rose said – jokingly, of course, but a joke that perhaps only he would ever have thought to make.

“That’s one thing I can live with. I’m the Hit King. Don’t take that away from me.”