The count was two balls and one strike on Sept. 11, 1985, when Eric Show of the San Diego Padres delivered a first-inning pitch to Pete Rose, the player-manager of the Cincinnati Reds. Crouching down in the batter’s box as he’d done for 23 seasons, Rose lined a single to left-center field, surpassing Ty Cobb to become Major League Baseball’s all-time leader in hits with 4,192. The sellout crowd roared, teammates mobbed Rose, fireworks went off, a red Corvette was driven onto the field as a gift from the Reds organization, and 15-year-old Pete Rose Jr. came out for a teary-eyed embrace with his dad. It was a glorious night for Rose, who retired from playing after the following season with 4,256 hits, a record that baseball experts said would surely never be broken.
That scene is the lone truly moving moment in “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball,” by Keith O’Brien, and like everything else the Hit King touched, even it is soiled in the end. Unlike O’Brien, I am not from Cincinnati and I’ve always detested Rose, to the point of actively rooting against my own mother’s beloved hometown Philadelphia Phillies in the 1980 World Series because I considered him a colossal jerk. I was 9, and I was right.
Outside of a true devotion to the craft of hitting, there is arguably nothing admirable about the adult Pete Rose, and I barely knew the half of it before reading “Charlie Hustle.” (Even Rose’s nickname was derisive. New York Yankees legends Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle tagged him with it for trying so hard during a meaningless spring training game.)
In the book’s early pages, I was a bit concerned that O’Brien was going to wade into reputation rehabbing. He writes that Rose was “the American dream sliding headfirst into third” and that his lifetime banishment for gambling on baseball marked “the end of the age of innocence in sports.” Maybe for a young Reds fan, but calling any age innocent is a trite sentiment that should be retired from sportswriting, especially here, given that the same Reds franchise defeated the infamous Chicago Black Sox in the fixed 1919 World Series. Fortunately, O’Brien isn’t committed to the introductory “Say it ain’t so, Rose” bit, and he quickly settles in to deliver a significant, fascinating biography of a man you wouldn’t let into your beer-league softball dugout.
The thumbnail sketch of Rose goes like this: A scrawny working-class kid from Cincinnati maniacally dedicates himself to baseball, living up to his famous claim that he’d “walk through hell in a gasoline suit” to play the game. He was named Rookie of the Year in 1963 and MVP in 1973, won three World Series — in 1975 and 1976 with the dominant “Big Red Machine” and in 1980 with the Phillies — and appeared in 17 all-star games at a record five different positions. From an early age, he was also a gambler. His addiction evolved from horse- and dog-track action to placing wagers with illegal bookmakers on the Reds team that he managed. Rose denied betting on baseball for years, but Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti had the receipts. In the summer of 1989, Rose was expelled from Major League Baseball, and a rule was then added to keep him out of the Hall of Fame.
It’s a fall from grace for an iconic athlete perhaps bested only by O.J. Simpson’s, but there’s still some fun to be had in the tale. The cast of seedy characters populating Rose’s gambling orbit would do Elmore Leonard proud. Rose liked to spread his bets around, often in avoidance of his outstanding debts, so a slew of old-school bookies pops up, like “the Skin Man” out of Dayton, Ohio; a fringe mobster in Rhode Island named Joe Cambra; and “someone on Staten Island” who “went by the nickname Val.” You can practically smell the Mennen and Marlboro Reds baked into Val’s velour tracksuit. Even funnier, in the grim way of this material, is how bad Rose was at gambling. His decades-long connection to the underworld reaches its vivid nadir, in O’Brien’s telling, when one of his closest gambling associates “wasn’t even sure that Pete understood the betting lines sometimes — it was confusing with baseball.”
In and of itself, the sordid mix of two-bit hoods, coke dealers, middlemen, sycophants, steroid abusers, hangers-on and random sketchy weirdos surrounding and compounding Rose’s problem provides great material. O’Brien also deftly lays out how Rose’s financial and personal losses mounted, stupid bet by stupider bet, fueled to a degree by his arrogance and lack of empathy. Had Rose admitted to betting on baseball in 1989 and thrown himself on the mercy of MLB, he might have worked his way back into the sport’s good graces. I’m glad he remained obstinate and sealed his exiled fate, because he wasn’t just professionally corrupt; he was also awful to women, which O’Brien details at length. While married, he would parade his mistress in public, bringing her to the ballpark, on the road, even putting her up in the same New York hotel as his wife during the 1976 World Series. That was all until the mistress became pregnant with a child Rose had no desire to acknowledge, by which time he was already on to the next woman.
Even by the standards of baseball in the 1970s and ’80s, Rose’s womanizing was brazen and humiliating. In a perfectly characteristic self-own in 2017, thanks to a pointless defamation lawsuit that he filed against the lawyer who had led the MLB investigation against him, it came out that beginning in 1975, when Rose was a married father of two in his mid-30s, he had sexual encounters with a 16-year-old girl. It cost him a postseason talking-head gig on Fox Sports, but he’s lucky that’s all. The woman claimed the relationship started before she was 16, which if true would mean that Rose had committed statutory rape; but he couldn’t be charged with a crime because the statute of limitations had run out.
“Charlie Hustle” gets better and better as it builds to Rose’s ultimate downfall. No spoilers, but O’Brien ends his fantastic book in grand walk-off fashion, painting a brilliant, harrowing picture of Rose today, pathetic and willing to sign anything for a buck.
One moment late in Rose’s career suggests that even his fiery love of the game had some fraudulence in it. O’Brien cites multiple people who say that Rose, while playing with the Montreal Expos, used corked bats. One of the people is a clubhouse manager (and carpenter by trade) who did the illicit woodworking on Rose’s lumber. It calls into question the legitimacy of the end-stage hits that Rose needed to surpass Cobb. I would now wholeheartedly argue that Ichiro Suzuki’s hits as a professional in Japan should count and that his combined total of 4,367 makes him the true Hit King, the one to uncomplicatedly celebrate when he’s elected into Cooperstown next year.
Patrick Sauer has been a freelance writer for more than 20 years for many publications, some that still exist. He also co-hosts the live online talk show “Squawkin’ Sports,” which features interviews with authors of sports books.
Charlie Hustle
The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball
By Keith O’Brien
Pantheon. 440 pp. $35
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