On the field, Pete Rose racked up hit after hit. Off the field, he racked up gambling debts. While persistence at the plate would reward him with baseball’s all-time hits record, his gambling resulted in a stiff punishment – a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball, and eventually from the Hall of Fame. A new book revisits this dramatic narrative – Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, by veteran journalist Keith O’Brien.
“I feel like in the last 35 years since Pete Rose has been banned from baseball, and made mistake after mistake off the field, we forgot why we ever cared about him in the first place,” O’Brien says. “The first thing I wanted to do was go back to that whole story, the whole arc.”
Taking its title from Rose’s nickname, the book has an added resonance in the wake of the latest gambling scandal to hit the major leagues: Ippei Mizuhara, the ex-interpreter for MLB standout Shohei Ohtani, is accused of stealing $16m from the star to settle Mizuhara’s gambling debts. Ohtani insists he did not gamble himself on sports and was not aware of paying any of Mizuhara’s debts incurred by gambling.
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 Reds player-manager, had bet on his own games. Rose denied it, but accepted punishment from Giamatti. The commissioner’s sudden death that fall further turned public opinion against Rose, according to the book.
