In 1993, when I was nine years old, I attended a youth baseball camp at Cincinnati’s Xavier University. I was one of a handful of Black players at the camp, held by an overwhelmingly white, Catholic institution, and many of my fellow-campers were surprised to find that my physical gifts did not conform to the stereotypes about Black athletes they had received through the media and from their families. I was not small or agile enough for the middle infield or fast enough for the outfield. But, though I was slow, I ran hard. At the end of the summer, our coach handed me the Charlie Hustle Award, named for a local icon who signified a certain determination and grit.
Charlie Hustle, as the disgraced former baseball player, manager, and broadcaster Peter Edward Rose is known in my home town, is a legend whose great triumphs and shameful mistakes personally buoy or affront generations of Cincinnatians. Rose, a product of the city’s hardscrabble west side, was a man of average physical gifts who propelled himself to unparalleled athletic heights and a mythic status hard to imagine for a baseball player today. His four thousand two hundred and fifty-six hits are among the American sporting records that few believe will ever be broken. He also holds the all-time major-league records for games played, at bats, plate appearances, singles, and times on base, and he is second in doubles. His on-field excellence was ultimately undercut by his many faults of character and bouts of criminality and rule-flouting, which included betting on baseball while serving as the manager of the Reds, for which, in 1989, he was suspended from M.L.B., for life.
The legalization of sports betting has led to a resurgence of interest in Rose’s legend. This year has seen two different substantial reconsiderations of his legacy: a four-part HBO miniseries, “Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose,” from J. J. Abrams’s production company Bad Robot, and a biography, by the sportswriter Keith O’Brien, “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball” (Pantheon). Rose’s singularly rich and checkered life has been the subject of dozens of profiles and exposés, but both the documentary and O’Brien’s narrative gain impressive authority from the depth of their research. Rose sat for a long, unsanitized interview for the film, and O’Brien spoke to him for twenty-seven hours across many months. In contrast to the film, which relies on interviews with nationally and locally famous sportscasters and journalists who covered Rose, O’Brien spoke with scores of Rose’s ex-teammates, ex-players, an ex-wife, and an ex-mistress, along with two former M.L.B. commissioners, the men who placed his bets, and the men whose investigation brought him down. The resulting book is the more thorough account of one of the most fascinating rags-to-riches-to-infamy sagas of twentieth-century celebrityhood at a time when baseball was central to America’s story writ large.
In O’Brien’s telling, America fell in love with Rose on July 14, 1970, during that year’s All-Star Game, when Rose barrelled into the Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse at home plate during an attempt to score a game-winning run from second, on a single in the twelfth. These days, the All-Star Game is thought of by most modern professional athletes as a meaningless exhibition not worth exerting much effort for or potentially getting hurt in. Consequently, it doesn’t attract much attention. But Rose’s dramatic and brutal home-plate wipeout into Fosse, which was blamed for derailing the catcher’s still productive career, was a nationwide spectacle, and its morality was hotly debated in the days and weeks to come. “Roughly half of American households had the game on, making it the single biggest show of the summer and the first seminal moment of the 1970s,” O’Brien writes. The game was watched by fifty million viewers on NBC, roughly seven times the number of people who watch the All-Star Game today. It was the first time that Rose’s win-at-any-cost attitude commanded the attention of the nation.
At the pinnacle of his career, Rose anchored some of the finest baseball teams ever assembled, the nineteen-seventies Cincinnati Reds. Known colloquially as the Big Red Machine, Rose’s team garnered four National League pennants and won back-to-back World Series, against the Red Sox in 1975 and the New York Yankees in 1976. (It was an era dominated by what became known as “small-market” teams; the Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati franchises won seven of that decade’s ten World Series championships.) Jimmy Carter once invited Rose to the White House to celebrate Pete Rose Day in Washington, after the star recorded a forty-four-game hit streak, in 1978—still a National League record—while the House of Representatives passed a resolution, without objection, to honor him that afternoon.
“I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball,” Rose once said. His go-for-broke head-first slides and habit of sprinting to first base on a walk marked him as among the game’s most irrepressible showmen and iconoclasts. “He can’t run. He can’t throw, and he doesn’t have a good pair of hands. All he does is bust his tail and beat you,” the former Oakland A’s manager Dick Williams said of Rose, who initially earned the Charlie Hustle moniker by bunting for a hit during an exhibition game with the Yankees, in his first major-league spring training, in 1963, drawing the derision of Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, who coined the nickname as a put-down. Rose chose to wear it as a badge of honor.
In the Cincinnati of my childhood, baseball was a civic religion. The city was home to the first openly professional baseball team, the 1869 Red Stockings, a precursor to today’s Reds, which were founded twelve years later, in 1881. In a nod to this legacy, the Reds traditionally open the season at home: for many years, the first game of the major-league baseball season was always played in Cincinnati. In my youth, the Opening Day Parade was the opportunity for many parents to let their children skip school. Cincinnati’s compact downtown still takes on a festive aura for the occasion.
But there is a dark side to all this lore, one that O’Brien’s book hints at through the lens of Rose’s various experiences, without ever making it plain: the team’s relationship with its Black players, like the city’s relationship with its Black population, has long been fraught. Chuck Harmon and Nino Escalera broke the color barrier in Cincinnati when they débuted for the Reds, in 1954, but were only on the club a short while. Two years later, the team added two Black outfielders: Frank Robinson, who hit thirty-eight home runs in his first season to win Rookie of the Year, and the talented young outfielder Curt Flood. The Reds soon traded Flood, setting up his battle for free agency in the seventies, which would change American sporting and labor relations forever. (According to rumor, management felt the team had too many Black players.)
In the nineteen-sixties, as Robinson, Henry Aaron, and Willie Mays became household names, Cincinnati’s heavily conservative, white fan base fiercely embraced Rose’s white-Everyman persona. Rose, having displaced a popular and still productive veteran when he joined the team, was initially ostracized by many in the Reds clubhouse and gravitated socially toward two of the team’s Black outfielders, Robinson and Vada Pinson. But, as O’Brien makes clear, Rose had no qualms about benefitting from his whiteness as his star exploded; baseball needed a performer who embodied the lies that many Americans wanted—and would still like—to believe, and Rose was happy to play the role, perhaps unwittingly at first, but with increasing awareness of what he was doing. “Look, if you owned Swanson’s Pizza, would you want a Black guy to do the commercial on TV for you? Would you like the Black guy to pick up the pizza and bite into it? Try to sell it?” Rose asked Playboy’s Samantha Stevenson in 1979, when he was at the height of his earning power as a pitchman. “I mean, would you want Dave Parker selling your pizza to America for you? Or would you want Pete Rose?”
Parker was another storied figure of my childhood. A fearsome hitter with a monstrous throwing arm in right field, he became the first African American athlete to make a million dollars per season in any American professional sport. Parker, raised in South Cumminsville, a west Cincinnati neighborhood not far from where Rose grew up, in Anderson Ferry, rose to stardom for the Pittsburgh Pirates, winning the National League M.V.P. award in 1978. After signing a groundbreaking five-year, five-million-dollar contract the following off-season, he received death threats, because many white fans felt he was being paid too much money. He was eventually cast out of Pittsburgh and returned to his home town to join the Reds—who had fallen on hard times as the Big Red Machine disintegrated, bottoming out at a hundred and one losses in 1982—and he quickly reignited his career and the franchise.
Parker’s reputation was tarnished by a cocaine scandal in 1985 which likely cost him his second league M.V.P. award. But, even at the height of his fame, he didn’t appear on many advertisements in Cincinnati. As Rose pointed out, Parker certainly wasn’t getting calls to sell pizza—neither was the face of the Reds’ brightest star of the eighties, the electrifying outfielder and folk hero Eric Davis.
Parker’s and Davis’s stories are part of the received lore of many millennial Cincinnati boyhoods. On the Little League fields of Cincinnati, Davis, in particular, held the status of a Greek god. During my own stint as a Little Leaguer, playing on the by-then retired Parker’s Roselawn Cobras, I and most of my teammates knew we’d never have Parker’s cannon-like arm or any of Davis’s myriad gifts—his muscular, sinewy frame, blazing speed, or scintillating power. His looping batting stance—back erect and bat held loose at his waist—was imitated everywhere you looked, however. He was a paragon of cool.
Davis is also one of the game’s great what-ifs. He joined the Reds in 1984, and in his 1986 breakout he became one of just two men in baseball history—oddly the spectacular Rickey Henderson also achieved the same feat that year and the year before—to hit more than twenty home runs and steal more than eighty bases in the same season. The following year, in 1987, he was the first man in major-league history to hit more than thirty-five home runs and steal more than fifty bases in a single season—a record not surpassed until Ronald Acuña, Jr., of the Atlanta Braves bested his numbers, just last year. Davis’s career was marred by a litany of injuries, but there was a moment in the eighties when you looked at Davis and could imagine him becoming what Michael Jordan became in basketball: an incomparable leading light, whose mastery defines an era.
In his moving memoir, “Born to Play” (Viking), from 1999, written with Ralph Wiley, Davis reveals how, at the height of his brief superstardom, he was offered the chance to do an advertisement for Cincinnati’s Provident Bank. This would have made him the rare Black Cincinnati athlete to do a local ad. He was paid one dollar to do so. Davis, knowing advertisement work was difficult to garner for Black athletes in the city, felt that he would help “open doors for the young black players”; someone would need to prove to the city’s business and financial élite, during a decade in which O. J. Simpson sold rental cars to a national audience, that a Black celebrity could sell products in a city where the Ku Klux Klan, for many years, would display a cross on Fountain Square at the holidays.
Davis was, in some respects, the player that Rose could never be, a man graced with physical abilities that few players had ever brought to the game; Rose, on the other hand, had the durability to play twenty-four seasons, never suffering the type of catastrophic injuries that derailed Davis’s career. An inversion of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, they loved each other from the start. “Eric Davis can do anything he wants to do in a baseball uniform,” Rose said of his star-player-to-be, near the start of the 1987 season, and Davis nearly proved him correct. In his memoir, Davis also recalls that Rose predicted that Davis’s sinewy, six-foot-two, hundred-and-sixty-pound frame would struggle to stand up to a full season’s worth of play most years. That turned out to be correct, too. “It all came true,” Davis writes in his memoir. “Pete was just a Yoda-type dude to me.”
Davis had a more complicated relationship with the team’s owner, Marge Schott, a chain-smoking car baroness who became the first woman to buy a controlling stake in a Major League Baseball team when she purchased the Reds, in 1984. In a particularly egregious act, Schott—who would openly refer to Davis and Parker as her “million-dollar niggers” and who was ultimately banished from the game for professing Nazi sympathies—refused to spend fifteen thousand dollars to fly Davis across the country on a medically equipped plane, when he lacerated his kidney in three places while attempting a diving catch early in the deciding game of the 1990 World Series, an injury that initially led doctors to advise him to consider not playing at all during the 1991 season.
When he rejoined the Reds, in 1996, after splitting three seasons between Los Angeles and Detroit and taking a year away from the game following several more catastrophic injuries, a rejuvenated Davis won the National League’s Comeback Player of the Year award. The following year, he moved on to the Baltimore Orioles as a free agent, where he had a magical season, hitting in the .380s well into May, until his life was upended by a cancer diagnosis. He won baseball’s Roberto Clemente Man of the Year award, but perhaps the most impressive thing he ever did in the game came the following year, in 1998. Having continued chemotherapy up to the eve of spring training in 1998, Davis, at thirty-six years old, hit .327 and went on a thirty-game hit streak for the Orioles—still a team record.
Davis’s shameful treatment by the team in the nineteen-eighties stands in stark contrast to Rose’s experience. O’Brien suggests that Rose’s gambling had been an open secret for more than a decade throughout Major League Baseball, and certainly within the Reds organization, but both the league and the media were reluctant to enforce the rules against him. O’Brien’s reporting indicates that the M.L.B. had known about Rose’s gambling since 1978, but it was not until 1989 that the league acted, and only after the F.B.I. had opened an investigation into the matter. In January of that year, Paul Janszen, a gym buddy of Rose’s who placed bets for him, attempted to sell the story to Sports Illustrated in the hope of recouping forty-four thousand dollars in gambling losses that Rose owed him. The magazine declined to pay and sought to report the story itself. When the M.L.B. got word that a piece on Rose’s gambling was in the works from the most venerable athletics magazine in the country, the organization raced to get in front of the situation, summoning Rose to New York for a meeting with the commissioner.
Even then, Rose might have avoided catastrophe: Peter Ueberroth, the outgoing commissioner, had little interest in pursuing the matter against one of the game’s all-time legends. But the sport had just appointed a new commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti—a former Ivy League college president and the father of the actor Paul—whose comportment and class instincts couldn’t have been further from Rose’s. Clad in a suit O’Brien describes as “shiny, like sharkskin,” in which the embattled Reds manager “looked like a mobster,” Rose denied any wrongdoing. Giamatti was unconvinced, and his deputy commissioner, Fay Vincent, pushed to hire John Dowd, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney (and future lead lawyer to President Trump during the Mueller investigation), to look into the gambling rumors. After speaking with Rose’s erstwhile friend Janzsen, Dowd had his smoking gun: betting slips in Rose’s handwriting clearly showing instructions to place money on M.L.B. games.
Dowd’s blockbuster report, in 1989, concluded that Rose had indeed placed bets on Major League Baseball games, including those involving the Cincinnati Reds, and in doing so Rose had violated one of the most stringent clauses of Major League Baseball’s code, implemented in the wake of the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which members of the Chicago White Sox intentionally threw the World Series. The finding, which Rose disputed for fifteen years, ultimately led not just to his lifetime suspension from Major League Baseball but also to his permanent ineligibility for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The Reds’ 1990 World Series victory, a year after Rose’s banishment, was largely won by a set of players—Davis, Barry Larkin, and Paul O’Neill, among others—whom Rose had nurtured as manager. Charlie Hustle watched the team’s World Series victory from jail, having been convicted of tax evasion in the aftermath of his suspension.
O’Brien persuasively renders Rose’s fall from grace as a tale of tragic hubris: he suggests that the same aspects of Rose’s personality that made him such an indefatigable hitter, one of the hardest outs the game has ever seen, were ultimately the seeds of his demise. Here was a man who wouldn’t give in and would fight to the bitter end in every aspect of his life. That he mistakenly thought himself too big to fail is surely the downside of the overweening confidence required to become such a remarkable player with such limited gifts.
But Rose’s story also illustrates how the scaffolding of unyielding adoration by the media, the fans, and the American political establishment which protected Rose from the fallout of his excesses for so long never existed for Black players such as Parker, who saw his reputation-shattering cocaine scandal in 1985 quickly amplified by the baseball media, or Davis, who had a cocaine scandal of his own in 1988 that was wholly fabricated from hearsay. The two were easy scapegoats in a media culture and news environment that often pathologized Black masculinity as deviant and dangerous. Meanwhile, their manager, ostensibly a paragon of white America’s most cherished views about itself, benefitted from a culture of hero worship that blinded his many supporters to his flaws.
Rose’s downfall did not necessarily end the glory days of baseball or of the Cincinnati Reds, as O’Brien’s subtitle suggests, but both the game’s importance on the national scene and the team’s fortunes have waned since the early nineties. The 1990 season marked the Reds’ last World Series win before the evolving economics of the game turned them into a near-permanent also-ran. In baseball’s modern era, the increasingly lucrative local-television deals that large-market franchises garner for their broadcast rights have given them a distinct financial advantage in pursuing the best free agents and retaining their own stars, making Cincinnati a glorified farm team to the glamour clubs on the coasts. The Reds are now on the back half of yet another disappointing season in which ownership sent away two of their best pitchers. The team hasn’t won a playoff series in twenty-eight years, ten years longer than the next longest drought in Major League Baseball. (“Where are you gonna go?” said the current Reds president, Phil Castellini, in 2022, dismissing fans’ concerns about the direction of the franchise. If cities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Oakland, with large working-class and Black populations, were the center of the baseball world in Rose’s heyday—those franchises won seven of the ten World Series championships during the nineteen-seventies and were three of the best teams in baseball when Rose was banished from the game a decade later—it was because they could still afford to be so, and perhaps we shouldn’t find it odd that the game was more popular then, too.
Eric Davis now works as a senior adviser to the general manager for the Cincinnati Reds. He credits Rose with helping him earn a position in the same front office that left him for dead in Oakland. “I picked up a lot from him,” Davis wrote in his memoir. “About everyday particulars of lineups, game strategy, matchups, when to go get a guy. I’m an assistant general manager waiting to happen in another life thanks to the likes of Pete, Parker, and Sparky Anderson.” (Anderson managed the Tigers during Davis’s sojourn in Detroit and the Reds during Rose’s greatest years as a player.)
The Reds’ immediate future will rely heavily on the All-Star shortstop Elly de la Cruz, who has emerged in his first full season as the most exciting player in baseball, just as Davis did thirty-eight summers ago. Davis mentored de la Cruz in the minor leagues; the young star, who leads the major leagues in stolen bases this season, wears No. 44 in Davis’s honor. He will continue to do so, one imagines, until he is eligible for free agency and the Reds can no longer afford his services. ♦
