Pete Rose 1941-2024

Pete Rose, sliding in headfirst, as always.

Baseball’s Hit King, Pete Rose, died yesterday at the age of 83. Pete Rose was one of the greatest players in baseball history, as well as one of the most controversial. Rose has been the MLB hit leader for 39 years, and it’s safe to say that his record of 4,256 hits will stand for many more years. The controversy surrounding Rose will last for many more years too, as fans and historians will debate if he belongs in the Hall of Fame after his 1989 ban for betting on baseball. 

As a player, Pete Rose obviously belongs in the Hall of Fame. His accomplishments are amazing. Rose was a 17-time All-Star (a fun Minnesota connection—his first All-Star appearance was at Metropolitan Stadium in 1965, and his last All-Star appearance was at the Metrodome in 1985) he made the All-Star team at 5 different positions, (second base, left field, right field, third base, and first base) a record that will be impossible to break. Has anyone else even matched Rose’s accomplishment of being an All-Star at 3 different infield positions? Rose was a 3-time batting champion, and he finished in the top ten of batting average 13 times. He was the 1963 NL Rookie of the Year, and the 1973 NL MVP. Rose was a .321 hitter in the postseason, and he appeared in 6 World Series, winning the 1975 World Series MVP. Rose led the league in runs scored 4 times, in hits 7 times, and in doubles 5 times. Not known as a power hitter, Rose is second all-time in doubles, with an incredible total of 746.  

As a person, Pete Rose falls short of the Hall of Fame. Rose bet on baseball, and while no one ever accused him of throwing a game or giving less than his full effort on the field, it’s still a cardinal sin in baseball. I think it’s ridiculous that Rose didn’t just come clean in 1989 and confess that he had bet on baseball. Instead, he lied about betting on baseball for 15 years, before finally admitting the truth in a 2004 book. As a kid, that always confused me. If Rose didn’t bet on baseball, then why did he accept the ban from baseball? If he didn’t bet on baseball, then why didn’t he fight the ban? It’s a bit like Richard Nixon accepting Gerald Ford’s pardon after he resigned in 1974. I’m not going to say I did anything wrong, but I’ll accept this pardon just in case I may have done something wrong.  

But Rose fooled a lot of people for a long time, and even a baseball writer as smart as Bill James was an apologist for Pete Rose. In his 2001 book The New Bill James Historical Abstract, James spent six pages attacking the Dowd Report and casting doubt on the evidence that Rose bet on baseball. Of course, read today, it makes James sound foolish. 

You can admire Pete Rose’s grit, his tenacity, his hustle, and still find him lacking as a human being. If Rose had truly reconstituted his life in 1989 and lived the rest of his life after his ban from baseball the way, say, Stan Musial lived his life, maybe Rose would have seen the ban lifted. But he didn’t live his life that way, because he was Pete Rose. How could he do anything wrong?  

I was born in 1981, the year that Rose passed Stan Musial for the National League hit record. (Back in the day, records for each league had more importance than they do today.) Rose was an icon from the moment I became a baseball fan. To anyone slightly older than I am, Pete Rose was a huge symbol of baseball. You could argue that Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson were the two most iconic baseball players of the 1970’s. They were opposites, Reggie the powerful home run slugger, Rose the dedicated contact and average hitter. But they both captured the media’s attention and became stars.  

Back in 2015, Rose applied for reinstatement, hoping that Rob Manfred would be more receptive to his case than Bud Selig ever was. Rose was wrong. Reading Manfred’s statement is illuminating of the kind of person Pete Rose was. In true Rose fashion, he told Manfred he didn’t currently bet on baseball, and then backtracked later in his interview to say he does still bet on baseball. 

Rose still generates conversation, 35 years after his ban from baseball. When I was in Cooperstown with my family this summer, Pete Rose was there, signing autographs. We talked to a guy who had eaten breakfast at the same place Rose did. He said that one morning, Pete was facing away from the door, and he figured Rose didn’t want people to bother him, but the next morning, he was sitting facing out to the restaurant, so this guy said hi to Pete and ended up having a nice conversation with him for 10 minutes about baseball. We had breakfast at that restaurant the next morning, but we didn’t see Pete there. We did see Rose at the Safe at Home memorabilia store in Cooperstown. I didn’t pay for an autograph, but we at least saw Pete, although the store had practically blockaded him, I assume to keep people like us from just looking at Pete for free. Rose looked good when I saw him. He looked like, well, how Pete Rose always did.  

I also had a conversation about Pete Rose with a guy who was staying at the same motel. Like most people, this guy thought Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. I’m torn, because I do believe that Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame as a player. But I also believe that Rose bet on baseball, and he accepted the ban, and he really didn’t do much to change his ways after 1989. I do think it’s a positive sign that people wanted Pete Rose back in baseball—people were not full of hatred and retribution towards Pete Rose. And even though I might seem harsh on Rose, there’s part of me that still likes him. He was a great player. He loved playing the game, and he played all-out, every single day. Pete Rose is so close to being the perfect role model. So close, and yet so far. Maybe that’s the moral of Pete Rose, that he was so talented, so gifted, but he had fatal flaws as well. He was human.  

Book Review: Baseball's Best Kept Secret, (1997) and Life Is a Hit; Don't Strike Out, (2014) by Al Oliver

Life Is a Hit; Don't Strike Out, by Al Oliver, 2014.

Baseball's Best Kept Secret, by Al Oliver and Andrew O'Toole, 1997.

A handsome head shot of Al with the Pirates. This photo makes it look like he records for Motown Records in the off-season.

Al Oliver enjoyed some of his best seasons with the Texas Rangers, hitting .319 for them over 4 seasons. And yes, his necklace says "Scoop." That's his nickname because he was so good at scooping up low throws to first base.

Al's 1983 Topps card, after winning the 1982 NL batting title with the Montreal Expos.

Al Oliver was one of baseball’s most dangerous hitters in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Oliver was a 7-time All-Star, a 3 time Silver Slugger award winner, and the 1982 National League batting champion. During Oliver’s career from 1968 to 1985, only Pete Rose and Rod Carew had more hits than he did. Oliver finished his career with 2,743 hits and a .303 lifetime batting average. So why was he dumped from the Hall of Fame ballot after failing to win 5% of the vote in his first year on the ballot? Good question. I think Al Oliver deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, and I think he’s one of the most underrated players in recent baseball history. 

Al Oliver just published an autobiography in September called Life Is a Hit; Don’t Strike Out: The Al Oliver Story. Oliver published an earlier autobiography in 1997 called Baseball’s Best Kept Secret: Al Oliver and His Time in Baseball, written with co-author Andrew O’Toole. Both books shed light on the man off of the baseball diamond. Baseball’s Best Kept Secret is the better book, as Oliver goes into much more detail about his playing career. If you’re reading Life Is a Hit without having read Baseball’s Best Kept Secret, you will be missing a lot of information. Unfortunately, just reading the books will be more work than it should be, as it is painfully obvious that neither book was professionally proof-read. Grammatical errors abound, and co-author Andrew O'Toole has an interesting interpretation of correct comma usage. That being said, if you can overlook the sloppy mistakes, the books offer a look at an interesting athlete. 

One thing that makes Baseball's Best Kept Secret interesting is that Oliver and O'Toole include other voices in the book-there are interviews with Oliver's teammates, sportswriters who covered the teams he played for, and excerpts from contemporary news articles about him. Not all of these other voices are complimentary to Oliver, and some of them quite pointedly criticize him. I applaud Al Oliver for including these other voices, and for not just creating an echo chamber of "Al Oliver should be a Hall of Famer." Oliver does the same thing in Life Is a Hit, sometimes enlisting some of the very same people quoted in Baseball’s Best Kept Secret. The problem is that most of the voices in Life Is a Hit do blur together, as they repeat the same thing: “Al Oliver should be a Hall of Famer.” Oh well, I can’t blame Oliver for wanting to be in the Hall.

Oliver grew up in Portsmouth, Ohio, where he played baseball and basketball against another future All-Star, Larry Hisle. Oliver dealt with tragedy early on, as his mother died of a heart attack when he was 13, and his father died on the same day that Oliver was called up to the major leagues. Oliver makes it clear in both books that his parents’ influence on him made him the man he was.

Signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of high school in 1964, Oliver quickly moved up the minor league ranks to earn a September call up in 1968. Oliver would never return to the minor leagues. A superbly gifted line drive hitter, Oliver could hit the ball hard to all fields. Oliver was a first baseman in high school and the minor leagues, but with the Pirates he alternated between first base and the outfield. In 1971, Oliver played a majority of his games in center field, where he was flanked by Hall of Famers Willie Stargell in left field and Roberto Clemente in right field. The outfield of Stargell, Oliver, and Clemente generated a lot of offense for the Pirates that year, as they beat the Orioles in the World Series. Late in the 1971 season, Oliver made history as he was part of the first all African-American and Latin starting lineup. Oliver blossomed as a hitter as the 1970’s went on, and beginning in 1972, he batted .300 or more in 11 of the last 14 years of his career. Traded to the Texas Rangers after the 1977 season, Oliver thrived in the hot Texas summers, batting .319 over 4 years with the Rangers. He had one of his finest seasons at the plate in 1980, getting over 200 hits for the first time in his career, and also hitting 19 home runs, which helped him finish the season with 117 RBI. During spring training in 1982, Oliver was traded to the Montreal Expos. He responded with his best season, as he led the NL in hits, doubles, RBI, batting average, and total bases. Oliver hit .331, the highest average of his career, and he finished in 3^rd place in the MVP voting. During his last two years in baseball, 1984 and 1985, Oliver bounced from team to team, as he spent time with the Giants, Phillies, Dodgers, and Blue Jays. He was one of many veteran players who were not offered a contract for the 1986 season because of collusion among baseball’s owners. 

The collusion scandal started because baseball’s owners were annoyed at the high salaries free agency had brought. They retaliated by illegally colluding with each other to not offer contracts to free agents and to coordinate their offers to free agents in an attempt to keep salaries down. Two of the most famous cases of collusion were against Tim Raines and Andre Dawson, both of the Montreal Expos. After the 1986 season, Dawson and Raines were not offered contracts by any teams, despite the fact that they were two of the best players in baseball. Raines had just won a batting title, and yet he received no offers until the Expos finally re-signed him on May 1^st, a month into the 1987 season. When no one offered Dawson a contract, he and his agent wrote a blank check to the Chicago Cubs and told them Dawson would play for them for any amount they would offer. Dawson ended up being the NL MVP in 1987 for the Cubs. 

Throughout his career, Al Oliver was regarded by the press as an overly confident braggart. Al's response to that was his great quote: "There's no such thing as bragging. You're either lying or telling the truth." Oliver always felt he was telling the truth about his abilities on the baseball diamond, even when that truth was predicting every day that he would get 4 or 5 hits. In his two books, Oliver shows us where that self-confidence and relentlessly positive attitude came from. Al Oliver was an African-American man who was raised by his parents to be very proud to be an African-American. When Oliver came to the major leagues in 1968, this was a rarity in the pro sports world. Oliver was not a militant, but as far as major league baseball was concerned, he might as well have been leading protest marches in the outfield. Oliver and other outspoken African-American baseball players of the 1970’s like Dick Allen, Reggie Jackson, and Oliver's teammate Dock Ellis would feel the brunt of white baseball writers' casual racism. 

One of the key passages in Baseball’s Best Kept Secret is a conversation that Oliver had early in his career with Roberto Clemente about the press. Oliver quotes Clemente saying to him, “They did it to me at the start of my career; the writers will give you a personality that they perceive.” (p.72) Baseball writers had decided early on in Clemente’s career that he was a hypochondriac who didn’t always give 100%. That label would dog Clemente his entire career. Likewise, Oliver was portrayed as arrogant, when he thought he was simply expressing confidence in his abilities. In both books, Oliver comes off as an affable, likeable man who was a quiet leader on his teams through his positive attitude and his generosity towards his fellow players.

Oliver was one of baseball’s steadiest hitters during his career, and he put up some really great numbers. Baseball’s Best Kept Secret lists where Oliver ranks in several categories during his career from 1968-1985. But since Oliver only played in 4 games in 1968 and collected just 1 hit, it’s a little more fair to Oliver to look at his stats from 1969-1985. 

Most Hits 1969-1985:

Pete Rose-3,095

Rod Carew-2,777

Al Oliver-2,742

Most Doubles 1969-1985:

Pete Rose-553

Al Oliver-529

Most RBIs 1969-1985:

Reggie Jackson-1,521

Tony Perez-1,342

Al Oliver-1,326

Johnny Bench-1,288

That’s very impressive company to keep. And while some might disregard those stats as just being cherry-picked to highlight Oliver’s career, the fact that the time span of those stats is 17 seasons makes the point that over 17 seasons Al Oliver was one of the best hitters in baseball. 

The Veterans' Committee for the Hall of Fame has put Oliver on their ballot in the past, and he deserves to be considered for election to the Hall of Fame. Oliver had a very similar career to another one of my favorite overlooked players, Vada Pinson. I’ve written about Pinson before, and I was excited to read in Baseball’s Best Kept Secret that Pinson was one of Oliver’s favorite players when he was growing up. For whatever reason, neither Oliver nor Pinson drew much support from the sportswriters who vote for the Hall of Fame. Oliver dropped off the ballot in his first year, and Pinson’s vote total never exceeded 16%, far short of the 75% of the vote needed for induction. Oliver and Pinson had similar skills; they were both hitters who slashed line drives all over the field and didn’t walk or strike out much. Because they didn’t walk much, their Hall of Fame candidacies have never gained much traction with the sabermetric writers. On the flip side, Pinson and Oliver have not had a lot of support from old school baseball writers either. There aren’t many people making the case for them, which is hurting future consideration of their candidacies. As the cases of Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris have shown, having a debate about a player’s stats is a vital part of getting into the Hall of Fame. While Blyleven is now in the Hall, and Morris fell just short, both players gained tons of votes because writers debated about them for years, even though their numbers hadn’t changed. But because no sabermetric writers are pushing for Pinson and Oliver based on recently developed stats like WAR and VORP, and no old school scribes are banging out stories about what great clutch hitters they were, they remain two of the best players not in the Hall of Fame.