.png)
2 months ago
16 ARTICLE AD
On the baseball diamond, Pete Rose did everything head on – barreling into infielders to break up a double play, diving headfirst on steals, famously flattening catcher Ray Fosse to score the winning run in the 1970 All-Star Game. He played straight up, hard-nosed baseball. No guile.
In other aspects of his career, however, it was pure evasion. As the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he secretly wagered on games, in clear violation of Major League Baseball policy. When the scandal came to light, he issued denial after denial, and maintained that fiction for years, even after he had been banned from the game by baseball’s commissioner.
That lifetime banishment, rendered in 1989, left the man they call Charlie Hustle ineligible to enter the Hall of Fame, even though he’s baseball’s all-time hits leader with 4,256, a mark that may never be eclipsed. The new HBO documentary Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose takes stock of the baseball icon at 83, hobbled by bad knees but still chugging towards his goal of getting into the Hall and baseball’s good graces. His age and basic human sympathy argue for him, as do his stats. But he remains a polarizing figure.
“Pete is most well-known for hitting a baseball… He’s the best hitter by the numbers that’s ever played the game. But the second thing he’s most known for is lying,” writer-director Mark Monroe tells Deadline. “He [told] a lie about what happened with the gambling, and not just at the dinner table, but on Johnny Carson or to Charlie Rose or The Today Show. He maintained that lie for more than a decade.”
Episodes 1 and 2 of the series premiere Wednesday night on HBO, followed by episodes 3 and 4 on Thursday night (the series will stream on Max). Rose sat for hours of interviews for the series (usually sporting a dress shirt with the words “Hit King” stitched into the right collar).
“All I did was bet on baseball. I didn’t rob banks,” Rose tells Monroe in his own defense. “I was wrong in not coming clean… but I played the game right.”
Rose was born in Cincinnati and became the local boy who made good when he joined the Reds organization in the early 1960s. He won Rookie of the Year in 1963, just a preview of the hitting prowess that was to come; from the left or right side of the plate he could smack base hits seemingly at will. In 1971, a trade brought second baseman Joe Morgan to the Reds. Suddenly, all the pieces were in place and they transformed into the Big Red Machine, one of the most formidable units in MLB history.
A young Al Michaels occupied the booth as the Reds’ play-by-play announcer in the early ‘70s. In the documentary, Michaels recalls even back then how Rose needed to be around the action and loved betting on the ponies and greyhound dog racing. At a recent Q&A with Rose and Monroe in Hollywood that Michaels moderated, the legendary broadcaster asked Rose if at any point in his life he had sought treatment for his betting mania, say by going to Gamblers Anonymous.
“I went a couple times. I didn’t understand what they were saying,” Rose replied. “I really didn’t. I mean, maybe I didn’t want to.”
There are flashes of introspection with Rose, but they generally end in a pivot to a joke or a yarn. In his 80s he remains a captivating storyteller – some might say a fabulist.
“I would say that Pete is an entertainer,” Monroe observes. “He’s a performer and an entertainer, and he sees himself like that, I believe. And that was true when he was playing the game. I think he felt like part of the personality and the ideology of the hustle is that you are entertaining people. I think he felt that after the scandal, in later years, being an entertaining person is a way to make noise, is a way to stay relevant, is a way to make sure people still want that autograph, and that’s how you stay alive.”
It’s the mouth that gets him into trouble. Monroe was in the middle of making his series in 2022 when Major League Baseball allowed Rose to participate in a reunion in Philadelphia of the Phillies’ 1980 World Series-winning team. During a press gaggle before taking the field, a female reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Rose about accusations that emerged in 2017 that Rose, in the 1970s, had engaged in a sexual relationship with an underage girl. Rose responded, “I’m not here to talk about that. Sorry about that. It was 55 years ago, babe.”
The “babe” comment came off as tone deaf and sexist.
“When he’s put in an uncomfortable place, he goes on the offensive,” Monroe says. “His natural reaction or instinct [is] to be aggressive and that played out with the media.”
It also stalled apparent progress in his bid to get reinstated in baseball.
“The trade winds going into Philadelphia feel good [in 2022],” Monroe recalls. “I’m talking to the [documentary] creative team going like, wow, maybe there’s some traction on reinstatement. Who knows? … And then to have him do what he does, which is just kind of shoot himself in the foot, to have the whole thing kind of blow up right in front of me…”
Rose not only holds the record for most hits, but many other MLB marks: most games played (3,562), most at-bats (14,053), and most singles (3,215). His record of 10 seasons with 200 hits or more was equaled in 2010 by the Seattle Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki. Rose’s lifetime ban from baseball has lasted 35 years. Is it time to end the sentence, perhaps not for good behavior, but in view of time served?
Monroe holds an opinion on whether Rose deserves reinstatement, but he prefers not to disclose it.
“In a storytelling way, the creative joy of this [series] is basically having the audience ask themselves constantly, ‘What would I do?’” Monroe says. “It’s the slight swinging back and forth of the evidence, of the information in the episodes that make you go, ‘I came into this thinking one thing. Do I still think that?’ And I think that’s what I want to do, is try to lay the whole thing on the table and see him as a human being today and ask the audience, ‘What would you do? You have the [Hall of Fame] ballot in front of you, what would you do?’”
