Pete Rose, Baseball Star Who Earned Glory and Shame, Dies at 83

One of the sport’s greatest players, he set a record with 4,256 career hits. But his gambling led to a lifetime ban and kept him out of the Hall of Fame.

Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds. No cause was given.

For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.

Few sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.

Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.

A lifelong adrenaline junkie who often operated out of sheer gall, Rose was long known to baseball officials as a fevered horse player with a network of unsavory associates and a rumored out-of-control gambling habit. During his nonpareil career as a player, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team, he was warned repeatedly by major league officials to curtail his gambling, and in the late 1980s, Rose, then the Reds manager, was investigated by baseball to determine if any of his activity was illegal.

The report by the investigator, John Dowd, revealed that Rose had bet regularly with bookmakers on a variety of sports, and though Rose vehemently denied it, baseball included. In August 1989, he was banned from the game by the commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, and he was subsequently declared ineligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which would otherwise have been a certainty.

One of the tawdrier episodes in baseball history and one of the most public — Rose’s farewell news conference was televised nationally — it was also, for Rose, monumentally costly. Not only did he lose his livelihood; he subsequently spent several months in jail for evasion of taxes related to his gambling income as well as his baseball memorabilia sales and autograph appearances. (For Giamatti, a former president of Yale who had served as baseball commissioner for only five months, the aftermath was far worse. A heavy smoker, he died at 51 a week after announcing his decision, the stress of the Rose case possibly contributing to the heart attack that killed him.)

Hoping for eventual reinstatement, the possibility of managing again and restoring his candidacy for the Hall, Rose perpetuated his lie for 13 years, steadfastly claiming, against a preponderance of evidence, that though he gambled on other sports, he never bet on his own. It was not until 2002 that he admitted to the baseball commissioner at the time, Bud Selig, that he had.

The confession was made public two years later in an autobiography, “Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars,” written with Rick Hill. In the book he acknowledged that he had told Selig that he had bet regularly on baseball, including on games played by the Reds while he was their manager, though never against them, he claimed, asserting at one point that he “would rather die than lose a baseball game.”

The possibility of his reinstatement never seemed to vanish entirely. But neither Selig nor the subsequent commissioner, Rob Manfred, lifted the ban, and Rose lived the remainder of his days under a cloud. Even so, among other honors, he was named to Major League Baseball’s official all-century team in 1999, and he refused to leave the scene quietly. Voluble and vulgar, self-indulgent and self-justifying, Rose never gave up gambling at the track. He was perceived by many, after the publication of his book, not so much as a contrite penitent as a crass opportunist.

“This is a man who admitted something in a forum in which he can make money,” the sportswriter Peter Gammons wrote. “He has no remorse, no respect for anything but his next bet.”

In 2017, Rose’s reputation was further tarnished when an allegation that he had once had sex with a minor came to light in a defamation lawsuit that he filed against Dowd, who had led the investigation into Rose’s gambling. The lawsuit stemmed from remarks Dowd had made on a radio program saying that Rose had had sex with “12- to 14-year-old girls.”

In testimony from that case, an unidentified woman said she had sex with Rose when she was under 16. Rose responded that he had believed that she was 16, the age of consent in Ohio. He never faced any charges related to underage sex, the statute of limitation having expired.

Despite the black marks against him, Rose remained an enormously popular figure among fans, regularly drawing large crowds for memorabilia shows and signings, including in Cooperstown, N.Y., the home of the Hall of Fame, during its annual induction weekends.

A full obituary will follow.

Sara Ruberg contributed reporting.