Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, died of natural causes this week at the age of 83. He was one of the greatest baseball players in history, and his stats back that up: three World Series titles, 17 All-Star appearances, and a record-breaking 4,256 hits. His moniker on the field was Charlie Hustle, and he was one of the most well-known and recognizable players in the history of the sport. But Rose is perhaps best known by the public for what he did off the field: He bet on baseball, including on his own team. As the manager of the Reds in the late 1980s, an investigation found, he gambled on Major League games, a violation of the league’s “Rule 21,” and he was banished from baseball for life. He spent the next 30-plus years fighting not only his banishment, but the league’s refusal to consider him for the Hall of Fame.
As we mourn Rose’s death and reflect on his life and career, it’s natural to wonder: Would Rose have fared any better if he had broken Rule 21 today? Major League Baseball is a far cry from what it was in the 1980s with regard to gambling. After the repeal of the Professional Athlete and Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 2018, sports gambling has spread across the country, and professional leagues like the MLB have formed partnerships with gambling companies. Fans are inundated with advertisements encouraging them to bet on games both during television broadcasts as well as in the ballparks themselves. Some stadiums even have on-premises sportsbooks.
Baseball’s biggest star today is probably Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher and designated hitter. Last month he became the first player ever to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season — finishing the year with 54 and 59, respectively. He is almost certainly bound for baseball’s Hall of Fame. But he’s also in the middle of his own gambling scandal. His interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, was found to have gambled well over $10 million with California illegal bookmaker Matthew Bowyer, with money that Ohtani claims was stolen from him. The MLB has cleared Ohtani of any wrongdoing. The public, however, still have their doubts, and some questioned whether or not Mizuhara was betting on Ohtani’s behalf. Rose joked in a video posted to Twitter, “I wish I had an interpreter.”
A number of other baseball players have been punished for gambling in recent years, including San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano, who was banned for life, and Padres pitcher Jay Groome, Oakland Athletics pitcher Michael Kelly, Philadelphia Phillies infielder José Rodríguez, and Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Andrew Saalfrank, who were all suspended for a full season. Few of these players’ stories garnered any headlines, and the list of professional athletes in every sport who have been caught betting on sports grows longer with each passing season.
When Rose was found to be gambling on baseball, it was a national scandal. The allegations, the investigation, and Rose’s legal battle to defend himself were front-page headlines. At the time, Rose’s gambling was treated by the league and his critics as a direct attack on not only the integrity of professional baseball, which was long considered, in the words of Walt Whitman, “America’s game,” but by extension, on American values. Commissioner Bartlett Giamatti, in announcing Rose’s ban, made it clear that it had to do with more than simple rule breaking: It was a punishment for a moral failing. He argued that baseball played too great a role in society to let Rose off the hook, “because it is so much a part of our history as a people, and because it has such a purchase on our national soul, has an obligation to the people for whom it is played.”
The impetus for Rule 21 was the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919, when players on that team conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series. At the time, gambling was rampant, not only among fans of baseball but among players, as well. The sport had firm roots in the world of gambling. In the game’s original lexicon, a hit was called an “ace” and an at-bat was called a batter’s “hand.” The original professional teams in the late 19th century were owned by gamblers who bet with each other on their own teams. The grandstands at the turn of the century were filled with gamblers and bookies placing bets on every play of the game. And players frequently bet on themselves with gamblers and with each other. But the Black Sox scandal rocked the nation, and woke fans up to the idea that gambling could have a corrupting influence on the players and teams. By 1927, Rule 21 was in place, and gambling became verboten among anyone associated with the sport.
When Rose was accused of gambling, however, public opinion about gambling had changed considerably. The majority of Americans not only supported legalizing gambling, but two-thirds of Americans wanted Rose reinstated, even knowing that he had gambled on the sport. Marty Brennaman, the Reds’ play-by-play announcer, said that Rose was so popular in Cincinnati that “if he ran for mayor, he’d be elected in a landslide.”
One thing Rose’s case did bring to the forefront for Americans was the realities of gambling addiction. At the time of his banishment from baseball, Cincinnati police reported that Rose owed as much as $750,000 to illegal bookmakers. Rose says he was in the throes of addiction, but that he didn’t feel he could seek any help, because doing so would insure he would be thrown out of baseball for life. “I should have had the opportunity to get help,” Rose said in his 2004 book My Prison Without Bars, “but baseball had no fancy rehab for gamblers like they do for drug addicts.” Gambling addiction wasn’t treated the same way as other forms of addiction then, nor is it today. In the 1990s, Daryl Strawberry was allowed to seek help for his addictions and return to the game. In the mid-2000s, Josh Hamilton was allowed to return to baseball after a drug-related suspension kept him out for three years. Not only did his team check him in to the Betty Ford clinic, his teammates chose to celebrate major victories in the locker room with ginger ale instead of champagne.
In the early 2000s, baseball suffered through the “steroid era” when players were abusing performance enhancing drugs and arguably doing far more damage to the integrity of the sport than Rose’s gambling ever did. But the “Joint Drug Program” the league agreed to in 2015 set forward rules that would allow players up to three positive tests for PEDs before they received a permanent ban, and even then the players could apply for reinstatement after two years. Players who have admitted to or been caught using PEDs have had difficulty getting voted into the Hall of Fame, but there are a number of players already there who have been accused or suspected of using PEDs during their careers.
In defending himself over the years, Rose always pointed out that he never bet against the Reds. Though the rules state that no one in baseball should bet on any baseball games at all, not only on their own teams, it’s an important distinction, because it gave lie to the idea that his gambling somehow violated the integrity of the game. The campaign against Rose was more about the morality of gambling (and, perhaps, lying about it), a moral vision not everyone in baseball or in America shared. His betting did nothing to change the outcome of any games, unlike the members of the Chicago Black Sox of 1919, and unlike the scores of players who used performance enhancing drugs and were allowed to continue to play baseball anyway. He wrote in My Prison Without Bars that while he admitted he broke the letter of the law, he didn’t feel he broke the spirit of it. He wasn’t using inside information or asking players to throw games. He was backing the Reds with everything he had, including his wallet. “I was rooting for my teams — no, believing in my teams. I bet the Reds to win every time.”
What could be more American than that?