Rose, Peter E.
Baseball
b. April 14, 1942, Cincinnati, OH
Once described by a sportswriter as "the least-gifted great player," Rose was self-made, parlaying a relatively small amount of talent into a 24-year major-league career that included records for most career games and most career hits through sheer hard work and hustle. Within three years of his retirement, he went from self-made to self-destroyed, his Hall of Fame dreams devastated by gambling and a criminal sentence for tax evasion.
When he joined the NL's Cincinnati Reds for spring training in 1963, Rose was nicknamed "Charlie Hustle" because he ran to first base even on a walk. A second baseman then, he batted .273 and scored 101 runs to win the rookie of the year award.
In 1965, Rose led the league with 209 hits, batted .312, and scored 117 runs to make the first of seventeen All-Star teams. It was also the first of fifteen seasons in which he hit over .300.
Rose won consecutive batting titles in 1968, when he hit .335 and also had a league-leading 210 hits, and 1969, with a .348 average and a league-leading 120 runs scored. He was named the NL's most valuable player in 1973, when he won his third and last batting championship with a .338 average, again leading the league with 230 hits, his career high.
From 1974 through 1976, Rose led the NL in doubles and runs scored each year, was the leader in hits once again with 215 in 1976, and led in doubles once more with 51 in 1978.
A free agent, he signed with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1979. Rose had moved to the outfield in 1967, then had played third base most of the time since 1975. With Philadelphia, he was a first baseman.
Rose led the league with 42 doubles in 1980 and 140 hits in the strike-shortened 1981 season, when he batted .325. However, his average dropped to .271 in 1982 and .245 in 1983, and he went to the Montreal Expos the following year. Late in the season, the Expos sent him back to Cincinnati, where he became the team's manager.
He retired as a player after the 1986 season, but continued managing until the gambling scandal broke in 1989. It began with reports that Rose had lost heavily on horse and dog races, and then there were charges that he had also bet on baseball games.
Rose denied the charges steadfastly, but was banned from the sport by Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti on August 24, 1989. As a result of the gambling probe, Rose pleaded guilty to income tax evasion in April of 1990 and was sentenced to five months in a federal prison.
The Baseball Hall of Fame board of directors in 1991 ruled that anyone banned from baseball would be ineligible for Hall of Fame membership. Though Rose's name wasn't mentioned, it was obvious that the ruling was aimed at him.