Keith O’Brien,"Charlie Hustle The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball"
In his instant The New York Times-bestseller bio of the 'hit king,' O'Brien shows the great and bad of Pete Rose, a timeless ballplayer whose gambling has kept him out of the Hall of Fame.
Keith O’Brien dropped an apt simile for Pete Rose while hustling to promote Charlie Hustle, his thorough biography of the exiled Hit King.
“Pete Rose is like a political party now — it feels like you are either with him, or against him,” O’Brien says on the new episode of SportsLit, focused on his instant The New York Times bestseller CHARLIE HUSTLE: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball (Pantheon Books, March 26, 464 pages).
The four-time book author put his nose to the gumshoeing grindstone with Charlie Hustle. Per his phrasing, O’Brien reconstructs the “slow-moving train wreck” that led to Rose being booted from Major League Baseball in 1989.
“What I wanted to do with this book, is go back and tell the whole story,” O’Brien says in an interview recorded on April 5.
“I feel like in the last 35 years as Pete has been banned from baseball and made mistake after mistake off the field, we’ve forgotten why he even matters. I wanted to tell the whole story with granular reporting and let people come to their own conclusions. Something I learned a long time ago was ‘don’t tell people how to feel, show them the story.’ ”
O’Brien estimates he met with Rose for 27 hours of interview sessions, plus meetings in Las Vegas and at autograph-signing appearances. O’Brien, like Rose, is originally from Cincinnati. Both men came into the world on the west side, although O’Brien spent most of his early life on the east side of Cinci.1
“In our earliest interviews, we were moving chronologically,” O’Brien says. “He would say things such as, ‘Out on River Road, you know what I mean.’ So there was a level of familiarity that did help.”
The Rose saga adds significance because of the uh, above-boarding of sports gambling in the United States and Canada in recent years.
As a fan of radical honesty, it is just basic fan service for MLB and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to give us some credit. A hall of fame tells the story of the sport. The story of baseball is incomplete without Rose, Joe Jackson, and so-called Steroid Era stars such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Alex Rodríguez having ‘HOF’ next to their names. Rose’s trespasses, of course, are full of risky and amoral actions apart from gambling; he also caught long-overdue heat during #MeToo in the late 2010s.2
O’Brien notes likely hall of fame-bound manager Terry Francona suggested as much to him, that baseball’s “n’er do wells” should get their place in the shrine, misdeeds and all.
Oddly enough, there is some eerie bookending in the 1980s with Rose’s downfall. What is now termed gambling disorder was initially added to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. In the final year of the decade, the walls started to close in on Rose, encapsulated by a Sports Illustrated cover that said ten thousand words — “UNDER SIEGE: PETE ROSE.”
“After all these years, Pete can’t decide whether he was addicted,” O’Brien says. “But those who saw him wager, who placed his bets, who were there, all agree that he was addicted by the mid-1980s.”
Here are some fan’s notes. Thank you so much, Keith O’Brien.
Intro
1:10 Charlie Hustle was right on time. Reports about Shohei Ohtani and now-former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara appeared on March 21. The book was released on March 26. SportsLit spoke to O’Brien on April 5.
Since time to discuss Charlie Hustle was of the essence and there are 112,001 Ohtani takes, it was best to leave that as subtext. Ohtani is now Victim A in the federal case against Mizuhara.
At least we had the memes.
One of those Rose-Ohtani memes was amplified by Rose himself. A well-circulated video showed Rose joking that he wished he could have pinned his betting on his interpreter. But one of his entourage, Tommy Gioiosa, was his interpreter, and O’Brien pointed that out in a recent post on X.
2:40 Of course this site had a Jontay Porter take.
3:30 In the book, O’Brien establishes that the “chain reaction that led to (Rose’s) ultimate implosion began with a quiet moment in early 1986,” when he paid his first visit to Franklin, Ohio for a face-to-face with bookmaker Ron Peters.3
5:00 Some review is needed of who Rose was as a player. Rose being in the 2,000-runs club is much more fetch than the record of 4,256 hits. The team that scores the most runs wins the game, so it should be a bigger deal than hit or home run totals.
Only eight players have scored 2,000 runs. Compare that to 28 players in the 500-home run club, or the 33 with 3,000 hits. Exclusivity: so fetch right now.4
6:30 Here is the video of Ed Ott (1951-2024) discussing baseball, and the eyes of Pete Rose.
Sidebar: my first reference with Ed Ott dates to 1992. He was a coach for the Houston Astros and could have killed Rob Dibble.
Remember, the Astros and Reds were both in the NL West. They had carry-over beef from the season prior when Dibble, the high heat-throwing, high-strung closer, precipitated a fracas by beaning one of the Astros’ regulars with a ‘purpose pitch.’
Another bench-clearer started. Instead of an Astros player getting to Dibble, the guy who got to him was Ott, a 40-year-old, a one-time state high school wrestling champion. Ott spotted Dibble six inches in height, 40 pounds in mass, and a dozen years of angry-young-man-ness that had yet to run through the hourglass. Yet he could have given Dibble the coup de grâce. And there was this quote from Ott that made it into Sports Illustrated.
“I watched him turn red, purple, then blue. I could have held him 45 more seconds until he turned black. Maybe now he holds more value for life because I spared him this time."
8:30 The “dumb enough” quote is from former commissioner Fay Vincent, in an interview with O’Brien for The Atlantic magazine.
Of course, a bit of movie dialogue from Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers is germane here: “You see, history is not simply a study of the past, it is an explanation of the present.”
9:50 It is tricky to assess preventative care and preventative measures in hindsight. But saying “don’t do that” while ignoring the red flags is not how care works, and I believe that needs to be said.
Interview
13:00 The “Pete Rose roast” that O’Brien wrote of took place in the 1978-79 off-season.
Free agency was still novel, and Rose and his legal counsel Reuven Katz arranged a road show of him meeting with potential teams. (He ultimately joined the Philadelphia Phillies.) By then, Johnny Bench was in his 30s and had been catching for a dozen years. Second baseman nonpareil Joe Morgan was about to turn 35 and play out his option in 1979.
Contextually, George Foster was the last piece of the puzzle for Cinci’s Big Red Machine teams, who won back-to-back World Series in 1975-76. He became a regular when Rose shifted from leftfield to third base to make room for Foster in the DH-less National League.5 By the night of that Rose roast, Foster stood as the two-time reigning NL home run champion and a recent MVP.
His room-reading, though, left a little to be desired! Foster is also depicted extensively as a member of the 1986 New York Mets in Jeff Pearlman’s first book, The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform — and Maybe the Best (HarperCollins, 2003).
Foster’s main contribution, before being released, was commissioning an awful song called “Get Metsmerized.” They might have been ripping off the 1985 Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle,” badly and obviously.
18:45 The Hall of Fame should be about “what they do between the lines,” not “some kind of Hall of Saints,” in O’Brien’s terming.
Meantime, over in Canton, Ohio, off Interstate 77, you can still see O.J. Simpson’s bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
21:00 Our guests span a gamut with access to their sports-great subjects. Previous guest Jack McCallum wrote about Oscar Robertson effectively without speaking to him. And Howard Bryant had a very confounding access experience with writing his definitive biography of Rickey Henderson.
25:50 Hindsight is always 20/20. It is mind-boggling that MLB did not get more out in front of the Pete Rose problem. Reds president Dick Wagner had “at least one official” from MLB security come to the ballpark to talk with Rose about his gambling debts.
28:20 Here is a clip of when Rose filled in for Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder on The NFL Today. And MLB doe not view this as a clear association with gambling…6
Juxtapose! In the 1970s, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn meddled in the Atlanta ballclub’s lineup decisions in 1974 when their management angled to have Henry Aaron hit his record 715th career home run in a home game. Kuhn also denied equal access to Melissa Ludtke because of her gender, and took the L in federal court.
Kuhn fined pitcher Bill Lee for telling High Times magazine he used cannabis. He banned all-time greats Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays after they took gigs as casino greeters.7
36:00 O’Brien mentions Bart Giamatti, the commissioner who banned Rose and died of a heart attack eight days after the ban was announced. Giamatti is the father of the Academy Award-winning actor Paul Giamatti.
One odd irony regarding Pete Rose and Ray Fosse and their collision in 1970. When Rose was incarcerated for tax evasion, he served his prison sentence in Marion, Illinois — the hometown of, wait for it, Ray Fosse.8
40:00 The three generational stars on the Big Red Machine had different intakes with Cincinnati.
Rose came of age before the amateur draft and was signed in 1960. Johnny Bench was claimed in the first amateur draft in 1965. Ruefully, the fact the Reds signed Bench for US$6,000 tells you why MLB instituted an amateur draft.9
Joe Morgan came to the Reds in a trade with Houston that was pilloried at the time, in Cincinnati.10 Over his first five seasons in Cincinnati, Morgan produced 47.8 WAR. That far exceeds the value, 34.7 WAR, the three players sent to Houston produced in their entire careers.
45:00 For whatever worth you give it, Baseball-Reference rates Rose 67th all-time in Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and 41st among everyday players. His fancystats take a hit from him hanging on to chase Ty Cobb. Counting stats, y’all!
Through his first 20 seasons, Rose had oh-beed .378, slugged .422, and had an OPS+ of 122. That puts him in a class with Derek Jeter (career .377 / .440 / 115 OPS+) and Tim Raines (.385 / .425 / 123 OPS+) as a batter, with post-season performance as added value.
47:30 I blanked a bit on where future hall-of-fame manager Terry Francona played during his injury-truncated career. Can you tell?
50:30 Lastly, please read O’Brien’s article in Literary Hub, “Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama.”
I have not read all nine books on his list, but I have read at least one book from each author featured. Nerrrrrrrrd!
Meat on the bone
What did I kick myself for not asking? Mainly, how it will go down when it is obvious governments rushed headlong into legal gambling.
Advertising for gambling needs to be reformed significantly. The marketing needs to be much less shady, and predatory with how it pumps people with false hope about hitting ridiculous parlays.
On the latter point, Driveline Baseball founder Kyle Boddy made a great post recently calling for the need to proscribe “marketing the inevitable statistical outlier wins of the 12-leg garbage parlay or teaser.”
To reiterate what I said after the Toronto Raptors had a player who allegedly does business … I can work within corporatized sports’ moral parameters; they need to come up with some quickly!
Previously on SportsLit
Howard Bryant was on in 2022 to discuss his biography of Rickey Henderson.
Another third rail scandal for MLB was its permissiveness during the Steroid Era in the 1990s and early aughts. We touched on that by connecting with Dan Good in ’22 to discuss his biography of the late Ken Caminiti, the first noteworthy player who admitted to doping.
Thank you for listening, and thank you for reading.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
March 5-April 14, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
My ’Stack, my choice to abbrev with the vowels in the city’s name.
Keith O’Brien, Charlie Hustle, pg. 373. The author describes a bit of the Streisand effect on the part of Rose. In 2015, John Dowd, who was MLB’s legal eagle in the late-1980s investigation of Rose, “made allegations on a radio show that Rose had committed statutory rape in the 1970s by having sex with underage girls.” Rose might have wanted to let that slide since discovery is fun for no one.
Instead, Rose sued for defamation. Court filings, reviewed by O’Brien, establish that Rose initiated a sexual relationship with a minor child “before her sixteenth birthday” while believing she was 16, which is Ohio’s age of consent. They saw each other for “several years.” The ickiness factor is high there. However, Dowd did commit a prosecutorial no-no by casting aspersions without receipts. It is even murkier since the court action was between two men and not the woman, whose identity is rightly shielded.
I don’t know how to get out of this footnote. Our shortcomings in supporting survivors of grooming, gendered violence, and sexual assault and abuse will not be remedied by whose ball-playing is, or is not, immortalized in bronze in a museum in upstate New York.
Charlie Hustle, pg. 251. If you read the book, track how Rose associates Paul Janszen, Tommy Gioiosa, and Ron Peters variously handled the heat, and how life and the criminal justice system treated them. The truth sets one free.
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
I had to look it up. The 1975 Reds were .500 (12-12) through about four weeks of play. Rose moved to third base on the first Sunday in May. From that point, counting playoffs and the World Series, the Reds played .669 ball through the end of the ’76 World Series. That is a 108-win pace, for two years.
It is worth pointing out The NFL Today, to appease its National Football League masters, had to ‘write around’ the gambling implications. That is covered in the ESPN 30-for-30 The Legend of Jimmy the Greek (2009, directed by Fritz Mitchell).
Spaceman gonna Spaceman. Lee fed the baseball men a puff-pass-plausible denial that he did not smoke cannabis, but rather sprinkled it into his breakfast pancakes to offset the carbon emissions he inhaled while jogging to the ballpark.
Late Night With David Letterman had a “Top Ten Pete Rose Prison Activities” bit. Ones I remember include “practicing his famous headfirst slide to burrow his way to freedom” and “getting into an argument during a softball game, getting kicked out of prison.”
That is about $31,350 in today’s currency. The first overall choice in the 2023 MLB draft, pitcher Paul Skenes, received a $9.2-million bonus from the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Seamheads have discussed that trade extensively. Reds general manager Bob Howsam included his club’s incumbent right-side infielders, Tommy Helms and Lee May, in the package that brought Morgan in return. He was pilloried for dealing away a middle-of-the-order masher with Triple Crown stats of .278 batting average, 39 home runs, and 98 RBI. One headline in Cincinnati read, “Trade Howsam For A Trained Seal.”
But Baseball-Reference.com says May’s coup de circuit-concentrated contributions amount to 5.5 WAR. In the same season, in the same division, Morgan was a 5.7 WAR player by being sturdy and reliable at second base, oh-being .351, bashing out 50-plus extra-base hits, and going 40-of-48 on stolen-base tries.