Pete Rose died yesterday: he was 83. A documentary on Rose came out this year, but there was nothing new in it except some more interviews with Pete in which he proved, again, that he just didn’t have functioning ethics alarms. Honesty, integrity, responsibility, trustworthiness, fairness, and a lot more on the list of ethical values, baseball’s all time hit leader didn’t understand at all. If you had any doubts that Rose was a sociopath, his own words in that documentary should have banished them.

Rose was the subject of my second ethics essay online, at the old, finally gone forever, Ethics Scoreboard. Here, I wrote about Pete for the first time shortly after launching Ethics Alarms in 2010. The topic: the discovery that Rose had used a corked bat (that’s illegal in baseball) as a player. I wrote in part, beginning by dismissing the theory that corked bats don’t actually help batters so using one shouldn’t count as cheating…

Baseball has seen fit to ban corked bats as illegal equipment, and using them surreptitiously, which is the only way they can be used, is cheating whether it actually improves a batter’s performance or not. A card cheat who draws an ace from his shoe and still loses the hand is no more ethical than the cheat who does the same and wins the pot. The argument that ineffective cheating somehow lessens the offense, which I have encountered frequently, is consequentialism at its silliest, in which an act intended to produce an unethical result is considered purified by its incompetence. The act is the same, whether it works or not….The best argument for letting Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame despite gambling on baseball as a manager was that on the field as a player, he played hard, fair, and spectacularly. The corked bat destroys that argument, and reaffirms a principle of human nature and ethics that people like to deny. People who are dishonest and unethical in one aspect of their life are very likely to be dishonest and unethical in the other aspects as well.

My most recent post abut Rose before this one was in 2022, defending him, sort of, on the occasion of Rose being harassed by a reporter and using politically incorrect language to tell the reporter to bugger off. Here’s some of that post…

Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hit leader who received a lifetime (and justified) ban from baseball for betting on games while a manager…is a slimeball; there is no disputing it. He knowingly violated baseball’s most inviolate rule; he lied about it in more than one way; he ended up in jail for defrauding the IRS; he has attempted multiple schemes to cash in on his own misconduct. Rose is the poster boy for the King’s Pass: he assumed that rules and laws didn’t apply to him because he was a Great and Beloved Player. Yes, he was a great, beloved, unique and entertaining player, but Pete Rose wouldn’t know an ethical value if it were nailed to his forehead…Yesterday, Pete Rose was attending a celebration in Philadelphia of the 1980 World-Series-winning Phillies team….A female reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer asked him about an old 1970s accusation by a woman that he had sex with her when she was under 16. Rose, quite reasonably, deflected the question….when another reporter brought up the incident later, [he said], “I’m going to tell you one more time. I’m here for the Philly fans. I’m here for my teammates. I’m here for the Phillies organization. And who cares what happened 50 years ago? You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t be talking about it, because you weren’t born.”…For some reason, this incident among all of Pete’s slimefests was focused upon by reporters as making “Charlie Hustle” unworthy of appearing on the field with the rest of his 1980 team mates. #MeToo, I guess. The reason Pete should not have been on that field is that he was banned from baseball, but if the Phillies invited him and he came, he should have been allowed to enjoy the day without having his metaphorical dirty sweat socks rubbed in his face.

Now his non-answers are being criticized. How dare he call a woman “babe” in this enlightened day and age? Pete is now 81, and has proven beyond all doubt that he has a flat learning curve. Pete Rose doesn’t mean anything when he calls a woman “babe,” and he isn’t hurting anyone either. If ever the Julie Principle applied, this is it.

As for his second response to a reporter trying to embarrass him: “Who cares what happened 50 years ago?” is ethically obtuse, but Rose is ethically obtuse and everybody knows it. He’s also not very smart: “you shouldn’t be talking about it, because you weren’t born” is typical PeteThink—dumb. What, the man is supposed to be smarter in his eighties? Getting Pete Rose to say something impolitic, offensive or politically incorrect is hardly worthy of a Pulitzer: in another interview yesterday, Rose used the terms “cock high” and “no shit” on live television. It’s silly to mock him with the “Anchorman” catch phrase “Stay classy,” because Rose isn’t classy, has never pretended to be classy, and couldn’t be classy if he tried. He’s a creep. The fact that he’s a creep isn’t news, and complaining that he’s a creep at this point approaches elder abuse.

Even creeps deserve to be treated decently, though they treat others badly as a lifetime pattern.

In between 2010 and 2022, there about 20 more posts either about Rose or that reference Rose, never in a good way. He stands as a towering example of what can happen to a successful and talented individual who is ethically clueless. Rose was basically a child; this is what made him such an appealing player on the field, and it was also his fatal flaw.

My favorite Rose story? The epic 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and Rose’s Reds featured what may be the best World Series game ever, the legendary Game 6 which ended when Carlton Fisk hit a home run off Fenway Park’s left field foul pole, now called the Fisk Pole. The game had so many clutch hits, great plays and memorable moments that no writer has done it justice; I was there, and I’ve never seen a better one. Fisk relates that in the Reds at bat in extra innings before the Sox catcher hit his homer, Rose game up to bat, turned to Fisk with a big smile on his face, and said excitedly, “Is this a great game or what?”

Pete Rose’s life has to be rated a tragedy, though one entirely of his own making. Yet no player entertained so many people so well for so long. Unfortunately, the better one got to know Pete, the less you liked him.