It seems almost quaint – now – that Pete Rose was banned from baseball for betting on his sport.
Today, with a 2018 United States Supreme Court decision affirming states’ rights to legalize betting, fans legally place wagers on the results of any sport of their choosing. Hawkers wander through Major League Baseball parks, offering raffle tickets. Baseball players can even legally bet on other sports, and athletes of other sports can bet on baseball.
But Rose, who died Monday at the age of 83, received a lifetime ban from the sport in 1989 from Commissioner A. Bart Giamatti. The commissioner said the evidence he had showed that Rose had placed bets on the Cincinnati Reds team he managed.
At the time, it was truly shocking. It had been 70 years since baseball’s Black Sox scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the World Series in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate, and it was still a few years before the era when the illegal use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) became more widespread across the sport.
Rose at the time was one of the game’s most recognizable personalities, having risen to become a star on the small-market Reds and then been one of the cogs in the team’s powerful Big Red Machine days of the mid-1970s. Known widely as “Charlie Hustle” for his penchant for sprinting to first base after a walk, he finished his career with the Philadelphia Phillies (where he was on another World Series winner) and then briefly with the Montreal Expos before returning to the Reds as a player-manager.