Baseball All by Itself is Interesting Enough For Most of Us. Apparently It Wasn’t For Pete Rose.

Anyone who has ever played almost anything knows the phrase “Let’s make it interesting.”

You’re dealing cards, or shooting baskets, or playing video games, and someone says “Let’s make it interesting,” which means make it for money.

True, it’s often not really about the money at all. It’s about the adrenalin rush of pursuing a win, and while that remains puzzling to those of us who think the game itself is enough, in most cases it’s a fairly benign add-on.

“Most cases” did not, however, include the case of Pete Rose. Rose, who died last Monday at the age of 83 and was so addicted to “making it interesting” that in the end he spiked what should have been one of the greatest baseball legacies of all time.

Short version of the story: Over 24 seasons as a Major League baseball player, Rose had 4,256 hits, more than anyone else ever. He’s Major League Baseball’s all-time leader in games played (3,562) and at-bats (14,053). He made 17 All-Star teams, won three batting championships and batted an impressive if not transcendent .303 for his career.

Equally impressive was the way he played. He approached every play, every at-bat, as if he were a Little Leaguer playing his first game in his first uniform. He was nicknamed Charlie Hustle because on the field, he exuded a sense of exhilaration just for being out there playing this great game.

One of his signature moments came in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between his Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox. If the Reds won the game they would win the Series, but the Red Sox had clawed back late to tie the score and send it into extra innings. When Rose came to bat in the 10th, he turned to Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk and said, “This is some kind of game, isn’t it?”

Rose could be a bit of a hot dog, or showman if you will, but so what? Willie Mays was a showman. In 1999 a panel of experts named Rose to baseball’s all-century team.

If that were the whole Pete Rose story, he’d be a legend of the game, a name routinely cited alongside Ty Cobb, Mays, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Cy Young, Tom Seaver, Sandy Koufax, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and that elite crowd. But like many of those guys, Rose had another side and his was a little darker.

Rose apparently needed to make almost everything interesting, and that included baseball games in which his team was playing. He was a gambling addict who bet openly and constantly on almost anything with two or four feet, and at some point he started betting on baseball.

You can see where this was problematic. Every legitimate sport has an ironclad covenant with its fans that it will be played fairly. It’s what separates MLB, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, the MSL, the WNBA and so on from the WWE, and one of its fundamental tenets is that if anyone involved with a game has a personal betting stake, it jeopardizes every presumption of integrity.

Once it was established beyond doubt that Rose had money riding on Cincinnati Reds’s games, baseball’s then-Commissioner Bart Giamatti banned him from the game for life.

Rose at first denied he bet on games involving his own teams. Many years later he admitted he had, now arguing that it wasn’t a serious mistake and it never compromised his play because he always bet on his team to win. He persuaded neither Giamatti nor his successors to lift the ban, which Rose fought to the end.

Baseball did the right thing, though baseball itself hardly comes off as a champion of gambling integrity these days. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the federal government could not forbid states from legalizing sports betting, several dozen states threw open the betting window, sniffing a healthy cut of this new revenue opportunity.

Baseball did exactly the same. Where for decades the sport had sternly warned that any gambling affiliation was poison, it has now hopped into bed with the exploding new industry of sports betting. One of the giants therein, Fanduel, is now an official partner of Major League Baseball. Fanduel uses the game to promote its product and floods baseball telecasts with high-intensity ads, often featuring attention-getting women and all making the seductive pitch that if you sign up now, your first bets won’t cost you anything. Get the hook in, as they say in fishing, and yes, by the way, you can bet on fishing. No one has ever questioned the integrity of a striped bass.

Baseball clients, for the record, can bet on everything from the outcome of the game to whether the two starting right fielders will combine for more than two runs batted in.

Presumably this “makes it more interesting” to those who can now place a bet with a couple of taps on their phone. In a country where the National Council on Problem Gambling estimates 2.5 million people have a severe gambling addiction and another four to six million have a moderate or mild gambling addiction problem, that’s probably not an entirely good thing.

Like other major sports, baseball does insist it has maintained an impenetrable firewall between civilians who place these bets and the people directly involved with the game: players, managers, coaches, executives, etc. The integrity of the game remains intact, baseball assures us, whether or not Pete Pelouski from Pocatello puts down $50 on Elly De La Cruz getting a hit before the fifth inning tonight.

Presumably Pete Rose shook his head as baseball got cozier and cozier with the betting biz. While it didn’t strengthen his argument, you see his point.

Rose, it has been noted, hustled as hard off the field as he did on the field. He could be a bit of a jerk and he went after a buck the way he went after hanging curveballs. Nor was he alone among elite athletes in his compulsion to make everything “more interesting.” Michael Jordan routinely bet $1,000 a hole on golf and his pal Charles Barkley said Jordan once proposed a $300,000 stake on a single putt.

For Jordan, it should be noted, betting $300,000 is like most of us betting for who buys the next cup of coffee. He can afford it, just as Rose presumably could afford it.

That’s not, of course, the point. The point is that Pete Rose thought he could play by his own rules and got thrown out. As much of a pleasure as it was to watch him on the field, what “made it more interesting” for him off the field in the end only sent him to the bench.