Charlie Hustle has died

My friend Mitch Warner had a vacant lot behind his house that, in summer, we would mow into the shape of a baseball diamond. We would then play Home Run Derby and “games” of baseball complete with lots of “ghosties” acting as base runners. Anyone of a certain age probably did the same things. It would always evolve, or devolve, into the same thing, though: “Do a Petey!” one of us would say. A “Petey” was a Pete Rose slide, in which one of us would barrel into a base, diving headfirst, in the same fashion as the great Cincinnati Red. We did Peteys on the grass, in the mud, on our living room carpet, and on Slip ’N Slides when it got really hot.

Near the end of Rose’s career, our moms took us to Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati to see him play in person, which was a stellar mom move. We loved him, I think, because he seemed to love baseball just like we did. He didn’t have a bodybuilder’s physique. Basically, he looked like us, but a little older, right down to the ridiculous, dorky bowl haircuts we wore because it was the 1980s. Mitch had a Pete Rose poster in his room.

Of course, the legacy of major league baseball’s all-time hits leader (4,256) became complicated later on, due to his gambling controversies (though he insisted he never bet against his own team) and his exile both from baseball and later the Hall of Fame. But we didn’t care, because the die was cast: We were Pete Rose guys. And now that I’m middle-aged, I enjoyed seeing the occasional Pete Rose television appearance—including at the World Series a few years ago where his bad haircut (from which he mystifyingly never deviated) was so obviously dyed as to look like someone had dipped him into a vat of black shoe polish. It was ridiculous, but, again, who cares, because Pete Rose was Pete Rose and played major league baseball while I grade papers for a living. Even if he was semi-sadly signing autographs at a Vegas casino, he was still winning.

But on Monday, word came that Pete Rose, aka “Charlie Hustle,” aka the “Hit King,” had died at age 83.

Of course, the moral high ground is distressingly hard to find in 2024. Will Leitch would say that I like Pete Rose just because I’m middle-aged and white and privileged and conservative and am thereby basically the root of all evil. Donald Trump and Pete Rose were, apparently, fond of each other. Of course, as I type this, a major evangelical pastor is tweeting his devotion to Kamala Harris (and then later wimpily un-tweeting it as, apparently, it was “misinterpreted” as … exactly what it was). The “cozying-up-to-celebrities” street runs both ways, and both ways are complicated and usually bad. If we love the approval of the world, the world will sadly usually comply.

Much to his (probable) chagrin, Pete Rose lived long enough to see the thing for which he was demonized (gambling) become completely normalized. He lived long enough to live in a world where every other ad on sports television is for FanDuel, DraftKings, or BetMGM. Every major professional sports league (college included, because, come on) is now in fiscal bed with the gambling industry. The vice for which Rose was blackballed from his sport can now live on everyone’s smartphone, and college kids everywhere are gambling during freshman seminar just to pass the time. We’re raising a nation of gambling addicts. This is, of course, sad, and must have been a little confusing for Charlie Hustle.

In many ways, the Hit King represented everything good about sports. He loved his craft, he played hard, he always played (load management … ha!), and he always looked like he cared, unlike most NBA players during most of the regular season, which, let’s face it, now exists only for degenerate gamblers and Detroit Pistons fans.

But in other ways, the Hit King is a sad reminder of the bankruptcy in placing our hopes in the things of this world. Charlie Hustle (ostensibly) had money, fame, success, access to celebrities, and the kind of sports profile for which childhood Mitch and I would have done anything to have had. But the good thing is, we grew up. We stopped thinking about baseball and Charlie Hustle. We started thinking about the local church, our families, and the Bible. We started thinking of our jobs and careers. We (slowly) put off the things of childhood and put on the things of adulthood. We in no way did this perfectly, but nonetheless, we did it.

I’ll miss Pete Rose, but only because he reminds me of doing “Peteys” in the vacant lot with my best friend.