Pete Rose can't seem to help himself

As the years go by, I soften and start to believe Pete Rose deserves to be in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame. And then he opens his mouth.

No, Pete, don’t do it, just smile, sign the cards and take home your loot. If someone asks you a nonbaseball question, just stammer something about not having lived a perfect life and express regrets. Try apologizing, even if you don’t understand what you’re apologizing for.

But something always trips him up. As the Philadelphia Phillies were celebrating their 1980 World Series championship team last weekend, he was asked by a young female reporter about accusations of statutory rape in the 1970s, he blew her off, saying “That was 55 years ago, babe.”

Sigh. Would it have been asking too much just to leave off the “babe?” Dismissing it as being irrelevant for happening a long time ago doesn’t necessarily get you off the hook, but it doesn’t create any headlines, either. It isn’t a red cape waved in front of a society that is still making up its mind about what your legacy will be.

But then, that wouldn’t have been the Rose way, because it would have demonstrated a sense of self-awareness that has been notably absent in the rest of his 81 years. In a meaningless All-Star Game, Rose bowled over Ray Fosse in a close play at home plate, effectively ending the catcher’s career. Yet when thrown a tough pitch that ended his own 44-game hit streak, second to Joe DiMaggio, Rose complained that the pitcher had treated the at-bat “like it was the seventh game of the World Series.”

To this day, it is doubtful that Rose would be capable of fathoming the contradiction.

Those under the age of 60 are unlikely to remember much of Rose’s career, or at least his glory days with the Big Red Machine in Cincinnati.

When Rose cracked the lineup, it was not to the applause of his fellow sporting professionals. On drawing a walk, he would throw down his bat and sprint to first base. “Why?” asked Miami Dolphins running back Jim Kiick. “It’ll wait.”

After Whitey Ford watched Pete climb an outfield wall to reach for a home run that was a hundred feet over his head, the great Yankees pitcher gave him the derisive nickname, Charlie Hustle. Possibly not knowing he was being mocked, Rose embraced the moniker as a badge of honor.

In looks and disposition, he mirrored another Midwestern athlete, James Scott Connors, the bad boy of tennis, who bent the game to his will, dominating on the basis of guts above pure, fluid talent.

Like Jimmy Connors, Rose was a showman whose one-step-ahead-of-the-law persona played in the 1970s, but would have been strained, to say the least, by today’s standards, which have been simultaneously elevated and lowered by the daily gutting and fileting of social media’s Greek chorus.

Based on what we now know of his personal behavior, yesterday’s Pete Rose might be today’s Deshaun Watson or Trevor Bauer, pushed to the edge of sport by conduct that used to fall into the category of boys being boys.

Despite his myriad other accomplishments and foibles, Pete Rose is known for two things: having more hits than anyone else in the game, and betting on baseball. The former made him a sure-fire, first-ballot Hall of Famer. The latter checkmated the former.

Rose steadfastly denied betting on baseball through the 20th century, despite the Dowd Report, which left no doubt that he did. When he finally fessed up, it was in typically Rosian fashion. It was not framed as, “I bet on baseball, I’m sorry.” No, he revealed it in a book, and his confession was largely seen as a way of boosting sales.

Leave it to Pete to find a way to short-circuit his own redemption tour. Once again, those of us looking for an excuse to forgive and forget were reminded of whom we were dealing with.

Phillies color analyst John Kruk of Keyser, W.Va., was himself an All-Star and a superb Major League hitter and he is every bit as self-deprecating and self-aware as Rose is self-aggrandising and clueless.

Over the weekend, as Kruk was talking on air with the 1980s stars he dropped the line, “Baseball was all we knew; we couldn’t have done anything else.” That’s true of many people in many walks of life who are supremely talented in one particular discipline, to the detriment of every other pursuit or social skill in their tightly confined worlds.

Pete Rose was a great hitter, but there’s more to life than just baseball. More’s the pity, babe.

 Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Views of Pete Rose might soften until he opens his mouth