Pete Rose Dies at 83; All-Time MLB Hit Leader Won 3 World Series with Reds, Phillies

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Pete Rose died Monday at 83 years old.

According to TMZ Sports, the Major League Baseball hit king died in his Las Vegas home. Rose’s agent, Ryan Fiterman, confirmed as much and said, “The family is asking for privacy at this time.”

Rose played in MLB for 24 seasons for the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos from 1963 to 1986. He also managed the Reds for six seasons from 1984 to 1989.

The two teams which he is most closely associated with reacted to Monday’s news:

He leaves behind a complicated baseball legacy as one of the best players in the history of the sport.

Rose’s playing resume included three World Series titles, a World Series MVP, a National League MVP, an NL Rookie of the Year, three batting titles, a Silver Slugger and a head-turning 17 All-Star selections.

Nobody in MLB history tallied more hits (4,256), games played (3,562) or at-bats (14,053), and he finished his career with a .303/.375/.409 slash line, 160 home runs and 1,314 RBI. The Reds’ all-time leaderboard is littered with his name atop a number of different statistical categories, and he has a statue outside of the team’s Great American Ball Park.

He was one of the faces of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine era as the team dominated throughout the 1970s.

That career should have made him a lock for the Hall of Fame and someone baseball fans would always look back fondly on, but he was banned from the sport in 1989.

The banning was the result of an agreement between Rose and then-MLB commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. Rose was banned, and, in return, the league did not officially announce whether he bet on baseball.

Special Counsel John Dowd investigated the situation prior to the agreement, and the ensuing Dowd Report concluded the evidence suggested Rose bet on baseball games, including Reds games when he was their player-manager and manager.

He has never been reinstated by commissioners who followed Giamatti and has not been elected to the Hall of Fame.

“I’ve been suspended over 30 years,” Rose told Christian Red of Forbes in 2023. “That’s a long time to be suspended for betting on your own team to win. And I was wrong. But that mistake was made. Time usually heals everything. It seems like it does in baseball, except when you talk about the Pete Rose case.”

While Rose is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, he was inducted into the Reds’ Hall of Fame in 2016 during a ceremony at Great American Ball Park.

“This is the biggest thing to ever happen to me in baseball,” he said at the time.

The story of Major League Baseball and the Reds organization in particular cannot be told without extensively mentioning Rose. He was unstoppable as a hitter, a three-time champion, a franchise icon and a controversial figure who helped define an entire era for both a city and a sport.