Opinion: We all made Pete Rose's tragedy possible

In Pete Rose's old neighborhood in west Cincinnati, children were taught to look both ways when crossing US 50, to be home for dinner, to fight for everything in life and never to speak ill of the dead.

Rose — Major League Baseball's all-time leader and most notorious gambler — learned these lessons well. Even after he became a baseball pariah and was banished to the backwaters of his sport for betting on his own team and repeatedly sabotaging himself, Rose rarely spilled dirt on other players and refused to be A. Bartlett Giamatti Commissioner who supervised him in 1989, fell and died of a heart attack eight days later.

“I like Bart Giamatti,” Rose once told me. “He was an honest guy. And a good league president. A good inspector.” Rose wanted me to know that if I wanted him to attack the man who had ended his career, I would be waiting a long time.

With Rose's death this week at the age of 83the moment calls us to break the code of the West Side. We must reckon with his complicated legacy and assess the cost of his mistakes and lies. And we must acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that we — the sports media, the fans, the culture — helped make the Pete Rose tragedy possible.

From the start, Rose was a deeply flawed person, prone to narcissism and excess. As a young man he was never the best player, but urged on by his overbearing father, he acted like he was. He strutted his way through high school, telling his teammates he was great, and in the minor leagues in the early 1960s he infuriated other players by making it seem like he was trying too hard. They didn't like him sprinting to first base on a walk or sliding headfirst into bases. And they really didn't like it when Rose stepped over the line and passed more established players to become the Cincinnati Reds' starting second baseman in 1963.

It could have ended there; Rose wasn't yet a great ballplayer. But he refused to miss his chance. He worked hard, studied pitching and hitting, and somehow he became greater than the sum of his parts. Rose became our most extraordinary athlete – and sportswriters loved him for it.

They were almost all white, male and working class, just like him. Until 1978, female reporters weren't even allowed into major league locker rooms. And in this de facto white boys' club, Rose became a god; he became Charlie Hustle. Sportswriters celebrated him for his courage and determination and happily ignored his obvious flaws: his womanizing, his gambling, and his apparent addiction to both.

The decision was easy for the authors. Rose was charming, loved to talk baseball, and always made fun of his tendency to make a bet. He only later admitted to being addicted to gambling, and only when it benefited him. The first time was in 1990 when he was looking Leniency in his federal tax evasion convictionand he confirmed this again in 2004 when he published a superficial, self-serving treatise on it He hoped he would play baseball again.

In reality, Rose was terribly addicted in ways he would never fully admit. He couldn't stop playing. A lot of people knew it – journalists, Major League Baseball officials, Reds management, his friends, even regular fans – and in the end they all just watched him fall.

There will be much debate in the coming days, weeks, months and perhaps years as to whether Rose should finally be reinstated and placed on the ballot for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Many have long speculated that this would happen after his death, after he was gone. And it's a debate worth having. These conversations reveal a lot about us and raise important questions.

What do we celebrate in a Hall of Fame? Do we honor players for the lives they have led, for the decisions they have made, for the games they have played, for the statistics they have compiled? And when we make moral judgments about players, where do we draw the line? There are already a lot of bad actors entrenched in Cooperstown. Things get messy when we start idolizing someone, perhaps especially young men, who were just good at playing a child's game.

But the more interesting debate centers on our complicity in the creation of Rose. Because while he's gone, we're still here, prone to making the same mistakes, in a world where there are fewer reporters in the locker room, new barriers to media access to players and widespread risks that Rose never faced has been exposed, such as legalized sports gambling on our cell phones.

Today the leagues want us to place our bets – at the next commercial break, as quickly as possible and as often as possible. They make money from licensing deals and benefit from the engagement that sports betting generates. But no one wants to discuss reality. Nobody wants to admit the truth. The next Pete Rose is out there right now, and we're almost certainly rooting for him like we once did for Charlie Hustle.

Keith O'Brien grew up in Cincinnati and is most recently the author of “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose and the Last Glory Days of Baseball.”