Pete Rose's stunning numbers are overshadowed by his denials

You immediately noticed how charming and convincing he could be. Pete Rose held out his hand as soon as I knocked on the door of room 1154 at the Essex House, a bright smile on his face, dressed in a red sweater and a cropped haircut that looked straight out of his 1965 baseball card.

“Mike, I really enjoyed the column you wrote yesterday about the Knicks,” he said by way of introduction, and after a lifetime of prodding (and later roasting) by the press, this was a man who Herz knew exactly the quickest route to a columnist. “Do you think there is a successor to Don Chaney?”

Of course, we weren't in that suite looking out over Central Park South talking about Herb Williams, Lenny Wilkens or the Knicks. Rose had a new book out and was in the square. “My Prison Without Bars” quickly disappeared from the shelves of the city's bookstores. In it he finally ended a lie that had reached its 15th year that afternoon at Essex House.

Somehow.

“You have to live with the cards you're dealt,” Rose said, an interesting metaphor considering that the barless prison he was referring to was the result of a gambling addiction that had been everything to him until about 15 minutes earlier had taken: his own reputation, his place in the game and a place in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

“This book didn’t come out to convince (then-commissioner) Bud Selig to reinstate me.”

Of course that was also a lie. The last 35 years of Rose's life have been an endless barrage of taunts and taunts, often incomplete concessions. For thirty-five years, Rose held a moistened finger in the air, trying to gauge the winds of public opinion. That sad journey ended on Monday when he died at the age of 83.

The numbers he left behind take your breath away when you study them: 4,256 hits, more than anyone else who has ever played the game, 67 more than Ty Cobb, the man Rose relentlessly pursued until he killed him on a magical night in Cincinnati, his hometown. on September 11, 1985. This moment may be one of the few unforgettable snapshots in baseball history. He started crying and hugged his son Petey. It was beautiful.

But by then he was also the Reds' manager, brought home from exile in Montreal to set the record and perhaps write a few more lines for his Hall of Fame plaque as captain. Except what we know – what the damning Dowd report revealed in painstaking detail – is that he had already started gambling. And in games involving his team.

The first play was “deny, deny, deny,” and that only served to strengthen baseball’s resistance, and the sport knew exactly how to hit it where it hurt most. From his freshman year, Rose's name never appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot issued to members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who had covered the sport for ten years.

For years, friends, family and complete strangers have asked, “Why didn’t you vote for Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame?”

The answer all these times: I never had the chance. Baseball has never allowed us a voice.

In 2004, Rose took the opposite approach. He admitted what he had done.

“I’m not trying to justify what I did because I was wrong,” Rose said at Essex House that day. “I wish I had paid more attention to Paul Hornung and Alex Karras (both of whom were suspended by the NFL for the 1963 season for admitting to gambling). Maybe that was the problem, that they only got a one-year ban.”

Over the years, baseball never faltered, even as the sport jumped with both feet into competition from every casino imaginable, without realizing how hypocritical that seemed. Rose never stopped pitching, showing up in Cooperstown every summer to sign memorabilia the week of the Hall of Fame induction – a ghostly, terrible fate.

Still, you always had the feeling that Rose was never ready to come clean. However, he could be terribly persuasive, always supple. As we shook hands goodbye on Central Park South that afternoon 20 years ago, he asked me, “Let me ask you something, Mike. If you could vote for me, would you vote for me?”

I asked him, “Let me ask you something, Pete. Did you bet on baseball as a player?”

He laughed. This is what he said:

“I would take that as a yes!”

This is not what he said: “I never bet on baseball as a player.”