Does Pete Rose Belong in the Hall of Fame? Well, He Sure Was Famous.
In an era when baseball still ruled American sports, nobody commanded more attention than Charlie Hustle.
Debates over whether Pete Rose deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame have raged pretty much ever since his gambling scandal broke in 1989, resulting in a lifetime ban from the game and permanent ineligibility for the HOF. So when President Trump threw his opinion into the ring — announcing his intention to issue a posthumous pardon to Rose1 — it was just the latest chapter in an argument that hasn’t faded much in nearly four decades, despite Rose’s passing at age 83 last September.
There was, however, further reporting by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. on Saturday, indicating that MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is reviewing a petition (filed by Rose's family) to remove him from the ineligible list, potentially paving the way for posthumous Hall of Fame consideration. This means that the Rose debate may reach a new level of attention — and contention — in the near future.
There are plenty of ways to look at Rose’s HOF case — more ways than almost any other player in history, in fact. Depending on how you view him, Rose was either addicted to winning… or to gambling, compromising the integrity of the game. He had remarkable longevity… or he was a compiler. He was the picture of hustle and competitive fire… or just an asshole. He was the all-time hit king… but was later shown to be overrated by the analytics. He was a beloved teammate… who was also not a very good guy.
With Rose, every pro also comes with a con.
But when I think about controversial Hall of Fame candidates, I am always drawn back to the “Fame” part of the term. The HOF is technically a museum that tells the history of baseball — and you can’t tell that history without famous (even infamous) names like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. Or, yes, Pete Rose. These are guys whose fame reflected back on the sport as they transcended it, for both good and bad.
And it’s hard for an athlete to be more famous than Rose was at his peak. We might have difficulty comprehending it now, but Rose was baseball’s star of stars during the span of his career. He was a fixture on talk shows and commercials; a recognizable celebrity in an era when baseball players could actually be that. In a 1985 ABC News poll that asked U.S. adults who their heroes were, Rose received as many votes as the Pope.
Being the leader of the Big Red Machine, which went to multiple World Series during the 1970s, didn’t hurt — nor did Rose’s chase for Ty Cobb’s iconic all-time record of 4,191 career hits.2 Yet, there was also a grander charisma to Rose, a relentless hunger to be adored — or, at the very least, noticed and remembered. Whether he was charming you or proving you wrong, Rose always had your attention.
Here are just a few ways to illustrate how famous Rose was in his time. Google has a tool that allows you to search for words, phrases or names in a corpus of printed sources by year going back to the year 1500.3 Rose played a long time, but not that long, so we can target our search to compare mentions of him versus other superstars of his era — the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Here’s a plot of “Pete Rose” mentions against those of eight other big-name stars from that same time period:
During the mid-to-late 1970s, Rose was just about on par with what were probably the three biggest stars of the era: Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson and Willie Mays. Aaron had just broken the biggest record in sports (Babe Ruth’s HR mark); Jackson was becoming Mr. October; Mays was, well, Willie Mays. And Rose was squarely in that mix, too. But then, things took off into another stratosphere for Rose as he hunted Cobb’s record, and was later at the center of the gambling bombshell — leading to him being written about more in the ‘80s than any of the others had been at any point in the preceding decades.
We don’t have very many public opinion polls about athlete popularity from that era, aside from the goofy ABC News poll with the Pope and Nancy Reagan that I referenced above. But we can try to reconstruct how contemporary people viewed Rose and various other athletes of his time. To that end, I asked ChatGPT to rank the Top 50 most “famous” baseball players of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s through a combination of six different prompts:
“In your best estimation, rank the 50 most famous MLB players of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s for me.”
“Based purely on ‘Fame’ — the likelihood that a typical American at the time would know who they were — how would you rank MLB players from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s?”
“Based on name recognition among fans, who would be the most well-known MLB players from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s?”
“If a fan or sportswriter at the time were thinking about which MLB players of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s would most likely make the Baseball Hall of Fame, what would their ranking probably be? (Do it if players were purely judged on their careers.)”
“If a random American citizen were asked yes/no if they knew MLB players during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, which players would likely rank highest in terms of the share of people who answered yes?”
“Among MLB players from the from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, give me a ranking of those who would be most likely to appear in media such as talk shows, TV guest star roles, movie roles, the subject of interviews, have magazine articles (i.e., Sports Illustrated) or books written about them, etc.”
If we combine together all of those different rankings using a simple scoring system (50 points for 1st place, 49 for 2nd, and so forth), we can create what I’m calling the FAME index — Famous Athletes in Media, Evaluated by AI:
Some of this should obviously be taken with a grain of salt; as an example, ChatGPT left Frank Robinson off several lists, for whatever reason. But broadly, it illustrates how — no matter which way the question is posed — we can be safe in saying that Rose would have been widely considered one of (if not the) most well-known players in baseball during his era.
And that was an era when baseball mattered a lot more to the cultural zeitgeist than it does now. In 1981, when Gallup asked American adults “What is your favorite sport to watch?”, 17 percent answered baseball — which ranked second behind football, nearly double the share for basketball (the next-highest sport). By contrast, when they asked the same question to the same demographic 36 years later, only 9 percent said baseball, which ranked third behind basketball (which grew to 11 percent):
So Rose’s moment was the golden era of baseball’s grip on American sports culture. As the sport’s visibility has waned, so has the presence of MLB players with Rose’s level of cultural cachet. But that makes his case for the Hall even more interesting: How much does being the defining player of a defining era matter?
Along these lines, we can also see where Rose would rank relative to all of the famous athletes of his era, if we re-do the same exercise from above but extend it beyond just looking at MLB:
Rose was not on the same FAME level as Muhammad Ali, the most famous athlete of the era, nor could he match basketball’s holy trinity of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. According to this cross-sport ranking, he was also behind Hank Aaron and roughly tied with Reggie Jackson within baseball — despite ranking slightly ahead of them in our earlier, baseball-only rating. (ChatGPT not exactly showing great internal consistency here — again, grain of salt!)
If we take the rankings at face value, though, Rose shows up in the same conversation as such big household names as Jack Nicklaus, O.J. Simpson, Joe Namath, Carl Lewis, Wayne Gretzky and John McEnroe, among other icons on the list.
(To contrast again with today, if we did the same exercise for modern MLB stars, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge would likely be the only baseball players to rank anywhere near the same commanding heights of sports culture. It’s a testament to how much more famous other sports’ stars — like LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes and Lionel Messi — have gotten relative to baseball’s biggest names.)
In any event, the main takeaway is that Pete Rose was as famous as just about anyone in that era of sports — and as Michael MacCambridge argues in his book “The Big Time”, the 1970s of Rose’s peak were the moment when sports evolved from a smaller enterprise to the massive entertainment juggernaut that we see today. As the co-face of MLB — at worst — Rose played a major role in that transformation.
He was the bridge between old-school baseball and its modern media-driven incarnation, an athlete obsessed with both winning and his public persona. And like so many icons of that era, Rose’s legacy remains larger-than-life — flawed, polarizing, and undeniably significant.
Obviously, the Hall of Fame is about more than just being famous. It isn’t even solely about hits, wins, or off-field transgressions that allegedly spilled over to the games themselves. There are many different ways to define baseball’s most important figures — and those worthy of the game’s ultimate honor. But if the Hall is meant to tell the sport’s story, it’s hard to imagine being able to talk about one of the game’s greatest eras without Rose as a central character.
Filed under: Baseball, History
Never mind the fact that neither the U.S. President, nor even Major League Baseball itself, really has any authority over the Baseball Hall of Fame, and that any pardon would at most be symbolic.
Which we would later realize was actually 4,189 hits… except MLB still lists 4,191… but that’s all another story for another time.
Think of it like Google Trends, except for book references instead of internet searches.