Pete Rose never could get out of his ego’s way. It grew so big that it subsumed him whole, deluded him into thinking he could get away with baseball’s greatest sin by lying and lying some more and lying again after that, a quarter century of lies stacked on top of one another like Lego blocks. At some point, the tower grows big enough that the inevitability of its toppling makes the fall all the more spectacular.
Secrets live long lives in baseball, tucked into the nooks and crannies of a game that never forgets. Most of them expose themselves eventually, and it was just a matter of time until the world learned what it always figured: Rose bet on baseball as a player.