CLEVELAND, Ohio – This is it for the Hit King. He's gone down swinging for the last time.
Pete Rose, 74, will almost assuredly go to his grave without being reinstated into the game he played so hard and discarded with such casual arrogance.
Commissioner Rob Manfred on Monday denied Rose's latest bid for reinstatement. Rose, the game's all-time leader in hits, has been on baseball's permanently ineligible list since 1989 for gambling as a member of the Cincinnati Reds.
In reviewing the original case against Rose, Manfred found evidence that he gambled on games in 1986, and perhaps in 1985, when he was a player-manager for the Reds.