The death this week of Pete Rose has rekindled debates about many aspects of his frayed relationship with baseball, the sport at which he excelled and loved to the end.
But his own bullheaded flouting of its most foundational rule — do NOT bet on the sport, especially games in which you are involved — led to his permanent banishment from the game in 1989 under conditions to which he agreed. That came after a Major League Baseball investigation determined that he had been wagering on the Cincinnati Reds to win games he was managing, betting with illegal bookies, something he vehemently denied for years before finally coming clean nearly a decade and a half later.