In a surprising move earlier today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released approximately 130 pages of documents relating to Pete Rose, Cincinnati Reds legend and all-time MLB career hits leader.
Late last year, on December 17 2024, Rose’s lifetime ban Baseball Hall of Fame – received for betting on baseball, and which he had agreed to – was finally overturned. Rose had, however, died almost three months beforehand. Never in his lifetime was he able to enter the Hall of Fame, which his legendary playing career would otherwise automatically have merited.
While the discussion as to whether that ban was right or wrong to impose has been going on for nearly four decades, today’s document cache will re-stir a pot that has already been stirred twice more recently, both by Rose’s death and the overturning of the ban. The cache did not reveal a huge amount that was not already known – the facts that Rose bet on baseball, and kept the company of deviants, have long been documented. But they do serve to put some details into the mix, and add some evidence to the suppositions.
Focus On Rose’s Bookmaker
In ESPN’s report on the files release, they acknowledge that nowhere in the cache is Rose specifically said to have ever bet on baseball – the thing that led to his banning (and that, after many years of indecisive answers, he would finally admit to back in 2004). They also, however, did not need to.
Instead, the newly released materials focus on a mid-1980s FBI investigation into Rose’s primary bookmaker, Ronald Peters, and specifically with regards to Peters’ involvement in narcotics and bookmaking operations. Many of these details had already previously surfaced in the Dowd Report (the pivotal 1989 Major League Baseball investigation that ultimately led to Rose’s ban from the sport, and his agreement to the Hall of Fame prohibition).
Among the most notable revelations in the cache were a 1987 memo submitted to the FBI in which Rose was said to have owed Peters $90,000 in gambling losses. Additionally, law enforcement officers in Franklin, Ohio, were said to have observed Rose frequently entering Peters’ establishment “through its private entrance”, while Rose was further described as a “silent partner in a bar that Peters operated in Cincinnati before [Peters] moved to Franklin”. That is to say, the story told is one of Rose and Peters being in cahoots.
Rose’s associations with less-than-scrupulous characters throughout his baseball career, and his sly nature, had previously been explored in (amongst many other places) a 2011 Vanity Fair article. In that piece, Peters’s name was mentioned, as he had been elsewhere in stories about Rose. Today’s document dump therefore did not introduce Peters as a new character in the story of Pete Rose. But it did add first-hand evidence to the stories, with the weight of the FBI’s name attached to them.
The Clouds That Have Not Parted
In 2007, Rose would eventually admit that he had not only bet on the outcome of Reds games when he was managing them, but that he did so “every night”. Despite more than a decade of denying the charges even in light of the volumes of evidence to the contrary, even the notoriously stubborn Rose had to eventually admit defeat, and walk back his defiance.
This overdue contrition, however, did not add much nuance to his legacy. The public nature of the FBI’s cache release will only bring new scrutiny to one of baseball’s most provocative figures, scrutiny that will now continue even in death.
Pete Rose has been dead for nearly a year, but the shadow he cast over baseball refuses to fade. Even if this document dump does not contain a smoking gun on the issue of baseball wagers, they do serve to once again remind us of just how hollow those denials always were. The gun has been smoking for too long.
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