Pete Rose was everything you could want from a baseball player on the field. He was talented, relentless in his pursuit of winning, and he played as hard as any player to get them. “Charlie Hustle,” as Rose was known in the baseball world, had the ultimate career, winning three World Series titles with the Reds and Phillies, a Rookie of the Year Award, an NL MVP and earning 17 All-Star appearances out of five different positions.

Rose, who died Monday at the age of 83, is best known as baseball’s “Hit King,” who had 4,256 hits over the course of 24 seasons with the Reds, Phillies and Expos.

Off the field, Rose has perhaps the most tarnished and complicated legacy in baseball history.

Infamously, in 1989, the league committee, through a very public MLB investigation, found then-manager Rose guilty of gambling on baseball through illegal bookmakers. Former commissioner Bart Giamatti and Rose signed a formal agreement, banning Rose from baseball for life in exchange for the league not considering the signing as an admission of innocence or guilt.

During his suspension, Rose categorically denied ever betting on baseball. That is, until 2004, when he admitted in an interview that he had indeed bet on baseball as a manager, and a decade later he admitted that he did so as a player as well.

Rose’s ban, which was upheld by every MLB commissioner after Giamatti’s death, also made Rose ineligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

His post-playing career continued to take unfortunate turns when, in 2017, he was accused by a woman of having a sexual relationship with her when she was a minor in 1973. When asked about the allegations upon his return to Philadelphia when his World Series team of 1980 was honored at a ceremony in August 2022, Rose offered this response to a reporter: “That was 55 years ago, honey.”

“Who cares what happened fifty years ago?” he continued. ‘You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t talk about it because you weren’t born. If you don’t know a damn thing about it, don’t talk about it.’

That’s Pete Rose, the legendary player whose transgressions, both verified and alleged, didn’t seem to interest him. Unfortunately, it is human nature to forget much of a person’s life story when he or she dies. And that’s what’s probably going to happen in baseball, probably what you’re going to see in the coming days and weeks.

Yes, Rose is a Hall of Fame talent who undoubtedly deserved to be enshrined as a player in Cooperstown. Yes, it seems hypocritical that sports leagues, including MLB, are doing business with sportsbooks, with kiosks and betting facilities on and around ballparks. And yes, Rose was still wrong when she gambled on baseball.

Not to mention that Rose thought it was a defense against those 1973 charges, instead of talking about his innocence, he publicly leaned on his belief that it was “a long time ago,” a rejection that was grotesque and was discouraging.

This is not Willie Mays, a person who was as legendary off the field as he was on it. This was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, who also happened to have some odious tone-deaf traits. In the days and weeks to come, we’ll see many tributes about Rose as a player and individual stories about him as a person, perhaps even people calling for Rose to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But without telling the whole story of Rose’s legacy, the rest seems moot.