Pete Rose will go to his grave without being a Hall of Famer and so it likely will remain in perpetuity. And that chafed Rose, a phi beta kappa student of baseball history, every day he took a breath until his last one Monday.
Upon his passing at age 83, his legacy belongs to something even more iconic and exclusive than the hallowed museum in Cooperstown. Rose, for both the better and the worse, became a nearly mythic American character, closer to Paul Bunyan than Paul Molitor. In the baseball club of outsized personalities, he resides with the likes of Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Casey Stengel and, yes, Shoeless Joe Jackson, his fellow countryman in exile. The stories about them are forever embedded in the fabric of the game, even of this country. Many of the stories are even true. With Rose, however, you wished some of them were not.
