Charlie Hustle's Final Play

By MARGARET CARLSON

When the dust settles on the deal struck between baseball and Pete Rose, it will still be nearly impossible to explain his banishment to the kids who love the game. Rose's bargain was the work of lawyers; its contorted logic was utterly devoid of the simplicity and finality that make the game so refreshing. It was a fine-print compromise that at once allowed Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti to announce that Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on his own team -- and Rose, an hour later in Cincinnati, to say Hey, it ain't so. Worse, although the 14 others expelled from baseball over the years never again set foot on a major league diamond, Rose insisted he would be back, perhaps as early as next year. A blue-collar guy from western Cincinnati who played baseball with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old on the field -- and exhibited the same level of maturity off -- Rose may actually believe it.

Exiting with his chin stuck out was probably the only way Rose could go. He was blessed by the gods not so much with talent as with the insatiable drive to win. A competitor stubborn enough to play long beyond his prime -- and until he could break Ty Cobb's batting record -- a rookie who ran to first base when he was given a walk, a bruiser who plowed so hard into an opposing catcher during an All-Star game that he separated the man's shoulder, Rose was too vain and too arrogant to beg for mercy from a former Ivy League classics scholar like Giamatti.

Revelations that Rose would gamble on any game, in any sport, at any time -- and seven volumes of evidence, including a stack of betting slips in his handwriting -- did not seem to shame him. Little ever has. Not a 1979 paternity suit that he did not contest, the messy unraveling of his marriage in 1978 (which did not interfere with his 44-game hitting streak), or striking an umpire in the chest, for which he received a 30-day suspension in 1988. Criticism in the press about the friends in thick gold chains and diamond pinky rings who placed wagers for a living did not faze him. Even now, Rose gives little outward sign that what happened has engendered self-doubt. The night before Giamatti's announcement, he was hawking autographed baseballs on Cable Value Network at $39.94 a throw and selling uniforms with his old No. 14 on them, the same number he used with his bookie.

Star athletes whose crassness is tolerated when they are winning -- Rose once made a scene in the Stage Deli in Manhattan because there was no sandwich named after him (there is now) -- are often stunned when the indulgence ends. When a reporter at the press conference asked Rose why he was accepting the most severe punishment possible if he had not bet on baseball, Rose was speechless. He turned to his lawyer, Reuven Katz, shiny with sweat beside him, who could only natter on about the fine print of clause F. Katz had fought for several days for language that would allow Rose to stand before the microphones and speak about his banishment as if it were a slump he would soon pull out of.

Rose will almost surely never earn a living in baseball again, but he is likely to continue to make a living off baseball by merchandising his relics. In 1985, the year he broke Cobb's record, he arranged to collect royalties on T shirts, beer mugs, pennants and plastic figurines of himself. On the lucrative baseball-card show circuit, where one show promoter has clocked him signing his short name 600 times an hour, Rose earns as much as $20,000 an appearance. He was broke or unsentimental enough to sell the bat from his record 4,192nd hit. One prominent dealer says the memorabilia market is flooded with Rose keepsakes of dubious authenticity; several collectors, he says, claim to own the hat, spikes and shirt worn during his record-breaking hit.

So far, Rose has resisted the refuge of the Betty Ford defense, so popular among addicted celebrities, that his compulsion to gamble made him do it. But he could not resist dragging his family into his mess. He said he had never looked forward to a birthday as much as his new daughter's first (Aug. 22, 1990), since it would signal his first opportunity to apply for reinstatement to baseball, thus sadly and inadvertently revealing her place in his life relative to the game.

Whether or not Rose is voted into the Hall of Fame when he becomes eligible in 1992, he may have achieved the kind of immortality that goes beyond fading type in the record books. America may celebrate winning, but what really fascinates the country is a fall from greatness. Bill Buckner's fielding career is overshadowed by the memory of an easily hit ball rolling inexplicably, eternally through his legs in the tenth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Rose in his 24 seasons set records for hits (4,256), games played (3,562) and 200-plus-hit seasons (10). He was the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1973, the World Series MVP in 1975. He won the National League batting title three times.

But it is Rose's unfathomable squandering of his own ability, his willingness to surrender his history for the rush of the bet that will make his memory endure beyond any portrait hanging in a gallery in Cooperstown. In the end, it wasn't the courts, or a pointy-headed commissioner out to get him, or his bookie friends squealing on him, but just himself that took baseball from him.