You immediately learned how charming he could be, how convincing. Pete Rose extended his hand as soon as I knocked on the door of room 1154 of the Essex House, a beaming smile on his face, sporting a red sweater and a cropped haircut that looked straight out of his 1965 baseball card.

“Mike, I loved the column you wrote yesterday at the Knicks,” was what he started with, and after a lifetime of being roasted (and later roasted) in the press, this was a man who knew full well what the quickest way to the top of a columnist was. heart. “Do you think they have a successor for Don Chaney?”

Of course, we weren’t in this suite overlooking Central Park South to talk about Herb Williams, or Lenny Wilkens, or the Knicks. Rose had a new book out and he was on the field. “My Prison Without Bars” quickly disappeared from the shelves of the city’s bookstores. In it he finally put an end to a lie that had reached its 15th year by that afternoon at Essex House.

Sort of.

“You have to live with the cards you’re dealt,” Rose said, an interesting metaphor considering that the bar-less prison he was referring to was the result of a gambling addiction that, until about fifteen minutes earlier, had robbed him of everything: his reputation , his place in the game and a place in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

“This book was not published now to convince (then-commissioner) Bud Selig to reappoint me.”

That was of course also a lie. The last 35 years of Rose’s life were an endless barrage of jokes and swear words, confessions that were often not incomplete. For thirty-five years, Rose held a damp finger in the air, trying to gauge the winds of public opinion. That sad journey ended Monday, when he died at the age of 83.

The numbers he left behind are breathtaking when you study them: 4,256 hits, more than anyone who ever played the game, 67 more than Ty Cobb, the man who chased Rose relentlessly until he passed him one magical night in Cincinnati, his birthplace, on September 11, 1985. That moment should rank among a handful of eternal snapshots in baseball history. He started crying and hugged his son Petey. It was beautiful.

But by then he was also the manager of the Reds, brought home from exile in Montreal to set the record and perhaps write a few more lines for his Hall of Fame plaque as skipper. Except what we know – what the damning Dowd Report revealed in excruciating detail – is that he had already started gambling. And in matches involving his team.

The first play was deny, deny, deny, and all that did was increase the drag of the baseball, and the sport knew very well how to hit it where it hurt most. From his first year of eligibility, Rose’s name never appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot issued to members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who have covered the sport for a decade.

For years, friends, family, and complete strangers have asked, “Why didn’t you vote for Pete Rose for the Hall of Fame?”

The answer, all those times: I never had the chance. Baseball never gave us a voice.

In 2004, Rose went in the opposite direction. He admitted what he did.

“I’m not trying to justify what I did because I was wrong,” Rose said at Essex House that day. “I wish I had paid more attention to Paul Hornung and Alex Karras (both suspended by the NFL for the 1963 season for admitting to gambling). Maybe that was the problem, that they only got a one-year suspension.”

As the years went by, baseball never faltered, even as the sport jumped into bed at every gambling house imaginable, never giving in to how hypocritical that seems. Rose never stopped pitching, appearing every summer in Cooperstown to sign memorabilia the week of the Hall of Fame induction — a haunting, gruesome fate.

Yet there was always the feeling that Rose was never quite willing to open up completely. However, he could be incredibly convincing, always flexible. As we shook hands that afternoon twenty years ago in Central Park South, he asked me, “Let me ask you something, Mike. If you could vote for me, would you vote for me?”

I asked him, ‘Let me ask you something, Pete. Did you bet on baseball as a player?’

He laughed. This is what he said:

“I’ll take that as a yes!”

Here’s what he didn’t say: “I never bet on baseball as a player.”