Pete, we hardly knew ye.

Pete Rose was far from perfect in the game of life, but about as close as it gets to perfection in the game of baseball.

Charlie Hustle. The graininess of this photo is entirely emblematic of the grit with which Rose played baseball.

Even though it’s now been a few days, I still can’t believe that Pete Rose is gone. If there ever existed someone in sports who was actually bigger than life, it was Peter Edward Rose: Charlie Hustle, the all-time hit leader in baseball, a 17-time All-Star (5 different positions), three-time World Series champ, 1963 MLB Rookie of the Year, 3 NL batting titles (1968, ‘69, ‘73), 1973 NL MVP, 1975 World Series MVP, and a 1978 44-game hitting streak. Tom Brady would have to have been a two-way player in the NFL to be in the same realm.

That was Pete. And, since 1989, a lifetime ban from baseball as well. Worse, Rose entering the Baseball Hall of Fame anytime soon seems unlikely.

I grew up in Kentucky in the 1960’s and ‘70’s as a fan of the Big Red Machine. Some of my best memories of those days were playing sandlot baseball in the summer, arguing over who was going to be Pete, Johnny Bench, or Joe Morgan. After baseball, we’d ride our banana seat bicycles down to the corner market for some Ale-8-1 (a local soda) and a new pack of gum and baseball cards. It was always a good day when you got a Pete Rose card.

A few years later, during my sophomore year at the University of Kentucky, I sacrificed any chance at a reasonable grade on an Organic Chemistry midterm to attend a game in the 1976 World Series where the Reds put an exclamation point on their dominance of the payoffs (no losses) that year by sweeping the New York Yankees. I flunked the exam the next day, but it was worth it. I’d have made a lousy chemist anyway (physics, it turns out, is much more my bag). I’m forever grateful to the Big Red Machine for helping me find my way.

The Reds fan base is and always has been largely blue collar. Reds Country extends from Cincinnati to the coalfields of Appalachia, the farmlands of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and to several gritty, hardscrabble industrial cities in the midwest. Because of migration patterns out of Appalachia, it’s not uncommon for Reds fans to outnumber fans of many smaller market teams east of the Mississippi, even in that team’s own market. I am but one of tens of thousands of expatriate fans who spent decades listening to Marty Brennaman and Joe “The Old Left-hander” Nuxhall, waiting for the final call: And this one belongs to the Reds!

To me, and I daresay many others of my generation and upbringing, Pete Rose was baseball. His moniker, Charlie Hustle, was well earned. From bowling over catcher Ray Fosse at the plate in the 1970 All-Star game to headfirst slides into second base, Rose was all about hustle and effort; he used to even sprint back to the dugout after striking out. Rose went all-out simply because he loved baseball. For him, there was no other way.

Contrast that with a notable precursor to many modern players, Deion Sanders, a dilettante who, while hitting an amazing .143 with the Yankees during a 1990 game with the Chicago White Sox, sauntered to the plate with a man on third and one out in a potential game-tying situation. Sanders settled into a batting stance only after drawing a dollar sign in the dirt in front of home plate with his bat. Sox Catcher Carlton Fisk was not amused.

Sanders “money” at bat produced a popup that eventually settled into Sox shortstop Ozzie Guillen’s glove for the out. Sanders took a couple of lazy steps down the line toward first base, pausing briefly to study the flight of the ball before peeling off the line and shuffling his feet as he made for the Yankees dugout. Carlton Fisk, himself a generational talent of the Rose era, took offense, leading to a dustup. Lazy is not, at least according to the likes of Fisk and Rose, the way that you play baseball.

IMO, it’s not the way that you do anything.

I feel your look. I did, in fact, walk to and from school, uphill both ways, through six feet of snow—with the horse on my back.

Alright, alright. Geeze. To be clear, I think that Deion Sanders was a wonderful NFL defensive back. He may yet be a wonderful college football coach. I’ll give him all of that. I’m just not down with anyone who makes a career out of preening, posing, and bragging about themselves and their accomplishments in the third person. I prefer those who let their skill and dedication do most of their talking for them. I’m old-school like that.

But that was then; this is now. In the current era of sabermetric-obsessed management and rich, blinged-up, tatted, limited-use prima-donna ball players, some coaches actually encourage batters not to run out hit balls that are likely to result in an out at first. The chances of pulling a muscle (especially running 90 feet with an extra 10 lbs in jewelry), it is thought, outweigh the chances of a muffed throw or catch. It’s sad, but it’s indubitably the modern way.

The closest thing these days to a dominant Swiss Army knife like Rose (or more generally, Bo Jackson) is Shohei Ohtani. I cheer every time he takes the field.

Tilting at windmills is supposed to be a part of sport (consider the Detroit Tigers and their unlikely path into this season’s MLB playoffs). But these days, a lot of people consider that type of thinking to be silly. The statistics don’t lie. I don’t know about that. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But if this trend continues, I can see a future where, in order to prevent anyone from ever getting hurt, we just use analytics to determine who wins the World Series each season without actually playing any games. Fantasy nerds would sure dig that.

Pete Rose was the antithesis of all that. He was all about baseball and competition. In the end, that’s what did him in. I think that Pete lived for the action. And when it wasn’t baseball anymore, it had to be something else. Gambling filled that void.

Like a lot of Reds fans, I distrusted MLB executives when they went after Rose for allegedly gambling on baseball. Pete was our guy, a screw you to the suits in the executive boxes who thought that they were better than all of us in the bleacher seats. We all knew that Pete was no saint but doubted that he was guilty of everything that was being thrown at him from the MLB Commissioner’s office. But when Pete went to jail for tax evasion in the mid-90’s, it was a Say it ain’t so, Joe moment. And when Rose finally admitted in 2004 that he had gambled on baseball while managing the Reds in the 80’s, it was a dagger in the heart.

I’ve forgiven Pete Rose, though I know that many, including some of his former colleagues, have not. It was beyond irony that I received the news of his passing from a TV sports network, where the anchors smugly discussed Rose and his subsequent ban from baseball while an ad for the network’s gambling app scrolled across the chyron at the base of the screen. It must have been tough on Rose to see all of the major sports leagues in this country embrace gambling while he was banned for it.

Nonetheless, I understand Rose’s lifetime ban from baseball and not being admitted to the Hall of Fame. I’m not sure if either is right or just, but I understand the difficulty. Shoeless Joe Jackson isn’t in the HOF either, and his case is better than Pete’s. Like Rose himself, the situation surrounding his lifetime ban from baseball and not being considered for the Hall of Fame is complex. I’m not nearly wise enough to sort it out. If you are, I’m happy to listen.

Jack Kerouac once wrote about youth being filled with crazy days and night skies full of stars. As one grows older, those stars dim and disappear one by one until you are left alone in the gathering oblivion. That’s what the end looks like. I thought that was just about the most poetic way of describing the process of growing old I’d ever read when I encountered it in my 20s. Now that my own shadows are growing long, I feel the weight of it beyond the poetry.

Pete was more than just an ordinary star in the brightness of a night sky; he was a supernova. RIP Pete.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.