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As part of our continuing 2024 CASEY Award finalists series, New York Times bestselling author ⁠Keith O’Brien⁠⁠⁠, author of⁠ the widely acclaimed ⁠Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball⁠, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

9:32-11:24: “From a process standpoint, what the records really helped me to do was create timestamps on a timeline. When you’re writing a narrative, and that’s what I’m looking to do any time I do a book, I want to write a narrative, a real story with a beginning and an end and a climax, all of that. … So when you’re doing that, timeline is really important to you. And I already had one timeline that was locked solid; I’ve got the baseball season. … Now, with those federal case files, I have a whole raft of different timestamps, so that while Pete Rose is in Los Angeles and the Reds are on a four-game win streak and he’s swaggering into the clubhouse and giving grandiose quotes to reporters about how great the Reds are, at that same moment, the FBI is knocking on the door of his closest associates in Cincinnati. These are dominoes that are falling. And I think what that did for the narrative was is it built an urgency to [it] in the final half of the book. You can feel the walls closing in around Pete Rose.”

14:29-16:38: “Pete Rose gets away with what he gets away with because he is charming. … The reporters –the beat writers in the ‘60s, ’70s and into the ‘80s – they loved him. … And I do think that Pete’s race did matter. I don’t think that a Black player in the1960s, ‘70s and in the early 1980s could have gotten away with the kind of stuff Pete Rose did on and off the field.”  

22:38-22:58: “He suffered from gambling addiction even though he struggled to admit that. And what does an addict do? They can’t stop. And I think that is ultimately what happens to Pete Rose. He cannot stop. And that’s what pushes him over the edge to gamble on his own games.”

24:10-24:45: “We, as baseball fans, know a lot of the key moments in his career – the batting titles in the late 1960s, the All-Star game [in] 1970, the playoff runs of the ‘70s, the Big Red Machine years, the World Series, etc. … What I wanted to do when we were talking about those moments was sorta peel back the layers of those onions and talk about what was going on in his head. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?”

27:58-28:15: “I realized very early on that this truly is a Greek tragedy…and my job from a structure standpoint was just to stay out of the way.”

39:17-42:02: “Could Pete Rose be restored from the ineligible list? And if so, would he then be voted into the Hall of Fame? That’s an interesting question. And something certainly has changed that I think is relevant and that could move the needle with Major League Baseball’s front office, and that is Pete is gone. … If Pete Rose had been restored to the eligible list and voted into the Hall of Fame while he was alive, he would’ve stood up there on a warm weekend day in late July at a time when Major League Baseball’s partnering with legalized gambling apps and he would’ve absolutely rubbed Major League Baseball’s face into all of everything that has happened. … All players should be voted in or not voted in based on what they did on the field; it is the only thing we know for sure. And if what they did off the field is so wrong then I think we should put that on the plaque at Cooperstown, put their mistakes right there next to their accomplishments for all of us to see.”

If you like what you’ve heard, be sure to check out Charlie Hustle.

The previous book special in our CASEY Award series, which featured Eric Vickrey, can be found here.

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.