HBO has announced that it will be premiering a new four-part docuseries regarding the life and career of former Cincinnati Reds All-Star Pete Rose, the league’s all-time hits leader. Titled Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose, the series will air over two days on HBO and be available to stream in full on Max. Rose was banned from MLB in 1989 after an investigation found that he placed bets on his team to win for a three-year period while he was playing and managing the club. The forthcoming media venture was a point of discussion on Thursday’s edition of Boomer & Gio on WFAN with both co-hosts Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti discussing their interest in the project.
Boomer Esiason, who played 10 seasons as quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, knows Rose personally and stated that he would watch the docuseries. Over his time in Cincinnati, he had always thought of Rose as “the local hometown kid” that everyone was proud of for his prowess on the baseball field. Moreover, he also mentioned that it will have to be decided whether or not he will ever be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a topic that has been up for debate for several years.
“It’s kind of interesting now that we have gambling that is a part of sports everyday life, and you would think that maybe some of this stuff would subside, but I don’t think in the inner workings of Major League Baseball in the offices here in New York City that it will ever dissipate,” Esiason said. “It would be done posthumously in the Hall of Fame – that’s what I think will happen if I had to guess.”
Conversely, Giannotti began his response by outlining that there are certain names in sports that when you hear them, he perceives talking about them as things he does not want to do again. Eli Manning and Álex Rodríguez, for example, constitute names in this category as it pertains to their legacies and impact on their respective sports.
“I think that I’ve been scarred by all the times that I had to over the years screen phone calls when hosts wanted to fill time with, ‘Is Pete Rose going to get into the Hall of Fame?,’ or, ‘Should he be in the Hall of Fame?’ that when I hear his name, I’m just like, ‘Aah, I can’t do it. No, I’m not going to watch. I don’t care. I can’t do it.’”
For Esiason, knowing him personally makes the documentary more interesting for him to hear what he has to say. Reflecting back on the incident, he believes that the perfidy displayed by Rose caused him to be banned from the game. If he admitted to betting on baseball from the onset, Esiason conveyed that his punishment probably would have been a suspension and that he would be a member of baseball immortality in Cooperstown, N.Y.
“Yeah, it was years and years and years of that, much like some of these steroid guys that took forever to admit anything,” Giannotti said. “I remember that Jim Gray interview – remember that? Was that on the field? Jim Gray was like, ‘Did you bet on baseball? Did you bet on baseball?,’ and then people were criticizing Jim Gray for doing it in that situation.”
Over the years, many different sports entities have engaged in documentary-style storytelling by creating and disseminating projects that make an impact. During the early stages of the global pandemic, ESPN premiered The Last Dance, a 10-part documentary series on the career of Michael Jordan that received rave reviews. Last summer, Netflix debuted Quarterback, a behind-the-scenes look at the 2022 season with Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota, leading to a sequel, Receiver, that premiered this week.
“Just like all these documentaries – they’re all done well – and I think hopefully this documentary will give you both sides and a better understanding between the disconnect between Major League Baseball’s front office and Pete Rose’s, I guess, being kept out of the Hall of Fame,” Esiason said.
