Pete Roses breathtaking numbers overshadowed by his countless denials

You learned right away just how charming he could be, how persuasive.Pete Rose extended his hand as soon as I knocked on the door of Room 1154 at the Essex House, a bright smile on his face, bedecked in a red sweater and a close-cropped haircut that looked straight from his 1965 baseball card. “Mike, I loved the column you did on the Knicks yesterday,” was what he led with, and after a lifetime of being toasted (and later roasted) in the press, this was a man who knew well the fastest way to a columnist’s heart.

“You think they have a successor lined up for Don Chaney?” Of course, we weren’t inside this suite looking out on 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 pitch.

“My Prison Without Bars” was disappearing rapidly from the shelves of the city’s book stores.In it, he finally ended a lie that by that afternoon at Essex House had reached its 15th year. Sort of. “You have to live with the cards that are dealt to you,” Rose said, an interesting metaphor given that the barless prison to which he referred was a result of a gambling addiction that until about 15 minutes earlier had deprived him of everything: his reputation, his place inside the game, and a place inside the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “This book didn’t come out right now to try to persuade [then commissioner] Bud Selig to reinstate me.” That, too, was a lie, of course.

The final 35 years of Rose’s life were an endless barrage of jabs and jibes, admissions that were often as not incomplete.Thirty-five years Rose held a moistened finger in the air, trying to gauge the winds of public opinion.

That sad journey ended Monday, when he died at 83. The numbers he left behind take your breath away when you study them: 4,256 hits, more than anyone who ever played the game, 67 more than Ty Cobb, the man Rose stalked incessantly until he passed him one magical night in Cincinnati, his hometow...