Pete Rose and All Those Wins.

They're legit. But let's do the context thing

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In proclaiming over the weekend that he will sign “a complete pardon” of Pete Rose in the coming weeks (he didn’t say for what), President Donald Trump noted that Rose “only bet on his team winning,” a solid indicator that the president does not understand how sports gambling works.

But when Trump also pointed out that Rose “won more games than anyone in sports history,” he was probably close to right. And that is a conversation we can get into.

Insofar as Major League Baseball is concerned, it’s true about Rose. By all available accounts, no MLB player has been involved in more victorious games than the 1,972 wins in which Pete either started or appeared.

Of course, Rose also was part of 1,583 losses and seven ties (they were a thing back in the day). Pete won a lot and lost a lot, and we’re not even talking about his betting record.

Why? Well, he played in more MLB games than anyone ever, period, all the old-timers included.

The list of position players in the all-time Top 5 for wins includes Rose, Hank Aaron and Carl Yastrzemski. All three also appear on the list of Top 5 for losses.

You play forever, and all your numbers are going to get big. Some you will be happy to talk about, and some you’d just as soon skip. But they all accrue.

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That’s no knock on Rose’s playing career. His 4,256 career hits comprise one of those records that looks unbeatable from here, and he also played injury-free — or, more accurately, played through lesser injuries — for nearly the first two decades of his 24-year career.

So — stay in the lineup and play until you are 45 years old, and a lot will happen. Some of the cumulative numbers begin to look imposing.

Rose’s career batting average of .303 is strong, but among MLB players who logged at least 3,000 at-bats, he actually ranks just 178th, with plenty of contemporaries ahead of him. Still, none of those guys played as long as Pete did, so they didn’t wind up with counting stats like his.

Rose, who died last year, stands as baseball’s all-time leader in four categories: games played, plate appearances, at-bats, and hits. He was the skilled grinder who refused to quit playing, and it is a fitting testament to his durability that the categories for which he is remembered are all longevity-related.

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Baseball’s all-time leader in wins by a pitcher has an award named after him. But while Cy Young’s 511 victories are the record, so are his 315 losses.

In what other categories does Cy Young lead the world? Starts. Complete games. Batters faced. Innings pitched. Hits allowed. Earned runs allowed.

Those categories don’t come up much in baseball dinner conversation, but you can’t usually have one without the other. Cy Young pitched all the time, back when pitchers really did pitch all the time; he had 11 seasons in which he was the starting pitcher at least 40 times. He was going to pile up a lot of everything.

By the way: Number three on the all-time losses list by a pitcher is Nolan Ryan, who absorbed 292 L’s. But Ryan also won 324 games and finished with a career ERA of just 3.19, in addition to putting up the all-time records for both strikeouts and walks. He was a great pitcher who often pitched on mediocre or lousy teams, and he pitched a ton. Numbers of all kinds happened.

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I don’t have a sense of what the Hall of Fame might do when it comes to Rose. If Trump is talking about pardoning Rose for the five months he served in a federal prison camp on tax evasion charges back in 1990, that doesn’t move the needle much. But if MLB commissioner Rob Manfred removes Rose’s name from the permanently ineligible list, as he is reported to be considering, that could change things.

Rose has never appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot, because not long after Pete was banned for life, the HOF changed its rules to say that anyone on the ineligible list could not be considered by the voters. Rose pleaded with a couple of commissioners for reinstatement, but he was always his own worst enemy, constantly changing his version of events and vacillating between remorse and haughty denial.

Sadly, perhaps, his surviving family has a better chance with Manfred than Pete did — and one could argue that there’s little point in keeping a player on “permanent” ineligibility posthumously. Whatever Manfred and the Hall decide, though, the questions around those decisions are about ethics, not numbers.

On the statistical side, Pete Rose played well enough — but especially long enough — to really matter. He ultimately undermined his legacy in the most dreadful way, but the numbers stand. Numbers tend to do that.

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