‘We all called him captain;’ Former teammate, sports reporters remember Reds legend Pete Rose

CINCINNATI — Reds fans across the Miami Valley and sports fans across the world are mourning the death of Pete Rose.

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As reported on News Center 7 at 6:00, baseball’s all-time hit leader died Monday at 83 years old.

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Since then, tributes have been pouring in for the former Reds great.

News Center 7 spoke with professional writer Hal McCoy, whose skill with the written word got him into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

But when he talks about the death of his friend Pete Rose, words are hard to come by.

“I’m supposed to be a man of words, but when something like that happens to somebody who you’ve been associated with all your professional life, it was very stunning,” McCoy said.

McCoy has covered the Reds beat for 50 years, including the Big Red Machine teams who won the World Series twice.

“Baseball has lost probably the greatest ambassador to the game it could ever have,” McCoy said.

Rose is no doubt one of the best players in baseball’s history.

But Major League Baseball banned him for life for betting on the Reds to win while he was managing the team.

The ban has kept him out of the hall of fame.

“In ‘89, when all this came down, that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do because it was, you know, you’re looking up to a guy that you’ve admired all your life, and now he’s breaking the rules and getting kicked out of the game you loved,” Former WHIO-TV Sports Director Mike Hartsock said.

Hartsock covered Rose professionally after growing up in the Miami Valley as a Reds fan.

“Every time I ran into Pete -- didn’t always know me by name, but he knew me by where I worked. He knew me from being at Channel 7 in Dayton,” Hartsock said.

Darrel Chaney spent seven of his 11 years playing Major League Baseball as Rose’s teammate in Cincinnati.

“We didn’t have a ‘C’ for ‘captain’ for him in those days, but we all called him captain because that’s what he was,” Chaney said.

They won a World Series together in 1975.

“He’s going to go down to me as one of the greatest baseball players that ever lived and one of the guys that made the biggest mistake of his life by getting involved in gambling and letting it carry over until he ended up betting on the game. But he understood that all the way to the end,” Chaney said.

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