The Hit King freely shares his thoughts on life and baseball.

The Hit King freely shares his thoughts on life and baseball.

Is he the gritty guy who collected more hits than all of the almost 20,000 other players who have played in the major leagues in your imagination?

Or is he the infamous former manager who was handed a lifetime ban by Major League Baseball for using bookies to wager on his own team’s games?

Everyone who is even slightly interested in baseball or its history has an opinion about Rose, who is currently 78 years old. On September 14, Rose will do a two-man act at the Palace Theatre in Albany with agent and friend J.T. Stewart.

Regarding the 90-minute performance, Rose remarked, “After J.T. introduces me, he kind of just sits back and kinda keeps the thing going.”

And sure, fans do question him about the “bad stuff”—his gambling problems, his expulsion from baseball after being found guilty of misbehaving, and the lengthy report written by former Justice Department attorney John Dowd, which was most recently in the headlines as part of President Donald J. Trump’s legal team.

Loved in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, he’s the most divisive player in baseball not named Barry Bonds (fans in Montreal, where he played 95 games to begin the 1984 season, certainly didn’t get to see enough of him as an Expo to love him). And the fans in every other major league city most likely think poorly of him.

Rose isn’t averse to expressing her ideas.

The sphere? chopped up.

Earlier this week, Rose declared over the phone from his Las Vegas residence, “Give me a reason the ball’s not juiced.” “Baseball’s never going to concede that, because then they’d be barking in the faces of the steroid users.”

Pitchers?

Speaking without hesitation, Rose listed pitchers who are widely regarded as the best in baseball. “There’s a lot of bad pitching going on,” she remarked. “You and I can sit here and name the good pitchers, but the overall pitching today isn’t up to snuff.”

The recently constructed ballparks?

“You don’t have to pull the ball at Yankee Stadium, and right-center is a joke. It’s a joke, Philadelphia. What a joke Camden Yards is. When the wind is blowing out, Wrigley Field is hilarious. Houston is absurd. Colorado is absurd. “Arizona is a farce,” stated Rose. “The new ballpark in Atlanta? The ball takes off from that place.”

In front of his Cincinnati fans, Rose described the play in which he knocked Fosse to the ground and popped the ball out to score for the National League. “No one did anything wrong on that play, I just beat the ball to the catcher,” Rose remarked. “The real story is I missed the next three games, he didn’t miss any and went on to play the next nine years, so people who say I ruined his career don’t quite have it right.”

When he started a fabled fight following a takeout slide directed at Buddy Harrelson in Game 3 of the 1973 National League Championship Series, Charlie Hustle gained notoriety among Mets fans of that era. Rose attributes that to him.