VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Director Of Pete Rose Documentary Tries To Place Fallen Great In Modern Baseball Pantheon

Documentarian Mark Monroe shared his experience as director of the new Pete Rose documentary, Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose in his new uInterview.

Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose traces the ascent and subsequent downfall that defined Rose, a star baseball player. In 1989, Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader, Rose, was issued a lifetime ban for his involvement in betting on the sport.

The documentary draws from candid interviews and insightful commentary provided by Rose himself, who desires redemption, although is seemingly hesitant to fully confront the gravity of his transgressions. The series examination of Rose’s life and career serves as a cautionary tale for the audience.

Monroe examined the question of what make Rose such a great liar.

“I’m not a psychologist,” Monroe told uInterview founder Erik Meers. “I do believe what Al Michaels said, which is I think that sometimes you begin to believe in your own lie. That certainly can be the case. And the details of what happened may become blurred in your mind because you have decided that something is a truth when it may not be.”

He continued, “But I think [Rose] is a great personality and he has a great energy. Even today, he’s 83 years old, he can still be very fun to talk to and sometimes very tough. So he knows he’s an entertainer. He was an entertainer when he played baseball. He felt like he was entertaining people, and I think he was, in more ways than a lot of players did.”

The documentary probes how Rose fits into the modern baseball landscape. “That’s the rub, that’s the difficulty,” Monroe said. “I think initially Pete may have felt like, ‘Well they’re going to let me back in now because everyone gambles now.’ And he maybe conflated the public gambling and the major sports league, all of them embracing gambling, as some sort of signal that gambling is okay. But gambling is not okay for anyone who is playing the games.”

Ultimately, the program tries to place Rose in the baseball pantheon today.

Monroe responded confidently, “That’s the big question! My question is: ‘What are we supposed to do with these guys?’ The talks around reinstatement. They took a major hit when he went to Philadelphia. In the aftermath of Philadelphia, when [Rose] went on the field, and he got all those cheers at the 1980 championship game, because of his interactions with a reporter that day and a mess of reporters that day, he became the Pete who shoots himself in the foot and suddenly there’s not talk of reinstatement, where he is on any given day in terms of the reinstatement is a mystery.”

The four-part docuseries is available on HBO Max now.