TLC launches Pete Rose reality show focusing on baseball's all-time hits leader's impending marriage to much younger former Playboy Playmate
Pete Rose, whose spectacular hitting on a baseball diamond was sometimes matched by his errors off the field, moves into a new game next month when he stars in a TLC reality show.
“Pete Rose: Hits and Mrs.,” will follow the current life of Rose, who is baseball’s all-time career hit leader and is also banned from baseball for life because he bet on games.
Rose has never stopped hoping he can get that ban overturned, which would make him eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame. In the show, we can expect to see him debating whether to launch another formal appeal.
But the show will primarily focus on his relationship with Kiana Kim, a former Playboy model and Rose’s current fiancé.
He has been married twice, with two now-grown children from each marriage. Some of the children will be seen in the new show expressing their reservations about his relationship with Kim, who is 31.
She has two children of her own, 14 and 11.
She also lives in Los Angeles while he is based in Las Vegas, and their whole situation creates enough potential drama to make it clear why TLC saw potential in this series.
Rose has been good copy for his whole career. As a baseball player with the Cincinnati Reds, he earned the name “Charlie Hustle” for an all-out style that sometimes got him into scuffles with opposing players. Most famously that included Bud Harrelson of the New York Mets.
He eventually passed Ty Cobb as baseball’s all-time hit leader and made a run at Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak before he was stopped at 44. The night his streak ended, he complained that the opposing pitcher didn’t give him a fair shot at getting a hit.
Off the field, he was suspended and eventually banned from baseball for betting on games in which his team was involved, though he said he never bet against them.
After he left baseball he admitted he was a compulsive gambler, pled guilty to income tax evasion and has spent time in, among other fields, professional wrestling.
His ineligibility for the Hall of Fame remains a raw and controversial topic among baseball fans, though Rose himself agreed to it after years of resistance.
