Pete Rose is Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader with 4,256 career hits. Some of those hits though may have come by way of cheating as a former Montreal Expos groundskeeper, a team where Rose played 95 games back in 1984, accused Rose of corking his bats while he played for the organization.

Joe Jammer has accused Rose of corking his bats. “Pete Rose would have his bats corked in the visitors’ clubhouse at Olympic Stadium,” Jammer told the Montreal Gazette. “Pete was too smart to deal with Expos equipment manager John Silverman (to cork his bats in the Expos’ clubhouse). So Bryan Greenberg, who worked in the visitors’ clubhouse, did it.”

According to Major League Baseball’s official rule book, using a corked bat is illegal as it is perceived to give hitters an unfair advantage by being able to hit the ball further than that of regular bats because corked bats are significantly lighter than regular bats.

During his time in Montreal, Rose played in just 95 games, had a batting average of .259, and 72 hits. For his career, Rose is Major League Baseball’s career hits leader with 4,256 hits and also had a career batting average of .303.

Rose was banned from baseball back in 1989 for betting on baseball games, some of which were games he played and managed in, which is why he has not been enshrined into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose has tried to apply for reinstatement multiple times since being banned but has yet to be readmitted. He most recently applied for reinstatement back in January of this year following the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.

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Rusty Staub, the beloved New York Mets hitting icon, died early Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida at age 73.

Mets Legend Rusty Staub Death News

Staub played for the Mets, Houston, Montreal and Detroit and was known to Montreal fans as “Le Grand Orange.” He died of a heart attack, his brother Chuck said. Staub had reportedly been battling several health issues in recent years, including multiple organ failure. In October 2015, Staub suffered a near-fatal heart attack on a flight from Ireland to New York.

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The hitter was also very recently discovered to be suffering from cellulitis, which evolved into a blood infection that resulted in a shutdown of his kidneys. Staub — a 6-foot-2 left-handed batter who weighed 240 pounds late in his career — was initially admitted to Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach with dehydration, pneumonia and an infection. He had spent the last eight weeks in the hospital, and would have been 74 on Sunday.

Staub was also known as a gourmet chef and a wine connoisseur.

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An All-Star for all three seasons he played with the expansion team Montreal Expos (1969-1971), Staub praised the arrival of pro baseball in Canada.

“I was in Quebec — I couldn’t talk to a child,” Staub said to The Montreal Gazette in 2012. “I couldn’t say something encouraging. I felt like I was not doing my job — not being able to respond to the media at least in some basic form.”

“I took about 25 French classes after the first season, and the next year I took longer classes,” he continued. “There’s not a question that my making that effort is part of the reason that whatever Le Grand Orange represented to Montreal and all those fans, they knew I cared and I tried.”

Staub also revealed he earned the “Big Orange’ nickname even before he landed in Montreal in a trade with Houston.

“The name wasn’t formalized for the public until one day when we were playing in Los Angeles,” he explained. “I hit a home run and made a pretty good catch when Willie Crawford hit a pea against the fence. The next day in the newspapers, I was ‘Le Grand Orange.’ And in both English and French papers, it stayed that way.”

The Expos traded Staub to the Mets in 1972. One year later, he helped send them to a National League pennant, hitting three home runs in their five-game win over the Cincinnati Reds in the National League Championship Series. He also injured his shoulder during that series.

Staub returned to the Expos in a trade in July 1979. In his first at-bat back at Olympic Stadium, fans gave him a standing ovation. He retired with the Mets in 1985.

Besides his brother, Staub is survived by his sisters, Sally Johnston and Susan Tully. 

After leaving baseball, Staub became president of the Rusty Staub Foundation, which has supported emergency food pantries throughout New York by working with Catholic Charities.

He equally helped form the New York Police and Fire Widows’ and Children’s Benefit Fund, which has raised millions of dollars for the families of uniformed personnel killed in the line of duty.

When MLB returned to New York for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Mets played the Atlanta Braves. The Mets donated proceeds from that game, about $450,000, to the fund for widows and children.

That evening, Staub stated the non-profit had donated about $8.3 million in the 15 years prior to the attacks.

Among the famous media figures who paid tribute to Staub on social media were Keith Olbermann, Anthony DiComo and Mike Lupica: