So the F what? Does he beat up his wife? Does he scare little kids and act like some kind of creep? If he was bit of a hard character which he appears to have been, that is America and he is an avatar. Makes him even better. Sometimes you get Tom Brady, who's this unathletic, gangly dude who can't run but has this youthful competitive gift, and if he can't run well he'll just play sports where you don't have to run like playing QB in football, and I think he was a serious baseball prospect as well, like a catcher or something. And he's just this dorky suburban kid who loves sports and cries when he doesn't get drafted high enough. And then you have hardasses like Pete Rose who seems like a decent enough athlete as far as it goes, and just a gruff dude who treats playing baseball for a living like it's way better than driving a cab or pulling a shift at the local bottling plant and would never cry ever about anything. And that's why he got 4000 hits.
It was probably a hit job meant to make him look as bad as they could plausibly make him look. Now that professional sports is this glossy playground for the billionaire class, and for computer geeks with their algorithmic 'analytics', and someone like Tom Brady is everyone's wet dream. By contrast Pete Rose is an embarrassment, he's white trash, and a target for millennial sports grifters and hangers on for their latest cool doc. If you're a real professional sports fan, you would demand this guy get in to the HOF.