Pete Rose never goes away. He’s still here in body, of course, now 82, surely this very second signing everything in sight at a memorabilia show in a medium-size convention hall somewhere across this great land, telling whoever’s willing to pay him a few bucks how Major League Baseball should reverse his lifetime ban from the sport, laid down 35 years ago for gambling on his own team. Mr. Rose reapplies to the commissioner every few years, gets rebuffed, and then just dusts himself off and tries again.

As a player, Pete Rose was irresistible. When you close your eyes and think of Willie Mays, you see him gracefully gliding through center field; Derek Jeter, a deep throw from shortstop; Ken Griffey Jr., his perfect, sweeping swing. But Pete Rose? You think of him sprinting toward an open base and leaping for it, arms and legs splayed, as if he were a man on fire diving for water, as if being safe were the only thing that had ever mattered in the world. “He runs like a scalded dog,” one of his early managers said. “He’s got more stomach than a parachute jumper.”

“Charlie Hustle,” the nickname that Keith O’Brien has made the title of his biography of Mr. Rose, was actually given to him by Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, who were making fun of how ostensibly, even showily hard the guy worked, how little seemed to come naturally to him. Because of that very quality, however, Mr. Rose will always loom large as an avatar for a very specific style of sports superstar, the undersized, scrappy almost-always-white underdog who defeats his athletic superiors through relentless intensity—an ethos to himself. I see that Pete Rose every time I watch a Little League dad scream at his kid to sprint to first base on a walk, every time someone says they just don’t make baseball players like they used to. Mr. Rose is forever a one-man baseball culture war.

But he’s also a man, made of flesh and blood and anxieties and regrets like the rest of us, and I’m not sure there’s ever been a book that does a better job of sketching out that man than Keith O’Brien’s. The author, a journalist, grew up in Cincinnati during the peak of Mr. Rose’s career, revering him like everyone else in the city did. “Charlie Hustle,” a 329-page stem-to-stern bio, chronicles Mr. Rose’s upbringing as a working-class Cincinnati kid with a frustrated athlete father who pushed him to become a boxer. In spirited, affectionate fashion, the author chronicles Mr. Rose’s years, in the 1970s, playing for his hometown team and winning championships with Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Pérez and the Big Red Machine. It is not difficult to understand why that team—by any measure one of the greatest teams in baseball history—was so beloved.

Mr. Rose was the public face of the Reds, but when the team started to decline, he went to play for the Phillies and the Expos. In 1984, he returned to Cincinnati to become the last man (so far) to serve as player-manager and to chase Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 hits. In 1985, after Mr. Rose passed Cobb’s mark, President Reagan called to congratulate him, only to have Mr. Rose complain about being forced to wait on the line too long. For a moment, he was bigger than baseball. Then, within a few years, news of the gambling scandal broke, and he was forced out of the sport, the only thing he cared about (other than himself): “Pete loves two things, wholeheartedly,” says one of his many paramours. “Pete and baseball.”

The author approaches his project with an undeniable appreciation of Mr. Rose’s appeal and ability to connect with the common fan, but he is not afraid of digging into often unsettling truths. Mr. Rose gave 27 hours of interviews to Mr. O’Brien, according to the author, but, perhaps inevitably, stopped returning the writer’s calls when he began to get into what his subject calls “the dirty stuff.” And there is plenty of dirty stuff.

As a hitter, Mr. Rose was a bit of a savant, able to retain reams of information on every pitcher in the league, desperate to win every single battle, with a batting eye and measured swing so respected that even umpires questioned themselves if they disagreed with Mr. Rose on a call. But the same qualities that drove the player to be so unremitting on the field carried over to an almost pathological obstinance off the field.

As Mr. Rose earned more money and gained more power, especially when he returned to Cincinnati, he became almost comically reckless, according to Mr. O’Brien. He would carry on multiple extramarital affairs, essentially in the open, including in the company of friendly media members willing to overlook everything, and spent time with so many shady characters—from bookies to cocaine dealers to ’roid heads at the infamous Gold’s Gym in Cincinnati—that his teammates kept trying to get them kicked out of the clubhouse. One teammate comments, early on in Mr. Rose’s career, that he considered himself untouchable, and acted accordingly. Mr. O’Brien describes him as having an “enduring belief that his choices wouldn’t hurt him.”