Comment Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader who was long banned by MLB for betting on games, returned to the field Sunday in Philadelphia as part of the Phillies’ celebration of their 1980 World Series victory and quickly found himself at the center of controversy. Rose, 81, was on the field in Philadelphia for the first time since the team scrapped plans to honor him with a Wall of Fame induction in 2017 because of a woman’s allegation that he had sex with him when she was underage. in the 1970s. “No, I’m not here to talk about it,” Rose said when Alex Coffey, a female baseball reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, asked him about it. “Sorry about that. That was 55 years ago, baby.” Rose briefly told reporters (via The Associated Press): “I’m here for the Philly fans, I’m here for my teammates, I’m here for the Philly organization. And who cares what happened 50 years ago? You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t talk about it, because you weren’t born. If you don’t know anything about it, don’t talk about it.” In a federal court filing in 2017, a woman claimed she had a sexual relationship with Rose that began when she was under the age of consent. The woman, named Jane Doe, said in a sworn statement in court that the relationship began in 1973 and continued for a few years. “Sometime after that, Pete Rose and I started seeing each other at a house in Cincinnati,” the woman said. “It was in that house where, before my 16th birthday, Pete Rose began a sexual relationship with me. This sexual relationship lasted several years. Pete Rose also met me at locations outside of Ohio where we had sex.” From 2017: Woman says she had sex with Pete Rose as an underage teenager In court, Rose admitted to having sex with the woman, but said he believed she was 16, the age of consent in Ohio, and that their relationship began “sometime in 1975,” when he was 34. The statute of limitations had expired, so he could not be accused of rape. The testimony came during Rose’s 2017 defamation lawsuit against attorney John Dowd, who led the MLB investigation that led to Rose’s lifetime ban for gambling on the Cincinnati Reds as a player and manager. The lawsuit was filed after a 2015 radio interview in which Dowd said Rose had committed statutory rape by having sex with underage girls. Rose denied the accusation. On Sunday, Rose received a standing ovation from Phillies fans when he took the field at Citizens Bank Park before a 13-1 victory over the Washington Nationals. Rose “made herself available after the ceremony,” Coffey tweeted. “Someone, maybe an agent, said he had something to say to me, but he didn’t seem to know he was expected to say anything. He asked if he had offended me and said, “you’ll forgive me if I sign you 1,000 baseballs” before saying “I’m sorry.” “