Pete Rose 360B by Andy Warhol captures one of baseball’s most celebrated players at the height of his fame. The portrait shows Pete Rose in his batting stance, gripping the bat with focused intensity. The bright colors of his uniform leap from a saturated blue background. A bold yellow and red “REDS” banner cuts across the image, while a Cincinnati Reds team logo anchors the composition in the lower corner. The print’s clean outlines and layered pigments echo the look of a classic baseball card, transforming a familiar sports image into a Pop Art icon.
Created in 1985, the work was commissioned by the Cincinnati Art Museum. That same year, Rose broke Major League Baseball’s all-time hits record. Warhol based the composition on a photograph taken by Cincinnati photographer Gordon Baer. In keeping with his Pop Art approach, Warhol produced four acrylic-on-canvas images. On each one of them he screened and painted bold variations of red, yellow, blue, and white. He later created 50 screen-print impressions of one of the four versions, capturing Rose as both athlete and celebrity. The bright palette mirrored Rose’s persona—confident, flamboyant, and larger than life. Two years later, Warhol passed away. Not long after, Rose was banned from baseball for gambling, lending the portrait an unintended sense of irony and finality.
Pete Rose 360B in Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
As one of Warhol’s late-period celebrity portraits, Pete Rose 360B merges popular culture with personal mythology. Warhol used acrylic paint on canvas, repeating Rose’s right-handed batting stance in four silkscreen variations. The result is a vibrant homage to American sports heroes—figures whose fame paralleled that of movie stars and rock musicians.
“It was so brilliant of Andy to make it into a baseball card,” recalled Carl Soloway, the Cincinnati art dealer who proposed the project. “And that’s so interesting because baseball cards are collectible and negotiable. So it was a statement about the commercialization of art, just like his soup cans are about the commercialization of branding.”
Indeed, Pete Rose 360B reflects Warhol’s lifelong fascination with fame, value, and replication. Much like his portraits of Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe, this work transforms a public figure into a cultural symbol. Warhol recognized that both athletes and celebrities functioned as modern-day icons—commodities as much as individuals. By presenting Rose within the glossy format of a collectible card, captured the athlete at the intersection of sport, fame, and commerce.
Photo credit: “Pete Rose on Hitting: How to Hit Better than Anybody,” 1985. Photo by Gordon Baer. Courtesy of Phungo.
