As long as I’ve been a baseball fan one 0f
those questions that was always debated was: should Pete Rose be allowed into Cooperstown?
Around the time I was becoming a fan Rose
had just been banned for life. I didn’t know the details at the age of 10, so
it was academic. As I grew older and learned more about the game and Rose’s
role in it, I heard a multitude of opinions from sportswriters, broadcasters,
former player, managers and even some officials.
By the time I left college the guardrails
had begun to be lowered: Rose was showing up at World Series games, was being
allowed to give color commentary and by the mid 2010’s was actually casually
employed by Fox for post-season games. Baseball seemed willing to forgive and
forget in a way that they have yet to be willing to do for the majority of the
players in the steroid era. But the Commissioner’s office remained obstinate
about refuse to remove him from the ineligibility list and continuously denied
his multiple appeals on the subject.
Last December Rose passed away at 83. A few
weeks ago Commissioner Manfred said that the ineligibility restrictions for
Cooperstown would stop after those had been banned were dead, finally allowing
for Rose and several other players banned for life in.
The question will no doubt surround Hall of
Fame debates for the foreseeable future and I may very well weigh in on that
eventually. What I’d like to discuss now is something that has no doubt been
forgotten by the current generation of fans: why did Rose get a lifetime ban
from Major Leage Baseball in the first place? And perhaps more tellingly, was
the punishment he received not appropriate to the original crime?
Note: As my major source material on the
subject I will be using ‘Lords of the Realm’ a book by John Helyar’s story on
the history of baseball which he published in 1994. The volume is mainly about
the struggles between the Commissioners office, the owners and the players
particularly after Marvin Miller arrived on the scene in 1966. At that point
the majority of the players involved were still alive and willing to be
interviewed by Heylar for the subject.
Let’s start with a given: Major League Baseball
was well aware of Rose’s predilection for gambling. They knew about his
problems with betting as early as 1978. One of the members of the Red’s front
office said: “Pete Rose’s legs may get broken when his playing days were over.”
But in the grand tradition not just of baseball
but all celebrities the game let him get away with it. The front office weren’t
going to mess with a top gate attractions. Sportswriters were not going to
expose a man who gave them so many good stories. The security director all but
nodded and winked when he talked to him.
By the time Rose broke Cobb’s record for
hits Rose had an entourage of gamblers, drug dealers and memorabilia hustlers
surrounding him. He was perpetually paying off bookies by selling his own
sports memorabilia. By the time he became player-manager of the Reds it was
becoming too ugly to ignore.
Not long before he left office then
Commissioner Peter Ueberroth called Rose on the carpet and flatly asked Rose if
he was betting on baseball, which had been the capital crime since the Black
Sox scandal in 1919. Rose and his attorneys basically fenced for a few hours,
offering straight denials. Ueberroth didn’t press; he was about to step down
and he had one mission. Declare victory and exit the game a winner. When the
Times learned of the meeting and called it he said: “There’s nothing ominous
and there won’t be any follow through. Essentially he left the mess on his
replacement’s doorstep.
A, Bartlett Giamatti’s name is inexorably
linked to everything involving Rose and that’s a tragedy because he was one of
the best men ever connected to the National game. Elected President of Yale in
1977, the 39 year old Giamatti told the crowd was: “All I ever wanted to be
President of was the American League.”
Giamatti was a Renaissance scholar and a
die hard Red Sox fan at a time when the latter brought tragedy. He once penned
a famous piece saying baseball breaks your heart. He would occasionally write
brilliant highbrow pieces on baseball, once comparing Tom Seaver being traded
from the Mets as similar to a fresco in the Sistine Chapel showing the expulsion
of Adam and Eve.
During 1983 and 1984 Yale was involved in a
horrible labor situation. During that period Bud Selig, looking for a
replacement for Bowie Kuhn, had a discussion with him. Their meeting turned
into an all-night discussion of the 1949 American League Pennant race which Selig
had experienced as a Yankee fan. The meeting so impressed Selig that he wrote a
piece recommending Giamatti as Kuhn’s replacement. Giamatti considered it but
he was halfway through his tenure at Yale and he was committed to keeping his
promise. Reluctantly, he turned it down.
Three years baseball came to him again,
offering him a job as President of the National League. Giamatti immediately
accepted: “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve just fallen in love and run away
with a gorgeous redhead with flashing eyes whose name is baseball.
Baseball, in turn, fell in love with him. Giamatti
became commissioner-in—waiting and in the fall of 1989 was elected to succeed Ueberroth.
Even though Giamatti was an egghead, he had
the common touch. As National League President, he sought out and had a bond
with the umpires at every game he attended. He was accessible in a way previous
commissioners hadn’t been. He was able to charm everybody, bringing the owners
back into the discussion (Ueberroth had acted unilaterally in his decision) At
owners meeting, they sat at a round table as equals. And he had the ability to
build a consensus.
One of his advisers was Fay Vincent, who
the same year Giamatti was named president of Yale had just been named
President of Columbia. They became instant friends, drawn together by their
common bond of baseball, literature and Yale. They made a half-serious pact; if
Vincent was ever in a position to hire Giamatti he would do so and vice versa.
Vincent spent a lot of time working in
Columbia pictures, getting them into TV syndication and setting up the
joint-venture company Tri-Star. But he also had an enormous ego and a ruthless
streak that led to him firing multiple executives at the company. When he was
squeezed out in 1987, Giamatti hired him as deputy commissioner.
The mess fell into their lap. After Ueberroth’s
denial appeared in the Times the two had a long conversation about Rose.
Both men agreed their should be a full investigation; the question was how to
proceed. Vincent finally suggested they get an outside investigator and hired
an old friend from D.C.: John Dowd, a former prosecutor.
Dowd took the case. Within a matter of days
the FBI busted a flunky in Rose’s entourage: Paul Janszen. A weight-lifter and
small time dealer of steroids (no one knew in 1989 how serious that would
become for baseball) Janszen was busted for drug-dealing and tax evasion. He
was scared into naming names and one name was Rose
After two days of Dowd turning Janszen inside
out, he let loose a small army of attorneys and gumshoes. Every aspect of his
investigation had not even a touch of due process with no search wars or subpoenas
involved. It got heavy handed as it went on.
Eventually Dowd’s deal got Giamatti in
trouble. Another lowlife had been of help squealing on Rose but wanted a sentence
reduction. Dowd drafted a letter that supposedly came from Giamatti arguing for the man’s truthfulness. Giamatti casually
scribbled his signature – without reading the document. It was a habit from his
Yale days that got him into trouble. It was going to be trouble if Rose’s
attorney got their hands on it – which they did.
The judge handling Rose’s hearing was
furious when he learned. (It didn’t help that he was a Reds fan.) He would disclose
and denounce the letter to everyone who would listen, including the press. Rose’s
attorneys now had ammunition to launch a counterattack.
In May Dowd delivered his report: 225 pages
and more than 2000 interviews to learn that Rose had bet on baseball. In June,
just before Giamatti was scheduled to give an official hearing Rose’s attorneys
sued for an injunction which was immediately granted.
All of this took a tremendous toll on
Giamatti during the summer. The new commissioner was dazed by the public scrutiny,
dizzy from the whirl stop meetings and was chain-smoking more than ever. He was
torn between conflicting advice. Vincent wanted Rose out of baseball for good.
Lou Hoynes, a critical man in baseball argued for a swifter, softer resolution.
The standoff continued for two months. It was a combination of chess and
chicken. Neither side wanted a trial. It would make both Rose and organized
baseball look bad
Settlement talks began in August. Vincent
offered first a ten year exile, then seven. Rose’s agent wanted a lighter
sentence and a finding that Rose had never bet on baseball. Finally they agreed
to put him on the ‘ineligible list’ It would be termed a permanent suspension.
But under the rules of baseball Rose could apply for reinstatement after one
year. There was also no admission of guilt.
However on August 23rd when
asked by reporters Giamatti was asked had Rose bet on baseball.
“In the absence of a hearing and therefore
in absence of evidence to the contrary,” Giamatti said. “I am confronted by the
factual evidence of Mr. Dowd. On the basis of that, yes, I have concluded he bet
on baseball.” The agreement that had taken days to negotiate over had been
casually trashed on national television.
Giamatti and Vincent congratulated each
other and then went on vacation.
Eight days later, Giamatti died of a heart
attack. After much discussion Vincent was named to move in immediately afterwards
ostensibly as continuity, to fill out Giamatti’s term. Because Vincent had been
pushing for Rose to be banned for life when Rose applied for reinstatement
Vincent refused to act on it. For the rest of his life he made it very clear
that Rose deserved everything he got. While the owners quickly became tired of Vincent’s
frequently dictatorial like behavior, even after he was removed from office Bud
Selig never did anything to allow Rose’s reinstatement occurred.
Now let us set aside the fact, for the moment,
that Rose would finally confess his wrongdoing after decades of denying his
role and speak in terms of hypothetical: Were the circumstance that led to Rose
being banned for life from baseball fair?
There is a strong argument they were
anything but. First the man who led the investigation John Dowd would gain a
reputation as being the equivalent of an attack dog who denied due process if
it was in the best interest of the game. Vincent would later use him to lead an
investigation into George Steinbrenner that would lead to the Yankees owner
being suspended from baseball for three years. When the owners read the report
and realized just how much Dowd had overstepped, they were horrified – but because
of their loathing of Steinbrenner they were not willing to defend him and
destroyed the report. It was Dowd and Vincent’s overreach of authority in
regard to the suspension of Steve Howe in 1992 that eventually led to Vincent
being forced to resign as commissioner after receiving a no-confidence vote.
Second the decision to ban Rose for life
was more or less done by the influence of Vincent rather than Giamatti. Because
he passed away immediately afterward we have no way of knowing if he would have
allowed Rose to be reinstated when he applied in 1990. Vincent influenced much
of Giamatti’s thinking during the investigation but there were signs he was
pulling away from his friend’s point of view before he made his announcement on
TV.
Third we must remember the timing of
everything involve the investigation of Rose. Baseball was undergoing several
major scandals. They were dealing with the fallout of a collusion scandal in
which the owners were making an effort to break the free agency market. This
went on during 1986-1988 and the fallout only came just around the time
Ueberroth left office. There was also the issue of how cocaine had infected
baseball. The day Rose broke Cobb’s hit record his teammate Dave Parker had
testified before Congress about rampant cocaine use in baseball. They were also
still dealing with the fallout of Al Campanis’ remarks about minority hiring in
baseball in 1987. After all this and Giamatti’s death, the World Series that
year was disrupted by the Lorna Prieta earthquake which postponed the Giants-Athletics
series for ten days and was a final sobering comment on how horrible a year
baseball had in 1989.
When one considers just how much trouble
baseball would have during the 1990s perhaps one should not be shock that the
sport had no desire to deal with the man who was the biggest symbol of
everything that was wrong with the sport during the 1980s.
It might be an exaggeration to say that
Rose was punished for the sins of Major League Baseball during this period but one
can’t rule out the possibility that if Giamatti had not died long after Rose
was banned, circumstances might have changed. It did manage to play out that
way starting in the early 2000s and that was well before we were aware of the
depths of the steroid scandal that exploded halfway through the decade. Perhaps
if Giamatti had lived and a little more time had passed Rose would have been
granted reinstatement the first time he applied for it. Rose could therefore be
gracious and would not have taken up the attitude of denial of responsibility
he did for the next two decades which was no doubt a major factor in the ban
being kept in place while he was alive.
And maybe when enough time had passed –
perhaps after the steroids came out – the writers might have looked at all this
and realized what many fans say about Rose’s crime. That compared to all the
juicing that happened Rose’s sins were venial, not mortal. And Rose would have
been voted into the Hall of Fame while he was still alive.
To be clear I’m still not advocating for
Rose’s induction in this article: I have yet to make up my mind one way or the
other. But I do feel Rose was denied due process by major league baseball and
had circumstances not played out as they did, he might have gotten reinstated
and he might have been inducted normally. This isn’t a defense of Rose, either,
merely an argument he was treated unfairly.
It is also, I should add, a defense of Giamatti
a man who I think if he had lived could have been a great force for the
national game and perhaps could have been the beacon we needed in the 1990s and
beyond. More than ever I think we need men like Giamatti in the world, not just
baseball but in life. Because he understood one basic truth about baseball that
any fan knows: “It is designed to break your heart.”
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