Pete Rose's Pony Ride

The circumstance is almost irrelevant. But, for the record, it was the first issue in a new billboard campaign by Pony, an athletic company with a not necessarily sinful taste for twisting the establishment tail. And the billboard issue's feature attraction sat for a radio interview, last Thursday, that reminded a listener it is rarely uninteresting when the interview subject is Pete Rose.

He is a creature congenitally unable to keep arresting things from passing his lips at the least provocation. That gift has long enough defined him as a personality at once engaging and enraging. Ask anyone who overheard him on a turbulence-buffeted team flight.

"We're going down," Rose told the teammate sitting beside him. "We're going down and I have a .300 lifetime average to take with me. Do you?" There are said to be jurisdictions in which you can seat no jury to rule manslaughter unjustifiable in that kind of instance. And Rose has not lost the gift yet, even if what he now inspires has devolved to simple battery.

The interview question arose as to whether Pony, in billboarding Rose, committed gimmickry and, by the way, Pete, does it not enable you to admit in the breach that you are exhausted for a quiet backchannel toward retrieving what you crave above and beyond all other mortal privilege? He answered, unflinchingly, in the familiar enough voice that is half street alumnus ("They should have named an alley after me, the way I acted in high school," he said at the naming of Cincinnati's Pete Rose Way), half shadow gamesman, making it easy enough to forget he is now sixty years old.

"It's just that Pony believes in me," Rose said, to ESPN Radio's Dan Patrick. "And Pony don't quite understand why I haven't been given an opportunity to be reinstated...They believe in me, and I appreciate that. They're a class company. They're a young company, they're on the rise. And I don't think it's any kind of stunt...

"When we got in bed with these guys, you know...we told (them) we do not want no slam against baseball, nothing negative against the commissioner, we want it done in class," he continued. "And they did everything we asked them to, and I take my hat off to 'em."

The billboard issue shows Rose's unmistakeable if slightly age-inflated countenance, framed by upper and lower black horizontal strips on which appear white letters spelling, clearly enough, "Why Isn't Pete Rose In The Hall of Fame?" If that is part of everything "we" asked for, then "we" remain about as subtle as a suicide bombing.

That billboard question has an answer simple enough. Pete Rose is not in the Hall of Fame because the Hall made official and formal (in very early 1991) what it long enough established in practise from its birth: If baseball has named you permanently ineligible, you are ineligible for Hall of Fame election and enshrinement. The Hall, an independent institution, had (and has) the right (and was right) to consecrate it in formal code, even if they were moved to do so by the very real prospect that Rose might be elected in spite of his baseball ineligibility.

It is no further the Hall of Fame's business to determine Major League Baseball's governing eligibility rules than it is MLB's business to determine the Hall's. But neither could the Hall brook Rose's election and enshrinement while under MLB ban without emasculating its own credibility, inasmuch as no previous MLB-ineligible player with legitimate Hall of Fame credentials (at least two, actually: Shoeless Joe Jackson and his Black Sox teammate, Eddie Cicotte) had been elected and enshrined.

Rose knows the distinction, even if his least literate partisans and his least forgiving critics forget or fudge. To my knowledge he has never held the Hall of Fame responsible for his MLB persona non grata. And, as excruciating a prospect as it may sound to enough of his critics, Charlie Hustler may very well have a case to make on behalf of his reinstatement.

A question actually arises around the entire Rose affair as to whether baseball government has turned Rose a kind of cryonic: thawing him out once in awhile when it suits their periodic conveniences, returning him to the deep freeze until next time, and otherwise reneging on a critical element in the agreement between Rose and then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti.

"I died. I'm dead," said Rose to Patrick, a comprehensible enough dash of bewilderment lacing his outrage. "But now, if baseball needs me, like it did at the All-Century Team, or they might at the end of the year, if 4,192 makes one of the top ten events, then they'll be on the phone calling fifteen times a week...But if we call them, to set up a meeting, they don't even answer their phones. They're unethical, if you want to know the truth."

I know. Accepting lessons in ethics from Pete Rose too often sounds tantamount to taking airline management instruction from Osama bin Laden.

This is the man who could have used the hook slide rather than plowing like a hijacked airliner into Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse, to score the winning run in an All-Star Game that was neither meaningless nor of championship import. Technically (the rule against blocking the plate is never enforced officially), Fosse may have assumed a given risk, but he was more a step or two up and in front of the line, priming for a sweep tag. But deeming a part of town high crime "as a rule" does not grant thugs a right or licence to rob, mug, rape, or murder.

And, this is the man who belched against the ethics and, implicitly, the manhood, of the wile-and-guile relief pitcher (Gene Garber, Atlanta Braves) who stopped his 44-game hitting streak with a darting ninth inning strikeout. To have heard Rose and his sycophancy you would have thought he was victim of grand theft. Hard to tell which was less relevant to them: Rose going 0-for-4 before he faced Garber in the ninth; or, Rose the sixteen-year major league veteran, who suddenly forgot how to lay the wood on off-speed breaking stuff, from a pitcher who couldn't throw a better-than-batting practise fastball if he shot the ball from a howitzer.

But this is also the man who made virtue from a kind of vice in breaking the record he lived most to break. Rose indulged the vice of hanging beyond his legitimate field value to his team, just to pass Ty Cobb. Under pressure to hold out, to tie and break the record for the home audience, Rose - by then a player-manager with his team in a pennant race - tied Cobb in a road trip finale. Then came the Cincinnati ninth of that game. Reds on first and second, nobody out, Rose due up with power-hitting Dave Parker on deck.

The Book, The Fan, and Rose's own owner (what a surprise: the execrable Marge Schott) said: Lay down that sacrifice; guarantee the glam knock for the home folks. Rose the manager told Rose the player what the latter knew already: Sacrifice? Leave first base open? Invite them to take the bat out of Big Dave's hands with a free pass? Let the tail-enders do what a future Hall of Famer and a Big Guy are supposed to be doing? When we got a crack at winning this game? I don't think so.

Rose swung away and recorded perhaps the most honourable strikeout of his career. Then the game was suspended, due to darkness (this was in Wrigley Field, before the lights went up), leaving Rose to go home and get the glam knock and the props with no stains attached.

Had Rose but managed his life as a human person as honourably as he managed himself around Cobb's record and for the most part as a player before that, he would not have left himself prone to baseball's official opprobrium. Unfortunately, baseball's official opprobrium seems to have invited behaviour at least as dishonourable as Rose's off-field had too long become.

The Dowd Report proves on serious reading a morass of question marks that want to be exclamation points when they grow up. There is too much left to speculation, hearsay, and incompletion; there is too little left to firm and secure final provenance. About all that yields solidly is that Rose had too much taste for betting sports with bookies; and, that he preferred doing so though flunkies and hangers-on of (we strain to be polite) dubious makeup who could destroy him if ever their relationships went into the toxic waste dump.

It turned out that it was not "if" but "when," over missing and unpaid gambling and loan monies, and it is not impossible that those provoked a hunger among the disenchanted flunkies/hangers-on to bring Rose down that equaled or surpassed any hunger to abet a purportedly professional investigation into Rose's decomposing life. That is the sort of thing that transpires when what you could call underground riches swell among the shady. Nor is it impossible that they had advanced their own baseball bets as Rose's, first to the bookies who wouldn't take their action without Rose's vouchsafe and subsequently to baseball's investigators as a way to hit him back.

Baseball's gambling rules having never been revoked or much altered, its government had to discipline Rose for his actual gambling life. He had to have incurred at least some sort of finite banishment from baseball. And he was neither the first nor the last to earn finite banishment (think Leo Durocher, a scrappy if not superstar player - and a bad Hall of Fame choice as a manager) for gambling infractions that were not even close to actually abetting or acting on throwing a game.

After releasing his formal statement on the formal ineligibility agreement, Giamatti under press questioning a) said Rose could apply for reinstatement after a year, and b) offered at best his own opinion (citing the Dowd Report as his influence) that Rose had bet on baseball, though not on his own team. The formal agreement on Rose's banishment included no formal finding that he did or did not bet on baseball.

And baseball's rules, as written, order bookie-style gambling or betting on baseball in general to garner a single year suspension, which is precisely what Leo Durocher received for the 1947 season. (Durocher, too, was a less than admirable character, but he, too, may have had a legitimate case against baseball government's hypocrisy: He may have invited his supension explicitly when he exploded in print after seeing Yankee boss Larry MacPhail entertaining at Yankee Stadium the very gambling types against whose association Durocher had been warned.) Had it been proven beyond doubt that Pete Rose had bet on his own team, then he would have incurred a legitimate lifetime banishment.

Giamatti, of course, died unexpectedly, short of a week after the Rose decision; Rose, of course, pled guilty to income tax evasion (involving his memorabilia earnings) and went to prison for five months, beginning his sentence before the full year expired. Giamatti's successor, Fay Vincent (who had pressed his friend John Dowd upon the incoming Giamatti for the Rose case) never offered Rose the reinstatement opportunity Giamatti declared Rose should have. Neither has Vincent's eventual overthrower and successor, Bud Selig.

You do not absolve Pete Rose of his real enough sins (and if you think baseball's Hall of Fame has a small pocketful of shady characters and even criminal ones, you certainly have not had a look at the NFL lately), when you say that baseball government since Giamatti's death has behaved toward him in ways we would condemn if we saw the government government behaving likewise toward an ordinary citizen. Neither does baseball government's behaviour make Rose innocent or write him an automatic Cooperstown pass. The Pony billboards may ask why he is not in the Hall of Fame, but Rose knows the answer begins with his own actual misconduct and continues with that of baseball government.

"Pete Rose isn't banned from baseball because he's a bad person," wrote Bill James, perhaps the Dowd Report's most severe critic, in 1994 (in The Politics of Glory: How The Hall of Fame Really Works). "He's banned from baseball because he broke the rules...the problem with Pete Rose isn't that he gambled. The problem is that he broke the rule against gambling...(Y)ou don't begin the rehabilitation of baseball's Wronged Man by putting him into the Hall of Fame. That's where you end it."

Rose was entitled to his part of the plate, regardless of the month or festivity of the moment.

When he stepped between the chalked lines, Rose had one intention.........win.

He should be be in the HOF.

If Giamatti were to roll over in his grave, nobody would care.

I believe Pete should be allowed into the HOF--based on his on-field performance.

That's about the prime reason he does belong in the Hall of Fame.

Not so sure about the banned from baseball for life --I have changed my view on that a few times (right now I think he should remain banned).

I thought at first, and for a long time, that he should remain banned for life, too...until I actually sat down to read the Dowd Report. There's no question that Rose had been gambling chronically, enough so that he had to be given a time-out...but, I repeat: a finite time out. This was something even Bart Giamatti (who may have been as much a pawn as anything in this affair - Fay Vincent had actually pressed John Down upon the commissioner's office in early 1989...when Peter Ueberroth was finishing his term as commissioner and hoping the Rose matter would just dry up and blow away, and when Bart Giamatti was standing as commissioner-elect, more or less) acknowledged by way of proclaiming as he did that Rose could and should be allowed to apply for his reinstatement after a single year had passed. Giamatti's unexpected death unintentionally screwed that pooch bigtime, thanks to the actions of his successors (real and alleged).

I also want Shoeless Joe to be allowed in.

Ain't gonna happen. For better or worse, the fact that Jackson did at least accept delivery of that $5,000 envelope in the first place, and that he did acknowledge that he at least accepted being in on the fix in its beginning (see Holtzman and Haas's Baseball, Chicago Style), is what kills his chance of making it to Cooperstown. On a personal level, I think Jackson was probably more dumb than dishonest, and he certainly wasn't the instigator or even one of the primary movers of the fix - if anyone should share those dishonours, they are probably first baseman Chick Gandil and shortstop Swede Risberg. But there but for those two errors would Jackson never have lost his eligibility...and would have been a Hall of Famer.

Rose was entitled to his part of the plate, regardless of the month or festivity of the moment.

When he stepped between the chalked lines, Rose had one intention.........win.

The question isn't his desire to win, the question is proportion - particularly in a game which is not entirely meaningless (or wasn't, in the days before Jerky Joe Torre, Buffaloed Bob Brenly, and Blowhard Bud Selig) but is certainly not championship important. If Ray Fosse is not strictly speaking blocking the plate - as in, he is not (he was not) covering or smothering over the plate itself, but was a step or three up and in front of the baseline - how on earth was Pete Rose denied "his" part of the plate?

You're not questioning a man's desire to win to suggest that there is a line to be drawn between hard clean play and disproportionate hard play, and that there had indeed been times when he crossed that line.

He should be be in the HOF.

I think so, too...after he is reinstated to baseball. And not until then. The Hall of Fame has every right to formulate its own eligibility requirements, including the one that denies eligibility to those on the baseball-ineligible list. Had Pete Rose been voted in despite his having been declared ineligible for breaking a rule that baseball had established well enough before Pete Rose was even born, it would have been a travesty. It's not the Hall's fault that Rose isn't in yet, and I think Rose has more than served his time, so to say. But read again the comment from Bill James with which I closed the essay. My call: Sooner or later, and well enough before he is dead, Pete Rose will be reinstated - and, thus, will be elected to the Hall of Fame.

If Giamatti were to roll over in his grave, nobody would care.

Quite wrong. Rose himself acknowledges Giamatti wasn't his real enemy in the commissioner's office; to this day, he cites the precise language in both the formal agreement and Giamatti's declaration that he should be allowed reinstatement after a year. Rose had no reason to fault or doubt Giamatti, but of course Rose and everyone else could not have expected Giamatti to die before a week after the ruling's announcement. If anything, Pete Rose's real enemy was Fay Vincent, who may well have jammed Dingbat Joe Dowd down the throat of the commissioner's office and who turns out to have been less than we once thought him to be, on reinspection. I don't question Vincent loves baseball as deeply as Giamatti did, but I think it should be questioned whether Vincent was quite the gentle giant he has often been cracked up to be, even if you do feel sorry for his having been overthrown by Bug Selig.

These folks apparently haven't been reading the news. Pete Rose was treated no worse than Billy Dale was. Did this guy condemn the Clinton administration for its treatment of Billy Dale? I hope so.

WFTR
Bill

Shoeless Joe deserves in before that dope dealing thug and cheat does.

Merely because Pete Rose happened to have some very sleazeoid friends who happened to be dealing in drugs (predominantly steroids, as I understand it to have been) does not mean that Pete Rose himself was dealing drugs. As for Shoeless Joe Jackson, see my comment above to the other gentleman.

Given how absolutely compromised and squishy Major League Baseball has been in the past (Steve Howe violated drug rules 7 times!)

I don't disagree on the manner in which Steve Howe wasn't dealt with - although I do know, also, that Fay Vincent became a little too heavy handed (I speak politely) with the Yankees when he got his eighth drug strike.

Little remembered: Vincent not only called three Yankee officials including then-manager Buck Showalter onto his carpet, he also bullied and browbeat them in so doing - he practically ordered Showalter onto the carpet and threatened both his job and his baseball eligibility to do it; in addition, he threatened all three officials because at least one and possibly two of them, in answering questions from Vincent's representatives, had enunciated their own questions about the substance and manner of MLB's drug policy - they were certainly entitled to speak thus, and they did not deserve to be threatened with their jobs and their standing to hold baseball jobs merely for disagreeing with either a particular policy or portions and operations thereof.

It didn't mean anyone sympathised necessarily with Steve Howe in order for people to realise that his maltreatment of those three Yankee officials (Showalter, famously enough, was held up by Vincent and his people from showing up for the Yankees' game in New York that day, and it was the talk of New York for a couple of days) was an indication that Vincent had gone too far in asserting himself something short of a dictator, rather than merely a "strong" commissioner. It's a bloody shame that it turned out to be Bug Selig who led the overthrow of Vincent, considering the unmitigated disaster Selig has been, but if it hadn't been him it would have been, likely enough, someone else.

I can't see how they can just ignore the perfidy of somebody who gambled on his own team (!).

Aside from the point that it is not proven once and for all that Rose bet on his own team (it is at least likely that his sleazeoid companions of the time were laying down bets on the Reds and claiming them to be Rose's bets), I would ask how on earth merely betting on one team is more perfidious than accepting a payoff in a plan to fix and throw a World Series.

Take another look at precisely where adjacent to the plate Fosse was positioned (he was primed to use the sweep tag on Rose; in fact, Fosse actually never got to even touch the incoming ball, Rose having arrived into his body about a split second before the ball arrived at his mitt), and then tell me Rose could not have scored that run with a good hook slide beneath a tag.

There is a distinction between disproportionate (which is what I call the play) and dirty (it was disproportionate and probably beyond the bound of sanity, but you and I both could probably name a few dozen other plays that could be classified as truly dirty plays). Rose was hardly the only player, of his or any time, to go disproportionate. And he won't be the last one, either. But if the All-Star Game is not supposed to be an exhibitionist's tea party, neither does it have proper bearing upon a pennant race. You can play the All-Star Game clean and hard to win without careening into the rough side of Cloud Cuckoo-land to do it.

Yeah I know Joe won't be allowed in--but I still think he should be from some of what I have read about the scandal (been years and I can't remember the details--other than he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer --and most likely couldn't read).

The best book about the 1919 World Series scandal, Eight Men Out, remains in print. As does Baseball, Chicago Style. Very worth reading. It's much as I posited above: Jackson, more dumb than dishonest, cooked himself by having accepted (albeit somewhat reluctantly) both the idea of the fix and at least that first $5,000 envelope. He may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he at least understood a gambling or fixing payoff (the Black Sox were hardly the first baseball players of their day to get involved with fixing games, especially if the name Hal Chase rings a bell with you) when he saw one. And for this one, he paid with his baseball standing and the Hall of Fame enshrinement he will probably never earn. But if anyone could be called the true masterminds of the fix, it was, I repeat, shortstop Swede Risberg (the last of the Black Sox eight to die, incidentally) and first baseman Chick Gandil.

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