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."

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.

You're probably right on both counts, but I think I'd take Vincent over Selig any day of the week. Selig and his policies (as well as the obduracy of the Players Union) will be the death of baseball, literally

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.

But as you mentioned, Shoeless Joe was a naif and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And practically a victim himself. Rose's antics over 20 years has been, in aggregate, shameful, IMO (and others). At least I , personally, don't miss him.

But as you mentioned, Shoeless Joe was a naif and not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He was a functional illiterate, strictly speaking. But he was not entirely unaware of game fixing (it had, in fact, run rampant in baseball and such other professional sports as existed in the 1910s and 1920s). And he was certainly aware enough of the motive which animated the fix in the first place, namely: the Risberg-Gandil faction of White Sox who'd felt (rightly enough) burned to a crisp by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey's perfidious ways with money. (As a matter of fact, it may have been so that the actual impetus for the fix was Comiskey's attempt to cheat pitcher Eddie Cicotte out of a bonus his contract called for paying him if he should win 30 games in 1929; Cicotte was benched with 29 wins and told by his manager he was being rested for the World Series; Cicotte was silently outraged. As it turned out, it was Cicotte's confession which broke the silence a year after the 1919 World Series and broke the scandal open at last.)

Jackson probably did have second thoughts about the fix in the end - his play in the World Series leaves it a very open question. But the fact that he did know of and participate in the fix's beginning (third baseman Buck Weaver, the eighth man out, never accepted a payoff but got banned because he knew of the fix and said nothing), and that he did accept at least the initial $5,000 envelope early in the Series, is what attached the black marks to him. It is a sad story; Jackson otherwise seems to have been a decent enough fellow. (He certainly doesn't come across to be even half the sleazebags Risberg and Gandil seem to have been.)

Now, I'm sure nobody is exactly prepared to call Pete Rose a saint. I'm certainly not calling him a saint. But however much one sympathises with Joe Jackson personally and might condemn Pete Rose as a person, it's not their persons which got them in trouble, it was their actions, to whatever level. And as distasteful a person as Pete Rose can be, it yet remains so that being accused of just betting on your own team (remember: it is proven that Rose was a chronic bookie gambler on sports; it is not proven conclusively that he bet on baseball in general, his team in particular, or both) is something very far short of being accused to trying to fix the outcome of a game which is designed to yield up a winner in fair and unvarnished competition of skill and intelligence.

I assure you that I spoke with regret when I spoke of Fay Vincent; it was only recently that I became aware of much of the detail involving both his mal-handling of the Steve Howe/Yankee situation and that it had been he who pressed Dowd on Ueberroth/Giamatti.

All things considered I would have to say I, too, given the absolute choice, would choose Vincent over Bat-head Bug Selig. But that does seem - sadly enough, given Vincent's intelligence and his genuine love for the game - a bit like having to choose absolutely between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

A City on Fire: The Story of the '68 Detroit Tigers. The true story of a team that helped heal a shattered city. Tuesday, July 30 at 10 pm.

I'm looking forward to watching that one. Especially to see how the great paradox therein is analysed: here was a city shattered enough that the Tigers' winning the Series should have been indeed a huge salve. So what did Detroit do when the Tigers nailed that triumph? They went out and upended the neighbourhood. Again. (Something that repeated itself even more when the Tigers won the big prize in 1984.)

I had the pleasure of visiting old Tiger Stadium for a game while I was traveling in 1998 (the Tigers and the Cincinnati Reds were doing a Negro Leagues tribute night, the Tigers in Detroit Stars uniforms and the Reds, the Kansas City Monarchs, I think they were wearing), and I found the natives to be quite civil and a delight to share a baseball game with. But I didn't have the heart to ask how such a seemingly civil city could break the neighbourhood over a pair of World Series wins.

But precisely what Billy Dale's treatment by the Clintonistas has to do with Pete Rose's by Giamatti's successors (it wasn't, for one thing, Giamatti or his successors who got Pete Rose in trouble with the tax man, nor did Pete Rose's trouble with the tax man involve his gambling) escapes me for the moment...

The connection is that in your original piece you said that the people would condemn the government if it treated citizens the way that baseball treated Pete Rose. The fact is that the government has treated people much worse than baseball treated Mr. Rose, but the people never condemned the government and specifically Bill Clinton in any meaningful way. I should have written my post more carefully to express that I disagreed with your statement about the people's reaction to unjust government rather than suggesting that you failed to criticize Clinton. For that mistake, I apologize. My point was that "the people's" moral outrage over true injustices is not what it once was. I have mixed feelings about the Pete Rose situation, but even if I supported him completely, I wouldn't look to our current culture to care.

In any case, I thought the article was interesting and well-written overall. Again, it wasn't my intention to be insulting but only to point out how much that one statement struck me as overly optimistic about our society's ability to feel moral outrage over true injustice. Congrats on being able to maintain a career as a professional writer. I like to dabble, but I'll probably never quite make it.

WFTR
Bill

Since when does a catcher get to creep up the 3rd base line in an attempt to block the plate while not having even tracked the throw home yet?

He can creep up the line as far as he likes so far as he is in front of the line, on the infield side of the line, and not on the line itself or its dirt path. As a matter of fact, Rose most likely had the play beaten by a half step at the plate - even using a hook slide, his arriving just ahead of the ball into Fosse's mitt would still have scored that run. Had Fosse been blocking the plate by smothering over it or otherwise covering the plate entirely, rather than being that step or two up and in front of the line, then might Rose have been justified by the rulebook. Bear in mind, always, that just because the rules allow for something does not always mean said something is either advisable or ethical.

It's too bad that Fosse became gun shy after that incident, but the play was clean, hard baseball.

Gun shy? Ray Fosse didn't know the meaning of the word quit. But he had another wounding flaw, as he himself has admitted in the years since: He was one of those players who, for myriad reasons including a reluctance to appear as though he "couldn't take it," waited for his manager to notice he was in particularly bad shape, even if he could barely swing the bat or throw a ball properly. The Indians began the second half of that season in Kansas City, and Fosse took a turn in the batting cage before the game, barely able to swing the bat, and nervous about telling manager Alvin Dark he was in too much pain to play.

Fosse's nickname as an Indian was The Mule. He continued playing despite the shoulder injury, and not until the following spring, when a doctor examined him for back pains, did he realise his shoulder was still in big trouble - broken. The inflammation and swelling from the Rose collision was apparently severe enough that the actual fracture and separation didn't show up in the initial X-rays.

"I obviously was hurt," he told Terry Pluto, author of The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump, "but I figured unless the bone was sticking out of the skin, you played. But no one came to me and said, 'Ray, are you hurt? What's wrong, why don't you take some days off?'...But I played through July and August, then I broke my right index finger in early September and my season was over."

Even with only one good arm and his power hitting cut into severely, Fosse still managed to hit .297 somehow for the second half of 1970. He also suffered several rounds of nagging injuries as time went on, usually to his hands or his fingers, not to mention his knees, and did I mention also his shattering several vertebrae in his neck trying to break up a brawl between Bill North and Reggie Jackson during his days with the Oakland Athletics?

The corollary effects of all those - his power hitting was all but erased, and his throwing arm was irreparably compromised - is probably what causes people to presume he was made gun shy by the Rose collision. He bulldogged himself to a seven and a half year career, in fact; you could make a case that, all things considered, he was damn lucky to end up with a .255 career batting average 55 homers from 1970 through his retirement, He had his uses on three straight Oakland pennant winners, but his own mulishness despite the Rose collision is probably the most likely reason Ray Fosse never put up the career he was projected to put up. (There were those who actually considered him in the first half of 1970 better than Thurman Munson, then the comer of the Yankees, and having seen them both play that season it's not entirely farfetched: Fosse was the more talented of the two before the Rose collision.)

I mentioned the Fosse collision and the hitting streak in context of discussing Rose viz ethics and ethics viz Rose, and illustrating the point that when it came to ethics Rose was not always beneath suspicion - in the same context, I mentioned the manner in which he played the hoopla around his passing Ty Cobb as an example of the better side of Rose's on-field ethics. It was a contextual reference. Though, I must confess, baseball writers - whether seasoned and properly aged in soul, or whether aspiring Webziners like yours truly - do tend to digress here and there, but in this instance it was a digression within a certain context.

Yet , in some ways I'm nostalgaic; nostalgiac for the days when a rule was a rule and standards of behavior were enforced mercilously. But maybe there never really was such a day, was there (particularly in Baseball )?

There may never have been, really, such a day in any organised team sport, never mind baseball. And, for that matter - and this is something too many of today's fans either forget or never really knew - the so-called "good old days" weren't exactly such good old days, in too many ways. Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth may be only the very best known of the old-time baseball stars whose play was as exemplary as their characters were not.

This is perhaps the most compelling reason why we tend, on the rare enough occasions when we find such people, to make such amplified fuss over that creature who is at once a magnificent athlete and an exemplary person; why, for example, Sandy Koufax - who was so much a gentleman that even when he pitched he resorted to a knockdown pitch only when it was imperatively necessary ("Sandy," Allen Barra has written, "preferred to intimidate by domination") - to this day is considered on his own plateau. In case you were curious, Koufax these days works as a free-lance pitching coach - he did work in that capacity for the Dodgers from about 1978-1990 or thereabouts, then became a freelance, though he does work with the Dodgers each spring training. And my understanding is that, though he could command a phenomenal fee for his teaching, he accepts only his basic expenses being paid for each such gig. "I just like to teach," he is quoted as saying.

Koufax apparently was the same way when he did pitch. Don Sutton has been quoted as saying, "A lot of people like to keep everyone else down when they get to the top; Sandy wanted to bring everybody else up there with him." There's another story about Koufax which I found even more telling about the man: in these pre-free agency days, when the minimum rookie salary was $8,000 a year, Koufax was chatting in the Dodger clubhouse with a couple of teammates when he noticed a rookie outfielder named Jim Barbieri in a corner of the clubhouse. This was in 1965, as the pennant race began heating up in earnest. Thinking ahead to the World Series, Koufax, reportedly, said without provocation, and indicating Barbieri, "You know, if I can just keep pitching the way I'm supposed to pitch, I can double that man's income."

I suppose a lot of it is a human level version of the old saw that a plane crash is news but the millions of safe flights from takeoff to landing are routine. We're so accustomed now to learning the most scandalous among professioal athletes that we could follow a particular player his entire career and not know how basically decent he was as a person even as he was good or great as a player, unless he's playing in a high-media region. We know, for example, that Derek Jeter of the Yankees and Al Leiter of the Mets are as decent as people as they are as baseball players. But now think of someone like Curt Schilling, the Arizona pitcher - it's only in the last couple of seasons, even though he has been a front-line pitcher for over a decade, that we've begun to learn that Schilling the man is at least as good and probably better than Schilling the prospective Hall of Fame pitcher.

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