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Pete Rose's Pony Ride
The Polo Grounds: A Calm Review of Baseball ^ | 23 July 2002 | Jeff Kallman

Posted on 07/26/2002 2:58:28 PM PDT by BluesDuke

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."


TOPICS: Sports
KEYWORDS: baseball; halloffame; peterose; ponyathleticshoes
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To: Nonstatist
P.S...And I guess you could argue that there are many characters in the Hall with similiar qualities of character.

We could argue that there are many enough characters in the Hall of Fame with lesser character than Pete Rose. (His idol Ty Cobb comes immediately to mind, though I have elsewhere read that so long as Ty Cobb didn't feel threatened, in any situation, he could actually be and often was a very nice fellow.) But it is as Bill James enunciated: Rose isn't banned from baseball because he was a bad person, he's banned because he broke the rules. For better or worse, many enough behaviours we would deem suspect if not immoral are not against the rules of professional sports but gambling is, and not just in baseball. (Think, for example, of all those periodic point-shaving scandals that hit basketball every few years.)

On the other hand, Pete Rose was never accused of hanging his manager by his legs out the window of a speeding train - as Babe Ruth actually did once do...
41 posted on 07/26/2002 9:23:34 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: WFTR
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.

I probably had in mind those among us who do feel such outrage. I tend to believe there are more such than acknowledged, but that they don't all have outlets to enunciate their thought, whether as employed writers or a fellow like me trying to reconstitute his professional life. (I am not at present formally employed as a writer, though I have been a professional ever since the end of my Air Force days in 1987, and the one-man show Webzine where I published this thread's title essay originally this week is one I write and edit myself, on the ground that even if one is not being paid again to write, just yet, one must still keep the instrument in tune sharply. That and I, like George Will, wanted to be a baseball writer when I grew up.)
42 posted on 07/26/2002 10:23:57 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
...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...

I can tell you about the '84 celebration, having witnessed it first-hand.

Though, I missed some of it because I had to wash the blood from my hand and try to stop the bleeding, due to slipping and falling off the damn light pole. I did take advantage of my being temporarily stuck in the Shell gas-station garage (where they let me use their fawcett) across from the stadium to call home. I remember my father telling me that there was a riot going on down there. I looked out the window and confirmed that, yes, there was a riot going on down here. I also said that I'd have to stay here awhile, because my car would have to cross Michigan Avenue, and I didn't want my car destroyed.

Anyway, I wonder what I could get on Ebay for eighteen-year old outfield turf and a couple of light bulbs taken from the left-field auxilliary scoreboard that night.

But, as far as I could see, the damage was limited to a few cars, and a lot of "disrespecting" of Detroit Police who were trying to end all the fun. There were no busisess that were looted or anything like that.

But, to answer your question, I guess I have no idea why fans would behave like that. I know I never would (again). I guess it's just that a few idiots can really make a big show and ruin the reputation of the whole group.

43 posted on 07/27/2002 2:29:02 AM PDT by Flashlight
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To: Flashlight
I guess it's just that a few idiots can really make a big show and ruin the reputation of the whole group.

Goes back to the syndrome we news folk (I've been a journalist for the better part of my adult life, though currently not formally employed as one) describe as, well, it's news when the plane crashes but no one wants to pick up the paper or turn on the television and hear that several million flights a week take off and land safe and sound (although, in the immediate weeks after 9/11, you can understand where it almost flipped over for awhile!). That kind of thing. For better or worse, the idiot brigades get the attention precisely because they are in the minority. Comparing the two Detroit World Series explosions, I'd have to say the 1968 eruption was probably more crowded and violent than the 1984 eruption, though I don't remember anyone overturning cars as was reported to have happened in '84. And, dearly though I love the Chicago Cubs' endearing mystique of the long dark hours of failure, and long-enough-time Red Sox fan though I have been, I'm almost half afraid of what would happen if the Cubs or the Red Sox should win a World Series again - or, better yet, if they should play each other in the Series and one (as must happen) wins.

Apparently, it isn't always the celebrating fans who are ready to trash the joint. When the Cubs beat the Tigers to win the 1906 World Series (yep, you can look it up - the Cubs), Cub pitching ace Three-Finger Brown would remember the club practically needing a police escort to get out of town alive. And, of course, recent memory instructs about the all-but-riot that broke out in Los Angeles after the Lakers won the first of their current three straight NBA titles. (It probably wasn't half as bad as people saw in news reports, but like you said - the idiot brigades live...)

Which reminds me of how some hemmed, hawed, and harrumphed when Shea Stadium fans exploded into bedlam on the field after the 1969 Miracle Mets nailed that Series against Baltimore. The hem-haw-harrumphers forgot that the worst those fans did was turn the playing field into the survivors of a close-air-support bombing raid (there's a famous picture of Met pitchers Tom Seaver and Gary Gentry walking across the field after the crowd was gone at last, still in their uniforms, surveying the damage) - but New York City itself went unscathed. And the ticker-tape parade bestowed upon the Mets was a crowd crunch but almost nothing more.

I have also read where Brooklyn went apesh@t following the Dodgers' only World Series triumph there (in 1955) but that the only untoward thing that happened was the shooting of a Dodger fan in a Brooklyn tavern by a visiting Yankee fan (who admitted he couldn't bear the thought of his Yankees losing even one Series to them Bums), but otherwise Brooklyn was one loud and crazy party with nothing destructive.
44 posted on 07/27/2002 9:19:22 AM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
Hey, cut that out...you two guys are making me blush! ;)

A little Pancake No. 10 oughta take care of that!

Good read, as always ... so apparently, I don't need to buy the book, eh? :)

45 posted on 07/27/2002 9:55:05 AM PDT by MozarkDawg
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To: MississippiDeltaDawg
*ROFL*

Whaddya mean, you don't have to buy the book? ;)
46 posted on 07/27/2002 10:52:16 AM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
Hehehe ... &;-)
47 posted on 07/28/2002 5:07:45 AM PDT by 2Trievers
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To: BluesDuke
Recent memory instructs about the all-but-riot that broke out in Los Angeles after the Lakers won the first of their current three straight NBA titles.

How sad. I went to the parade in '88 (?) after they won the second of the back-to-back championships and it was civilized.

48 posted on 07/28/2002 6:41:44 PM PDT by altair
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To: altair
So was this year's parade. They kept everything well enough in order and a splendid time seemed guaranteed by one and all (I listened over the radio to the parade and celebration ceremonies). As I recall reading, so was the hoopla when the Dodgers won the 1988 World Series. Now that I think of it, the weirdest thing that happened with the 1986 Series was the parachutist who dropped from the sky to aside the pitcher's mound carrying a "Go Mets" sign...
49 posted on 07/28/2002 7:09:07 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
When the Cubs beat the Tigers to win the 1906 World Series (yep, you can look it up - the Cubs)

Well I looked it up Blues..seems you were off by a year or two. In 1906 the White Sox defeated the Cubs 4 games to 2 in the World Series. In 1907 and 1908 The Cubs won their World Series both over Detroit by 4-0 and 4-1 respectively. 6 more seasons to the century mark for no Cub World Series Championships. Red Sox fans still have about 16 or so seasons to go...should be an interesting "celebration" for both of them.

50 posted on 08/05/2002 4:22:01 PM PDT by xp38
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To: xp38
Right you are - nice catch on my typo! I should have remembered the actual dates, especially since I had just been re-reading something about the crowd madness that caused the Cubs to need the police to get out of town alive, and boy should I have remembered 1906 as the year the Hitless Wonders White Sox knocked off the Cubs in the Series. (Does that say Cubs all over, that they could lose a Series to a team nicknamed the Hitless Wonders?) Though I have to admit, reading the teams on paper, I'm surprised the '07 Tigers didn't at least play even-up with the Cubs, take it to a seventh game, the '07 Tigers were a good enough team...

I have seen much speculation and fantasising on the idea that maybe the only way to bust the infamous Curse of the Bambino would be for the Red Sox to meet and beat the Cubs in a Series again, since the 1918 Series matched the two teams and Ruth was still one of the Sox's top pitchers. I find it fascinating enough a prospect, but with my luck what'll happen is - such a Series goes down to a seventh game, they get to the bottom of the ninth (in Fenway Park, of course!), and the Red Sox launch a two-out rally, get the bases loaded, and...the second great Northeastern power failure hits, Boston blacks out, and still-Alleged Commissioner Bug Selig declares that in the interest of fairness due to circumstances beyond his control, he is thereby proclaiming the Series a tie and splitting the championship.
51 posted on 08/05/2002 7:12:57 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
:) You create good fantasies too!!!
52 posted on 08/05/2002 8:28:23 PM PDT by xp38
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To: xp38
The only problem is, we Red Sox fans (Cub fans, too, for that matter) would be only too afraid that my little fantasy is precisely what would occur!
53 posted on 08/05/2002 10:13:35 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: hole_n_one
Pete Rose lied for 14 years about betting on baseball. He now claims that he never bet AGAINST the team ha managed. Why should he be believed now? He releases his book at the same time some players who EARNED their way into the HOF are being announced. Pete Rose should be allowed into the HOF, with a plaque that has no bust(just a name) and states why he was banned. However, he should never be allowed to manage, coach, scout, or have any other position with any MLB team. He lost that right by means of his own deceit.

Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.
54 posted on 01/09/2004 8:08:02 PM PST by MAXFAX
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