Pete Rose makes a thorny candidate for redemption. At 58, the game’s all-time leader in hits remains a knot of headfirst truculence and bad hair, easier to accredit than to hug. Yet he is also a rallying point for passionate ethical debate–a high road and a low road, all unto himself. Operating in the uniquely mock-grandiose moral universe of sports chatter, his travails stir intense passions–for fairness, forgiveness and a second chance even for jerks. Last week, Rose seemed to inch closer to getting his day in court. Major League Baseball’s lawyers agreed to meet his legal team in the new year. “We have a tremendous amount of evidence available to be submitted,” says Rose lawyer S. Gary Spicer, who says the lawyers have twice before requested such a meeting, to no avail. Spicer declines to discuss his materials, which were never presented in the original 1989 investigation (Rose agreed to his banishment rather than submit to a formal hearing), but says he hopes they will turn baseball’s heart. If not, he says, “all Pete’s evidence will become part of a public litigation-type forum.” Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig cautions that the league has not agreed to reconsider Rose’s case, or even to accept any materials. “I received the letter [from Rose’s lawyers] and I gave it to baseball’s lead attorney,” says Selig, who has shown no sign of reconsidering baseball’s position. “I thought he had a right to a meeting, but that’s all there was to it.”
For now, Rose remains the only living player on baseball’s permanently ineligible list, banned not just from the Hall of Fame, but from coaching or even sitting in an official broadcast booth. “There has been a tremendous loss of income in the arena he knows most about,” says Spicer. This, Rose has said, is the heart of the issue. Known in his playing days as Charlie Hustle, Rose now makes his living peddling his signature at card and memorabilia shows, as well as from two Pete Rose restaurants in Florida. The closest he has come to a return to the game was a stint last spring as a part-time hitting coach for the Solano Steelheads in northern California, a Western League team that has no affiliation with the big leagues.
Yet Rose is riding a recent groundswell of public support. In October, during the World Series, fans voted him one of the 30 greatest players of the century; the ovation he received at Atlanta’s Turner Field exceeded even that for hometown hero Hank Aaron. When NBC sportscaster Jim Gray asked him tough questions coming off the field, fans rallied behind Rose as if he were again the roguish, lunch-bucket hero of his playing days, harassed by some pusillanimous yuppie in what should have been his moment of glory. Rose used his air time to press his case. “Even Charles Manson gets a hearing every two years,” he told reporters. “My son thinks I’m a monster.”
Since the appearance, fans have flocked to Rose’s cause. According to a recent CNN/ USA Today/Gallup poll, 74 percent of the public believe he should be allowed in the Hall of Fame, up from 56 percent a decade ago. Last week an Internet start-up called Sportcut.com, run by the colorful former music-industry mogul Charles Koppelman, posted an e-petition calling for Rose’s reinstatement (Rose is also a paid pitchman for the site). More than 300,000 users filled out petitions in just the first two days, says Koppelman, who, among other distinctions, gave the world Vanilla Ice.
Through the generous lens of fan retrospection, it is easy to make light of a little gambling, especially when weighed against Rose’s accomplishments. After all, some of the stadiums that bar Rose accept ads for casinos. But fan memory can be selective. Before Rose waltzes back into baseball, it is worth taking a closer re-examination of the charges and evidence against him.
Rose’s troubles date back to the late 1980s, when he was manager of the Reds. Sportswriters following the team in those years describe a clubhouse full of “characters”: guys with gold chains and big muscles, three of whom were ultimately sentenced on charges ranging from running drugs to failure to report income from selling steroids. “They weren’t anything like the people fans imagine were hanging out with Pete Rose,” says Mike Sokolove, who covered the team for The Cincinnati Post. “We raised our eyebrows. But if you were around Pete enough, you were blind to it.” In 1989 one of the regulars, a bodybuilder named Paul Janszen, told baseball investigators that he had handled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bets for Pete Rose, including regular “two dime” ($2,000) bets on Rose’s own team, the Reds.
Seven other witnesses ultimately corroborated or expanded upon Janszen’s testimony, which investigators supported with bookies’ logs, phone records and taped telephone conversations. “He only didn’t bet when [the erratic] Mario Soto was pitching,” says John Dowd, a former federal prosecutor who led the investigation. Rose denied betting on baseball, telling investigators, “I’m guilty of one thing in this whole mess, and that’s I was a horses–t selector of friends.” On Aug. 24, 1989, after Rose failed in court to block a formal hearing, he and the then baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti signed an agreement declaring Rose permanently exiled from the game. By signing the document, Rose acknowledged “a factual basis” for the penalty, but without “an admission or denial” of guilt. The Hall of Fame, a semi-independent corporate entity, shortly ruled that players on baseball’s ineligible list could not be inducted into the hall. In 1990 Rose began five months in federal prison for failing to report $354,986 in income from card shows.
Dowd, who no longer works for Major League Baseball, is one of the passionate believers in the case against Pete Rose. In recent years the commissioner’s office has asked Dowd not to discuss the case, and even brought a complaint against him to the D.C. bar (“The bar dismissed the case,” he says). Yet he has remained outspoken. After the World Series, he launched a Web site with the original 228-page report from his 1989 investigation, detailing a history of alleged betting and debt that went well beyond the occasional friendly wager. He posted it, he says, because after the World Series he “couldn’t make enough [print] copies to meet the demand.” Spicer calls Dowd’s report “flawed, and severely imbalanced. It did not present any exculpatory evidence.”
Does Rose have a prayer? Despite public sympathy, baseball’s high offices have remained resolute that he got a fair shake back in 1989. In the 10 years that followed, Rose has offered no evidence to contradict the Dowd report. Dowd, among others, believes that Rose’s biggest stumbling block is his refusal to confess and apologize. “Baseball would have wrapped its arms around the guy,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen.” The public seems ready–for a sanctified Rose in the hall, at least, if not necessarily for a profane one on the field. In a sport that has embraced drug offenders, wife-beaters and all-around heels, abject apology is the easiest route to forgiveness. Unfortunately, Pete Rose never did anything the easy way.
