Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (26 page)

At nights in Marion the prisoners were allowed to watch sports on a TV in the rec room, and that October the Reds, managed by Lou Piniella, reached the World Series against the Oakland A’s. Pete watched the games a little differently, you might say, from the other men at the correctional facility. He liked to forecast moves that Piniella (or Oakland’s manager, Tony La Russa) would make an inning or two ahead of time, and most often he was right. “It was crazy the way he could do it,” says Guide. “He could read those games inside and out, he knew the team so well; he knew so much about the guys and the situations.”

The 1990 Reds, free of the Rose scandal and the media barrage that had buried them the year before, won 91 games and finished on top of the National League West with room to spare. They beat the Pirates in the playoffs, and although the A’s were heavily favored in the Series, the Reds knocked them off in four straight games. “Pete taught a lot of us how to play,” said the veteran infielder Ron Oester during the sweep. And by that Oester was referring to an attitude toward the game. “He helped put this together.”

Everyone around the club knew that, understood that this championship was something that Rose had helped to build. About seven months before the Series, March of 1990, Pete was in Plant City, Fla., where he owned a house and where the Reds still trained. He was six months into his ban and playing golf at the Walden Lake course with Tom Browning, the lefthanded pitcher who as a rookie had been the winning pitcher on Sept. 11, 1985, the night of 4,192, and who remained an anchor of the Reds staff. Browning stood at the 8th tee when all of sudden the new Cincinnati manager, Piniella, appeared. Lou had seen Browning from the road in passing and thought to stop and say hello. What Piniella had not seen, however, was Rose, hidden from his view by a stand of palmettos. As Piniella came up to greet Browning, he and Rose found themselves suddenly face-to-face.

“There was an immediate and very awkward silence, really so quiet,” says Browning. “It felt like 10 minutes.” This was a warm and sunny-hazy day in Plant City and birds wheeled overhead. “Finally Lou puts out his hand and says, ‘Pete, it’s good to see you. I’d love to sit down together and talk about your team.’ That’s what Lou said, ‘your team,’ which was classy. And it was also true.”

Says Browning, “The whole thing had to break Pete’s heart. But he just shook Piniella’s hand and said, ‘Sure. That would be great.’ ”

All during the World Series that October the topic came up of how odd and almost eerie it was that Rose, Mr. Red, was nowhere to be seen— except that is, in the historical sections of the Reds media guide, and in the stories some of the players told, and on the backs of the people who wore Rose’s jersey in the Riverfront stands. “I’ve got his address at that place in Illinois right in my pocket,” said Johnny Bench, who was working the Series as a commentator on CBS radio. “But whenever I think about writing him, I wonder about what I’d say.”

THEY ALL high-fived in the Marion rec room after the Reds won it all, although there was not a cork to be popped, and talk of the Reds filled mess hall conversations for weeks. Pete felt grateful to have Guide, along with a couple of other inmates, to help see him through. In later years Rose was never shy about this gratitude, never ashamed. “Hey, this is my friend Billy,” he would say, cheerfully introducing Guide to Mike Schmidt or to Steve Carlton, when Guide came to see him at a show somewhere. “This is the guy who took care of me when I was in prison.” Guide met Carol and Tyler and Pete Jr. as well. “Pete did not turn his back on me after he got out,” says Guide. “He made me feel good and accepted.”

When in November the Associated Press sent Rose a letter at Marion asking if he would answer some interview questions, he declined. He did, however, write back on a sheet of lined paper: “Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to respond to your questions. However, at this time I’m not ready to talk to the media. I hope you understand and maybe sometime in the near future we can sit down and talk. Sincerely, Pete Rose.”

And then he added, still winking, that same Pete Rose: “P.S. Please excuse the stationery.”

Rose would get out of Marion on Jan. 7, 1991, and that same winter’s day he would arrive (with Carol beside him and riding in a black Jaguar driven by Jeff Ruby’s wife, Rackele) at the halfway house, the Talbert House in Cincinnati, where he would sleep on a cot every night for three months. He checked out in the mornings when he left to do his community service—assisting gym teachers at inner city schools—and he checked back in at the end of the day. He sometimes wore a ballcap that read 4,192.

During his final weeks in Marion, though, Pete had already been looking ahead, past the Talbert House and the community service, to a new future, away from Cincinnati. The house in Indian Hill went up for sale and the house in Plant City too. Pete and the family were preparing to move into a new place in Boca Raton. He would do his appearances and work his card shows and make a go of it in the restaurant business. Play golf. Bet the dogs. Things were easier in Florida, he said, “more action, more to do.” And Pete knew too, as he swept up the welding scraps each day in the penitentiary or played some handball in the rec area, that even if he wasn’t yet ready to try for reinstatement to baseball, at least something else was coming: Late in 1991 (he’d be about 11 months free of Marion), his name was to appear before more than 400 baseball writers on a Hall of Fame ballot. Rose would be eligible for induction for the first time.

Chapter 17

Gate Keepers

T
HEY GATHERED together, 10 men in a meeting room in a hotel in the center of New York City, and for eight of those men the purpose and intent of the gathering was clear: Keep Pete Rose out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This was a special committee put together by the Hall of Fame’s board of directors and led, at least nominally, by Edward Stack, the Hall’s president. The committee was stocked with influential guardians of the game: American League president Bobby Brown and his predecessor Lee MacPhail; former National League president Chub Feeney. Sixty-four-year–old Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts was on the committee too and, in a cosmetic gesture, two members of the Baseball Writers’ Association, executive secretary Jack Lang and past president Phil Pepe, were also invited to take part. The meeting had not been explicitly labeled as a means for barring Rose, nor had Rose’s situation even found its way onto the formal agenda, which included discussion of nuances of the Hall’s voting procedure. The idea from the top was to draw less attention rather than more to the committee’s true mission.

Rose had been released from Marion three days before this meeting, but plans to deny him his chance at Cooperstown had been brewing since soon after he’d entered prison. There was nothing to prevent a banned player from being elected to the Hall of Fame, and the thought of Rose being celebrated and honored with a bronze plaque after his impudent flouting of Rule 21, after his tax conviction and prison time, and with baseball’s leadership still in the long shadow of Bart Giamatti’s untimely death, held little appeal to the Hall of Fame’s 16-member board of directors. One somewhat notable board member, baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, Giamatti’s successor, had said privately and firmly that he believed induction into Cooperstown is best suited to upright and honorable men. With Rose about to appear on the ballot alongside contemporaries such as Tom Seaver and Tony Perez, the board of directors was so determined to block him that it was willing to rewrite the rules.

Among the actual voters, the baseball writers, debate over whether or not Rose deserved induction had begun almost immediately at the time of his banishment from the game. Some writers had vowed that they would not support Rose. (Charles Scoggins of the
Lowell
(Mass.)
Sun
said, “As long as the lifetime ban exists for the commissioner I wouldn’t be voting for him.”) Others said they would. (Joe Goddard of the
Chicago Sun-Times
said, “It doesn’t change what I would be voting for and that is Pete Rose as a player.”) It was hard to truly gauge the depth of Rose’s support or opposition, and the uncertainty of how the overall vote might go made folks uneasy in Cooperstown and in the Park Avenue offices of Major League Baseball. While it was true that neither the writers nor the Veterans Committee had ever inducted the banned Shoeless Joe Jackson over the many years that they had the chance, there was no way to be sure what would happen with Rose.

It was MacPhail who brought up the motion in that hotel meeting room on Jan. 10, 1991. The group was seated around a conference table and everyone wore shirt and tie. Saying he was “very concerned,” that Rose might be inducted, MacPhail proposed that the committee recommend to the board that it add a clause to the voting regulations: “Any person on baseball’s ineligible list shall not be eligible for election to the Hall of Fame.” This was later shortened to: “Persons on the ineligible list cannot be eligible candidates.”

Lang and Pepe protested strongly but to no avail. The motion went to a vote and came back 7 to 2 in favor of the recommendation. Then Stack added his name to the minority, siding with Pepe and Lang to make the final score 7 to 3. “If it had been 5–4 when it came to Ed there is no way he would have voted to even it up,” says Pepe. “It was a calculated vote, for show.” (Similarly, Lang said to reporters at the time that Stack “was just trying to make himself look good.”) Stack responded by saying that wasn’t true—that he honestly believed the writers association should continue to control the Hall of Fame fate of even those players banned from the major leagues. But Stack also claimed that the committee and its recommendation was not meant to target Rose, thus making it hard, in these matters, to take Stack at his word. Said Lang of the committee process: “It was a sham, from start to finish.”

Less than a month after the committee’s vote, the Hall of Fame’s full board officially passed the resolution into its election bylaws. The democratic process had after more than 50 years been abruptly scuttled, and done so in a direct rebuff to the spirit and intentions of the Hall of Fame’s founders—no longer would the fate of all players be entrusted to hundreds of veteran writers who cover the game. No longer would the voting necessarily aspire to reflect the feelings of the everyday baseball fan.
¹

The Hall of Fame is a private institution supported by a public trust, and it has at times taken it upon itself to alter and amend certain guidelines. After the death of Roberto Clemente, the Hall permanently waived its five-year waiting period in the case of a deceased candidate. In 1977 the board adopted a resolution to allow for the induction of the old Cleveland pitcher Addie Joss even though Joss had not played the 10 seasons required for eligibility. In tweaking its ballot guidelines in ’84 and again in ’93, the Hall added grandfather clauses to maintain the eligibility of any players who had been adversely affected by earlier tweaks. What the board did to Pete Rose in ’91, however, remains the only time that it has taken measures designed specifically to keep a particular player
out
.

There is nothing keeping this 1991 rule in place; it is hardly etched in granite. Tomorrow, the Hall of Fame’s board could pass an amendment to the resolution that says, “Persons on baseball’s ineligible list cannot be eligible candidates…unless the person is baseball’s career hits leader.”

Or: “…unless the person played in more than 500 games at each of five positions.”

Or: “…unless the player wore number 14 and sang in an aftershave commercial.”

If such suggestions (greeted with understandable chuckles when I presented them on separate occasions to current board members Joe Morgan and Phil Niekro) seem specious, and narrower in theory than the rule that the board of directors passed in 1991, in practice they are not. Consider, after all, the alltime list of players who by virtue of achievement would have appeared on the baseball writers’ Hall of Fame ballot but who did not appear on account of being on Major League Baseball’s ineligible list. The list is printed here in its entirety: Pete Rose.

When the Hall of Fame ballots were counted in January of 1992, the first year Rose would have been eligible, Rose drew 41 write-in votes, the most writeins, by far, that anyone has ever received. Those voters supported him even knowing that their votes would not be officially counted. If Rose had been eligible—that year and in the years that followed—maybe he would have still gotten those same 41 votes. Maybe he would have gotten fewer. Maybe he would have gotten more. Maybe he would have received the 323 votes that he would have needed to join the Hall of Fame class of 1992 alongside Tom Seaver and Rollie Fingers. We’ll never know.

The Rose resolution was then and remains the greatest disservice to be inflicted upon the Hall of Fame induction process, an injustice not simply to the player and the voters but also to the fans, the people who sustain the institution. There have been other cases in which the voting has for one reason or another seemed compromised—mostly relating to the earliest years of the Hall or to matters of the Veterans Committee— but none other has so deeply stained the procedure nor delivered such a blow to the integrity of the process as a whole.

THE THREE players who were inducted into the Hall of Fame via the baseball writers’ vote on July 21, 1991—about five months after Rose had been ruled ineligible for the Hall and about five months before he would have appeared on the ballot—make for an interesting study in themselves: Rod Carew, Ferguson Jenkins and Gaylord Perry.

Carew was a fabulous, precise offensive player who held his bat in the manner of a fly fisherman handling his rod. He won seven batting titles and an MVP, was a daring base runner and retired (with a .328 lifetime batting average) as arguably the best pure singles hitter of his generation. Carew was born in 1945 on a passenger train in Panama, where he lived until age 15 before moving to New York City. Over the course of his 19 major league seasons with the Twins and Angels his teams did not appear in a single World Series; upon receiving his Hall of Fame plaque, Carew kissed it and began to weep.

Jenkins, an exceptionally consistent righthander who won 20 games in a season seven times and pitched to a 3.34 career ERA over 4,500 innings, was in 1980 known as well for a less inspiring reason. While a member of the Texas Rangers, Jenkins was arrested and later convicted after airport officials in Canada found about four grams of cocaine in his luggage. Jenkins, a Canadian citizen and national hero there, would receive no jail time but drew a suspension from baseball that lasted for two weeks. He was repentant, reflective and contrite about his transgression, volunteering to speak with children about drug use. “Nobody’ll find any more of that stuff in my luggage,” he said. Eleven years later, before giving his induction speech, Jenkins was asked his opinion on Rose (each of the inductees were asked about Rose, repeatedly); he made his case without even mentioning all the hits: “Pete deserves to be in the Hall of Fame because of his careerlong hustle and because of the influence he had on each of the teams he played with,” said Jenkins.
²

And then there was Perry, perhaps baseball’s most noted cheater of the presteroid era. The superb righty won 314 games and two Cy Young Awards and struck out more than 3,500 batters, and did so, he proudly admits, while putting a little something extra on the ball. Perry’s autobiography
Me and the Spitter
came out in 1974, 12 seasons into his 22-year career. Part of Perry’s effectiveness came from the fact that preoccupied batters believed he was throwing a doctored baseball even when he was not (he fidgeted famously on the hill, irritating hitters; Rose used to yell from the batter’s box, “You have to cheat to get me out!”); but Perry acknowledged that at one time or another he had used not only saliva but also wax, K-Y jelly, resin and other substances on the baseball. In ’82 he was ejected from a game and suspended for 10 days after umpires discovered him holding a ball greased with some indeterminate muck.

Heavy clouds (but no rain) filled the sky above Main Street in the summer of ’91, as Perry and the other inductees accepted their plaques. People in the crowd waved the flag of Panama for Carew and Canadians who had come by the busloads held up the Maple Leaf for Jenkins. Thunder clapped. Lightning flashed. Along with the new Hall of Famers and the other distinguished guests on hand (DiMaggio was there, and Williams), appeared commissioner Fay Vincent, who introduced the inductees. Asked now, Vincent says he does not think that Perry belongs in the Hall of Fame (because of the cheating); but at the induction he offered no objections, smiling and joking gently as he handed the plaque to Perry.

The commissioner cut a strong figure at the ceremony. He posed for photos and greeted the older stars and talked with Stack and some of the writers. He distanced himself from Rose when the topic came up—too hot just then—but in all that he did and said Vincent seemed confident, secure and, behind his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, even wise, the owl-eyed man.

ALTHOUGH VINCENT maintained then and continues to maintain now that he had no involvement in the Hall of Fame’s decision to render Rose ineligible—he neither attended the meeting nor voted in absentia when the board passed the resolution, explaining that he did not want the controversy to become “a Vincent-Rose” matter—that has always proved a tough pill to get down. He was the commissioner of baseball and his feelings on Rose were solicited and wellknown. He might after all have spoken out against the board’s anti-Rose motion (as Giamatti may well have done), but he did not. Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame were, in the words of Bobby Brown, “kind of one and the same.” And, as the president of the Baseball Writers’ Association Kit Stier said back then of Vincent’s bearing on the Rose resolution, “He’s the one I believe who has created this situation.”

“No,” says Vincent. “I did not push for the Hall of Fame to put in that rule. But I think it is a good rule. I like it.”

In the heat of the baseball morality play surrounding Rose’s fall, Giamatti and Rose emerged as the Christ and the antichrist. Giamatti set, confirmed and delivered Rose’s punishment, firmly casting him out. He was the face and protector of baseball during the investigation, bearing the brunt of the criticism (and the anger and the death threats), as well as large helpings of respect and applause. Giamatti handled himself masterfully in the spotlight, articulating a philosophy of idealism and fairness that elevated himself and the game. Yet even with that context—and even when considering Bud Selig, the commissioner who has in effect held control of Rose’s reinstatement prospects for two decades—the person who has proven Rose’s most influential and most unwavering detractor, a foil both in deed and in word, has been Vincent.

It was Vincent who led to the hiring of John Dowd for the Rose case, and Vincent who spoke directly with Reuven Katz during the investigation. Vincent wrote Rose’s banishment document. The idea for the nonadmission, nondenial paragraph regarding Rose’s betting on baseball—that meaningless concession that Rose’s team demanded as essential to agreeing to the deal—came directly from work Vincent had done while in the corporate finance division at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At Rose’s 1989 spring training visit to Ueberroth’s office it was Vincent who had spoken up in the crowded room and asked Rose, “Did you bet on baseball?” And it was Vincent who continued to press the point that day. Partially paralyzed due to an accident during his college years, Vincent moves slowly and deliberately and in Ueberroth’s office relied upon a cane. Rose, after leaving the room, grumbled to those around him: “That crippled guy asked all the questions.”