Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (27 page)

“That comment was my first sense that there was a gap in Rose’s armament,” says Vincent. “That maybe he was not too bright.”

The strong trust and friendship between Vincent and Giamatti—they met in the late 1970s, when Giamatti was president of Yale and Vincent ran Columbia Pictures—was built on a rich exchange of ideas and eloquences that marked and bettered each man and that ultimately led Giamatti to handpick Vincent as his deputy commissioner.
³
On the eve of the Rose banishment announcement the two men were discussing how Giamatti might respond to reporters when they inevitably asked what Rose would have to do to get back in the game. “At the least he’ll have to reconfigure his life,” Vincent suggested. The phrase stuck in Giamatti’s mind and he used it at the press conference, and it has survived as a touchstone remark, one that Rose himself often refers to even now.

Over the more than two decades since he left the commissioner’s office, Vincent has continued to speak against Rose’s reinstatement and against his inclusion in the plaque gallery of the Hall of Fame. He has publicly chastised Bud Selig when Selig has shown or even suggested any leniency toward Rose. In Vincent’s reckoning Rose violated not only a cardinal baseball rule but also a principle, a moral boundary. And for those reasons Vincent will never forgive him.

FRANCIS T. “FAY” VINCENT grew up on the first floor of a three-family house in New Haven, Conn., watching Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees on a television his father had won at a church raffle. His father, who worked for the New England Telephone Company, was also named Francis T. Vincent and was also known as Fay.

Born in 1938, three years before Rose (and 55 days after Giamatti), Vincent enrolled at age 14 at Hotchkiss, a well-heeled Connecticut boarding school. Fay Sr. had also gone to Hotchkiss—the school had coveted him as a football player—and a scholarship was arranged for his son. At the same time that Rose was pounding a ball into a wall near the Anderson Ferry or grappling with Slick Harmon in the bramble along the Ohio River, Vincent was knotting his tie and going to class to read aloud from the Western canon.

These were deeply formative years for Vincent. More than a half-century after graduating from Hotchkiss he wrote an admiring book about his headmaster, George Van Santvoord, a devoted teacher with unyielding standards. At the school, as Vincent writes, “we followed a tidy and disciplined regimen that carried over to the classroom…Sloppy dress was unacceptable, as were sloppy speaking and thinking. We learned grammar because we were corrected.”

The values imprinted upon him at Hotchkiss guided Vincent as he went on to study at Williams College and Yale Law School, and also in his career—as a lawyer, as an executive at Columbia and Coca-Cola and then, conspicuously, in his jobs at Major League Baseball. The Rose case is certainly not the only issue on which Vincent adopted and stuck to a hard line, which is a large reason why, after inheriting the commissionership from Giamatti, Vincent lasted only three years before base-ball’s owners forced him out.

During his brief tenure Vincent publicly admonished owners for having colluded to control player salaries in the 1980s; he banned Yankee owner George Steinbrenner after an investigation (conducted by Dowd) revealed that Steinbrenner had paid a known gambler to dig up damaging information about Yankee outfielder Dave Winfield (Steinbrenner was reinstated two years later); Vincent also gave a lifetime ban to pitcher Steve Howe, a repeat drug offender, and when Yankees manager Buck Showalter testified on Howe’s behalf Vincent scolded Showalter for not supporting baseball’s stance. (After five months out of the game, Howe too was reinstated, by an independent arbitrator.)

In 1991 Vincent sent a cogent letter to all major league teams warning about the use of illegal drugs including, specifically, steroids. He said any player possessing such drugs would “risk permanent expulsion from the game.” He threatened a fine of $250,000 to any club that covered up such drug use by its players. The letter was clear, smart, powerful and well ahead of its time. It is difficult to imagine that the steroid era would have continued on quite so rampantly, and done the damage that it has done, had baseball remained under Vincent’s watch.

Vincent believed he was a moral arbiter for the game. At times it seemed he believed he was
the
moral arbiter. He banned chewing tobacco in the lower minor leagues. He tried to strongarm through a realignment of the National League. He assumed a level of power, in labor relations particularly, that troubled many in the game. A Bill Gallo cartoon in New York’s
Daily News
near the end of Vincent’s reign depicted him wearing a crown inscribed with
EMPEROR VINCENT
, and a chest pin that read
ONE MAN RULE
.

Nor did Vincent seem particularly concerned with finding ways to increase revenue for the game. He had not handled things to the owners’ liking in a 1990 labor dispute, and with player salaries escalating and crucial longterm television issues in the balance, the owners began to lose faith that Vincent would properly represent them in their battles with the players’ union.

On Sept. 3, 1992, the owners gathered in a hotel in Chicago and during a four-hour meeting about the commissioner’s fate, passed a noconfidence resolution by a vote of 18-9-1, urging Vincent to resign. Four days later under heavy pressure, Vincent did just that, making public a measured but unrepentant resignation letter in which he defended his actions and his views but said he would step down because he believed that the toxicity between himself and the owners was not, as he wrote, “in the best interests of baseball.” He added: “A fight based solely on principle does not justify the disruption.”

Vincent did retain strong support from a minority of the owners, and also in public opinion. One person who came to Vincent’s defense, speaking from Florida, was Pete Rose. “I just wonder, what do they want as the commissioner?” Rose said of the owners. “Do they just want a figurehead and they want to make all the decisions? If I thought he wasn’t going to show compassion and good judgment and be fair, I would wish he would leave tomorrow. But I can’t get myself to believe that about Fay Vincent.”

Vincent has always liked that some observers refer to him as the “last commissioner,” with the implication being that those who followed him in the job would be beholden to profits rather than to the game.
⁴
Vincent titled his 2002 autobiography,
The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine
. (It’s a highly readable book, full of pearls.) He still loves the game and knows it well, and he has remained at once a gadfly and a voice of conscience on many issues in baseball: steroids and revenue imbalance, and the antitrust exception, and quite often gambling, which he sees as the single greatest threat to pro sports. He has not softened on Rose in the least. Anytime Pete steps in it in public, Vincent will pounce. “He is really a bad guy,” says Vincent. “He is a man without a moral compass.”

Vincent lives, during the warmer months at least, in a fine large house on a fine leafy street in a part of Connecticut where argyle socks never go out of style. He reads and he writes and he is often asked to speak. He has good friends and he watches baseball and he lives an intellectual life. His daily routine continues to be informed by an event that occurred more than half a century ago; the single event that, along with his years at Hotchkiss, has so profoundly shaped him in tangible and intangible ways.

During his freshman year at Williams, Vincent lived on the third floor of a dorm, in a suite with several friends. One December day one of those friends, pranking, locked Vincent into his room. Vincent was 18 years old and to his (and his father’s) pleasure had played well in freshman football that autumn.

Vincent had the idea to escape his dorm-room lockdown by climbing out onto a narrow ledge and inching along it to the window next door. On the ledge, though, he lost his footing. He fell 40 feet, striking a metal railing before landing, on his back, on the ground. The impact paralyzed him, as he writes in
The Last Commissioner
, “from midchest down.” The life Vincent had known was over and a new one had begun. These many years later, while leaning on his walker or while kneading his stockinged feet, he will say that he views his walk on the ledge as an error in judgment and blames only himself.

Vincent told the story of his fall to students at Williams as part of a 2008 talk he gave on the nature of failure and success. He was not, at the moment of telling the story, talking about his position on Pete Rose, although he might have been. For when he finished describing the drop off the dorm-room ledge, Vincent added this:

“What we learn in life— I’m now 70—is there’s a certain ruthless sense of honesty about life. And that is that when you make a mistake you pay.”

Chapter 18

Petey

F
OR HIS first professional tryout camp, at old McBride Stadium in Richmond, Ind., June of 1985, Pete Rose Jr. wore a T-shirt that read
COBB BUSTER
on the front and
CHARLIE HUSTLE
on the back. The Reds were auditioning free-agent prospects and though Petey was only 15, too young to officially sign, the scouts said that, for the heck of it, they’d like to take a look at him anyway. He had short red hair and plenty of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Karolyn had driven him the 60 miles from home.

It was a day of partial sun and partial cloud, and during the tryout Petey hit a single in three times up during a simulated game. He also went in hard on a slide into second base, taking the fielder by surprise. “I’m going to the major leagues,” Petey told reporters there, using “when” rather than “if.” Karolyn contributed her own scouting report, suggesting that her son had desire equal to his father’s and had talent even greater.

He tore it up in the American Legion that summer, batting .390 as the youngest player on a club that reached the district finals. He went with a Cincinnati all-star team to the town of Marion, Ohio, to play in an amateur World Series, and at night when some of the boys, pumped to be out on their own, blared Van Halen and the Fat Boys loudly in the rooms of the motor lodge and hung out of bathroom windows smoking cigarettes, Petey was out front in the parking lot, under the yolk-yellow light of a lamppost with a baseball bat, working on his swing.

He played third base and first base, and he started as a sophomore at Oak Hills, and he kept hitting the hell out of the ball. He wore number 14. Petey loved the ball field but school itself he “hated,” he said—“Except gym and lunch and girls”—and when he found himself academically ineligible to play on the team in his junior year, he knew this was not a development that would anger his father. “Petey can hit,” Big Pete said with a grin upon introducing his son to Nolan Ryan that year. “But he can’t read.”

When Big Pete talked with Petey at the ballpark, which was about the only place they saw each other, he was clear about what kind of education mattered most. “You get a Porsche if you hit .400,” Big Pete said after Petey learned to drive. “So long as you play the right way and you’re always on time.” After the game, the two Pete Roses went different ways.

The kid kept his head in the game, picked up nuances beyond his years. Slow wheels and all—he had the same gait as his dad but was more plodding. “I’m a mule,” Petey said—he could backdoor slide around a tag like a professional. One year in the American Legion World Series he caught a pitcher off guard and became the first player to steal home in the history of the tournament. As a senior at Oak Hills he was named MVP.

Four years, tops, he’d be in the big leagues, he said then, and so when he slipped to the 12th round in the ’88 draft, which is where a goodhitting kid with little speed and a sketchy glove might go, he wasn’t about to sign on the cheap. Especially with his father in his ear. Rather than commit—the Orioles had drafted him—Petey went out that summer and helped Budde Post No. 507 win it all in the American Legion, batting .440 on the season, .463 in the World Series. His risk had paid off. In September, Baltimore gave him a $21,000 signing bonus, which was about what a fourth-rounder might have gotten in those days.

Soon it would all begin, Petey’s wrenching and unparalleled odyssey through the minor leagues, but first he would spend 10 late-winter days in Florida living with his father. Big Pete gave him batting clinics and looked at his stroke and they talked about two-strike hitting and subtle differences in breaking balls, those kinds of things. Near the end of that time together, Big Pete told Petey by way of some parting advice that he should grit his teeth when he came to bat and Petey, in response, took off his ballcap and wrote with a marker “grit your teeth” on the underside of the bill. Neither the son, who thought he knew all there was to know about what it meant to step onto a baseball diamond as Pete Rose’s son (that the name might make him a bright target for words, for taunts, for fastballs high and tight), nor the father understood just how hard and for just how long Petey would indeed be clenching those teeth, as a way to hold himself in, to bear what was his to bear and to play baseball for another day.

PETEY HARDLY knew what was happening that summer of 1989. Mostly, he saw it all collapsing around his father in the news. Unnerving. Disorienting. Baseball was deep into its investigation of Pete Rose, a mission that would reveal him as a gambler, a tax cheat and a defiant liar, and that would lead to his banishment from the game. With all the attention upon him, Big Pete kept changing his phone number. To speak to his father, Petey had to call Reuven Katz, who would get hold of Big Pete. Of course a lot of people were calling Katz that summer. Must be, Petey figured when he didn’t hear back, that his dad hadn’t gotten the message.

He was 19 years old, one step into pro ball, playing home games in a Babe Ruth League park in Frederick, Md. When Rose Jr. came to bat grown men would stand and holler things loud enough that you could hear from centerfield to both dugouts: “Your papa doesn’t look so great now, does he Rose? Fucking loser!” At more than one ballpark, fans waved dollar bills at Pete Jr. Karolyn drove out and came to some games and tried to drown out the hecklers. “Give it a ride, Googy!” she’d yell. Googy was what Karolyn and Pete called Petey when he was small.

He didn’t hit much in Frederick and was sent down further still, to low-A Erie (Pa.), where the noise from the stands never stopped, people yelling out gambling taunts when he came up: “Three-to-one you’ll strike out, Rose!” And the media was everpresent too, all the time looking for more out of Petey. The team finally had to forbid reporters from asking him any more questions about his father. Midsummer, Orioles management suggested he should take a couple days off to clear his head. Pete Jr. didn’t want the break. “Go home and sit on my butt?” he said. “Thanks, but no.”

Grit your teeth
.

He made $1,000 a month and drove to scruffy Ainsworth Field with his roommate Arthur Rhodes—the good and fast friend he made that crazy year—and despite the nightmare of his father’s disgrace, Rose Jr. provided for himself a measure of hope that summer. He batted .276 in 58 games for Erie, exactly one point less than his father had hit playing for Geneva in the same New York-Penn League three decades before. The younger Rose, it was noted, had a bit more pop in his bat than his dad had shown back then.
Baseball America
named Rose Jr. the 8th best prospect in the 14-team league. National headlines said things like
2nd coming of charlie hustle
. “Anyone who works that hard has the potential to make it [to the majors],” an Orioles player development man, Roy Krasik, said.

Still, Pete Jr.’s small success could not compete with Big Pete’s spectacular unraveling; always the events in Petey’s world were small details on the broader canvas of his father’s life. Big Pete’s spiraling fate—in particular his being locked up for tax fraud—gave the hecklers unlimited ammunition. They couldn’t get to Rose but they knew where his son was. “How much have you got on the game?” Pete Jr. would hear as he dug his left foot into the back of the box. Or chants of “I-R-S, I-R-S” as he ran out onto the field. As if the father and the son were one. The managers he had—old baseball guys like Wally Moon, Bobby Tolan, Fred Kendall—winced and shook their heads because they’d never heard a kid treated the way Pete Rose Jr. was treated by the fans. They wrapped their arms around him as best they could and stood with him in solidarity when the reporters circled around.

His batting average sputtered—down to .232 one year, .217 the next, then .253, .218. The Orioles traded him to the White Sox’s system, and the White Sox let him go to Cleveland, and then he came back to the White Sox again. Class A ball all the way. He had some shoulder trouble, and his arthritic knees had already started to ache from time to time, and the men inside the game, the same men who had let him fall to No. 295 overall in that 1988 draft, believed that their suspicions were confirmed. For all his worthy effort, Pete Rose Jr. wasn’t adapting against pro pitching. He got out in front too much at the plate, he was too aggressive, like he was pressing. You couldn’t walk the guy, he wanted so badly to put his bat square on the ball. People began to wonder when he might stop hanging on. “He’d make a fine manager, you know,” folks said even then.

“The bottom line is that I’m playing baseball,” Rose Jr. said late in 1994, “and all the people who ask how much longer I am going to give it are still doing nine-to-five jobs. If it means staying in A ball for the next 10 years and then on the 11th I get called up to the big leagues, I’ll play 10 more years.”

He was at Prince William then and his manager, Dave Huppert, talked about Rose Jr. in a way that managers and teammates often did. They would say that he was dedicated as few players are. That he could be hard on the field but was softer off it. That sometimes he seemed too sweet and sentimental to be his father’s son, and that at other times he had a bristle that made him seem exactly that. He was the guy to think of ordering a cake for some bench player’s birthday. He was the guy, whatever his batting average at the time, that the team wanted up when a runner needed to get knocked over from second to third. The chip on his shoulder— truly, the block of timber that sat there—was implicit and understood in all that was said and observed about him.

“He has a chance to become a pretty good hitter,” Huppert said. “He just needs a break. He changed this team around when he came with his hard work and effort. His attitude rubbed off on a lot of guys.”

Petey tried everything to get a longer look, to move himself up, even going to spring training as a White Sox replacement player during the strike in 1995 (“When you’re stuck not getting playing time in A ball…” he said in explanation), which, of course, provided new grist for anyone eager to lash out at him from the stands. He bulked up, downing protein shakes and swallowing supplements, so that the media guides that put him at 6' 1" and 180 pounds were 20 pounds light, at least. He added a little uppercut to his swing. And if he came to bat 500 times in a season, he heard something from the stands 500 times, the announcement of his name a catalyst for derision. When on a Thirsty Thursday promotion in some bush league town in North Carolina the two-for-one beers made their presence felt, the joke would always be on Petey.

Grit your teeth
.

And then, nine seasons in, nine years just about exactly since he’d signed on with the Orioles, it happened. Having made it into the Reds organization, and up to the Double A Chattanooga Lookouts, Rose Jr. had that season of dream—“I saw myself in the big leagues,” he said to teammate Toby Rumfield after being jolted awake on the bus. “I saw myself!” He sprayed line drives, smacked tough pitches over the wall, drove in runs like no one else on the team. It all led to the phone call received by Pete Rose Jr. in Chattanooga at 5 p.m. Aug. 29, 1997. A Friday.

“We’re calling you up,” Reds general manager Jim Bowden said on the other end of the line. Just a few days earlier the Reds had announced that they were not planning to add Rose Jr. to the team, but the fans had been so indignant and made such a ruckus that the team changed its plans. Bowden told Petey to be in Cincinnati for the Labor Day afternoon game, Sept. 1. There would be a uniform and a place in the starting lineup awaiting him.

IT WASN’T the .143 batting average nor the nine strikeouts in 14 Reds at bats that charted Rose Jr.’s baseball future. No one could be judged on so brief a trial. “Not 14 at bats not 100 at bats, not 200,” says Bowden. “Our baseball people evaluated him over years, not on those four weeks.”

There was a day in Pete Rose Jr.’s fleeting major league career when he looked at the stat line and saw his batting average at an even .400. In his fifth at bat, pinch-hitting against Pirates’ righthander Jason Schmidt in the bottom of the sixth inning, Rose Jr. lined a 2-and-2 pitch into rightfield for a single. He scored on Pokey Reese’s home run, factoring into an 8–6 Reds win. That second—and what would be final— career base hit ensured that if his father was first in hits among all major leaguers, at least he, Pete Jr., would not be last.

“It was a good feeling,” he says now. “I hit the ball on one hop to Jose Guillen in rightfield, went down and made the turn at first. That guy had an
arm
and he threw a seed to second base. But guess what. When I got back to the dugout after Reese’s home run, one of the coaches started telling me if I’d hustled more out of the box I might have made it to second. I thought he was joking. The fastest guy in either league couldn’t have made it to second base. Then I realized he wasn’t kidding. Just part of the deal.”
¹

He started only the one game, played the field in only three. “I was told that he didn’t figure in our long-range plans,” says Jack McKeon, who had taken over as Reds manager midway through that 1997 season. “The idea was to give him a look, but not all that much playing time. We had other guys we wanted to get in. What I remember about the kid was how hard he was working, trying to do everything he could do with a very limited opportunity.”

Twenty-eight days. One big league September. There was a road trip to Philadelphia where the old grounds crew and the stadium workers came around to greet him. (He got one at bat in the fourgame series, lining out to rightfield.) In a game against the Pirates on Sept. 6, Pete Jr. gloved a ground ball at third base and threw across to Eduardo Perez, playing first. Rose to Perez went the play; like old times in Cincinnati.
²
Later in that Pittsburgh game he threw a ball away, leading to a couple of runs. On another afternoon, during batting practice, Reds shortstop Barry Larkin started calling Rose Jr. the Hit Prince. After the season’s final game—he played a few innings at first base, scored a run in an 11–3 win—Petey left a few things in his locker, figuring he’d be back.