Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (28 page)

The Reds cut him in October.

Big Pete griped on the radio, saying Petey hadn’t gotten a fair shake. But then it turned out that Junior, who after the release came back to the Reds on a minor league deal, couldn’t stick at Triple A Indianapolis either. The Pirates picked him up, sent him to
their
Triple A team, then when he struggled let him go after 28 games. Now each season meant a new start, a bolt of optimism, another dead end. He played in the Phillies’ system for a while, then in Chattanooga again. Canada. Mexico. Petey turned 30 years old. He turned 32. Thirty-three. Big league teams stopped calling. Even keeping him somewhere down in the organization didn’t make sense anymore, not when the spot might go to a younger guy with a promising future.

Petey grit his teeth and found work in the Independent Leagues, teams like the Joliet (Ill.) Jackhammers, Lincoln (Neb.) Saltdogs, Long Island (N.Y.) Ducks. He had Bud Harrelson as a coach one year. Clubs like that could always use a name such as Pete Rose Jr. to put a few more people in the seats. And teams at that level could use his bat. One season in Winnipeg he hit .344. Still, the hecklers hollered from every grandstand in every town.

His father published his as told-to book,
My Prison Without Bars
, admitting he had bet on baseball. Petey asked the P.A. announcers to introduce him as PJ Rose for a while—as if he could hide—but the name didn’t feel right to him, and he went right back to Pete Rose Jr. One season he refused to sign any autographs; before long he was signing them again.

Petey did not harden, even if there might have seemed to be a shell around him. Each time he came to a new club—sunglasses on, the Rose jaw right there—some teammates treaded gingerly, assuming Pete Jr. would be aloof and arrogant. Soon, though, that perception would disappear, and Petey would become a team leader, the glue. During pregame and postgame and the time in between, he was always one to talk, banter, loosen people up. He’d stay for hours in the locker room after the final out, dissecting the day’s at bats, treating players with stories from his childhood and about things his dad once did. The Hit Prince.

And yet.
Grit your teeth.

As a kid Petey used to hear his father say, “Playing baseball is the easiest way in the world to make a living.” For him maybe. The $30,000 salary that Pete Jr. had earned as a Double A player now seemed a luscious sum. Independent leagues might pay $2,000, $2,500 a month over a short season. Petey ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches six days a week. He crashed at friends’ houses to save some cash. He turned 34. Thirty-five. Thirty-seven. Thirty-nine. No one had ever led a baseball life like his.

How do you
do
that? How do you sustain such a life, a life that by now included a wife and two young children, earning that kind of money in that kind of itinerant career? How do you shake off the credit card debt? The bus rides? How do you play on through the pain in your knees, ankles, hips? How do you bull through the disappointment? How do you hold on to hope, year after impecunious year?

THE FIRST time Pete Jr. saw Shannon Tieman they were both in kindergarten. Cincinnati, mid-1970s. It may be that she was wearing a red shirt; that’s how he recalls it, anyway. In the sixth and seventh grades Shannon and Petey talked with one another sometimes. In high school he asked her on a date. He took her to Skyline Chili. She had long brown hair and a smile like Sunday morning and she was way smarter than he, as he’d known for years. They decided after high school that his going out on the road to play pro baseball was not something that would pull them apart, but rather would hold them closer together. Shannon arrived to stay with Pete Jr. in 1991 (he was 21 years old and playing at Sarasota) driving an old, white Sentra. “She had one bag and all the rest shoes,” says Pete Jr.

She made chicken parmesan sandwiches, enough to last a few days, and they ate them sitting on the floor. They slept together on a mattress coarse as canvas. She came to games and growled at the hecklers. Between innings he looked for her in the stands and smiled when their eyes met. Over time, Shannon’s parents became like second parents to Rose Jr. Quieter, of course, and with other values than he had known at home. They came to see him play, and Pete sometimes worked for Shannon’s father during the winter. Shannon kept traveling with Pete Jr., to Hickory, Prince William, South Bend, Birmingham, Nashville, through the call up to the major leagues and back down again. Along the way, in 1995, they married. In ’99 Shannon took a full-time job and since then she has worked at a bank and in marketing and in advertising, all around Cincinnati.

For a number of years after the wedding they lived with Shannon’s parents. Their son, Peter Edward Rose III was born in 2004, and two years after that a girl, Isabella Marie, both of them growing beautiful, impish, cute. In the baseball off-season, Pete Jr. changed the kids’ diapers, strolled them to the park, drove them to preschool and picked them up. Shannon went in for her nine-to-five. Then spring training would come around again.

“Not once in all the time of my career, not once, did she say to me that she thought I should do something else,” says Pete Jr. “She has supported me like a steel beam. We have had amazing times together, and she has also been there for me to cry on. I have needed that. All of the things she does—wife, friend, mom. None of this is possible without her. She has been the world to me. It is hard to do what I am doing. And it is really hard to do what she is doing, I know that.”

In 2003 the debt got so deep that they filed for bankruptcy (among their listed assets: a signed Pete Rose baseball, $75) and then, three years later, Shannon sat in a Nashville district courtroom as Pete Jr. was sentenced to jail. According to the charges,
United States of America
v.
Pete Rose Jr
., between 2001 and ’02 Pete Jr. did, “knowingly and intentionally possess…[and] distribute a liquid mixture containing Gamma-butyrolactone (GBL), a controlled substance.” He pleaded guilty. He says he took GBL to help him fall asleep because at times those bad knees, the throbbing heel, the whole grinding circumstance of his life, kept him lying awake staring at another ceiling in another motor lodge.

GBL, though, does other things. It causes the body to produce growth hormone. It can help build muscle. The drug was another strand in the sprawling web of baseball’s steroid era. Pete Jr. took GBL before and for years after it was declared illegal in 2000. If the drug could help him hit a few more home runs, drive the ball the way he did back in 1997 at Chattanooga, well, then…When Pete Jr. was taking GBL his weight got up near 250 pounds.

Pete Jr. cooperated with the prosecution from the outset, and the judge believed the evidence showing that the “distribution” part of the charge was a little misleading, that it really boiled down to his simply buying some for himself as well as a few teammates. The fact that scores of players all across the game were taking drugs like GBL and that it was in the heart of a tainted culture was not overlooked. Petey was contrite and torn-up, that was obvious. What ate at him more than anything was not even the prospect of being locked away, but that, as he said in the courtroom, “I am not making the Rose name proud, and that is my fault.” He saw no irony in his words. By the book, Pete Jr. could have gotten 20 years for what he did. A more typical sentence was around 24 months. The judge gave him 30 days in a county jail.

Shannon did not blink when Pete Jr. told her that when he got out of that Boone County cell (where some days he would spend all but an hour in isolation, never having a weight to lift or a bat to heft, though he would swing a laundry bag sometimes), he was planning to go right back into baseball. Soon after his time began, he called Dave LaPoint, the manager of the Bridgeport (Conn.) Bluefish, from jail looking for work and found that the Bluefish had a place for him on the team. His second game back he hit a three-run homer.

He batted .299 that season and over the next two years, over 962 at bats playing for LaPoint (now managing the Long Island Ducks), Pete Jr. hit .314 and knocked in 190 runs. Alongside former major league All-Stars—Edgardo Alfonzo, Carl Everett, Danny Graves, Jose Offerman— Rose Jr., as LaPoint recalls, was always “the heart of the team, the guy who made us go.” The others regarded him with surprise:
Twenty-eight days in the Show? That’s all the time you got?

“There he is, 38 years old, and some nights he could hardly get around, his knees were that bad,” says LaPoint. “He’d lie on the couch in my office icing until 15 minutes before game time, then he’d limp out there. And on every one of those days, and I am convinced of this, he was sure he would get back to the major leagues. He would say, ‘I could give a team a little lefthanded pop off the bench, I play a couple of positions. Hey, my dad played in the big leagues until he was 45.’ ”

When Pete Jr. talked the same way with Shannon, she supported him then too. Always.
Sure, sweetheart, plenty of big league teams need a hitter like you.
She kept saying that right up until, and even beyond, his last minor league at bat, when at the age of 39 years, 10 months, he was let go by the York (Pa.) Revolution. Petey didn’t quite retire—he never officially did—but just said he would take a little time off, rest the knee, help around the house, go watch his son’s Little League games, chase his daughter around the couch. Be a dad.

All through the years Shannon understood that there was nothing to say but what she said, truly nothing else to do. No matter how tough it seemed, no matter how tight the money got. She was there from the very beginning, grade school on the West Side, and she saw with open eyes what it meant to be Pete Rose’s son in Cincinnati. She understood, with an intimacy that few others ever could, the reach of his father’s ascent and the depth of his father’s fall. She understood that there were things that should be said between Petey and herself, and things that were better kept inside.

Shannon understands, just as Karolyn Rose understands, and Eduardo Perez understands, that all of Pete Jr.’s love for the nuances of the game— the striding up to the batter’s box, the squaring up of a fastball, the way a ground ball cuts through the grass, the knocking of infield dirt off your hip, the moment of noticing that a pitcher’s arm has dropped just this much late in a game, the heavy stick of pine tar—that all of that is wrapped up with his trying to find his way to another love. And that Petey’s unending dream of making it to the major leagues, no matter the cost to get there, is wrapped up as well in another dream. And that it has never been entirely clear, not to anyone, where it is in Petey’s life that his father ends and the game of baseball begins.

Chapter 19

Truth, Reconfigured

A
S PETE ROSE began his life in baseball exile, his central concerns—as might be expected for a man who has lost his primary livelihood, has become troubled by debt and has been accustomed to a certain style of living—revolved around his finances. All the steady money he’d ever earned had come directly from baseball or, by extension, from his own commercial appeal. As he once told Denny McLain at a card show, “I get up and do Pete Rose every day.”

He lived in Florida with Carol and the kids and presided over the investor-run Pete Rose Ballpark Cafe in Boca Raton, a sprawling familymenu place with a TV in every booth, a deep stable of coinop video games and Pete himself as a lure for customers. He hosted a radio sports talk show in the evening, working inside a glassed studio from which he could see the diners and they could see him. Calls came in to the show on all kinds of sports topics and from all over the country—a guy from Anchorage, a woman from Pennsylvania, a kid from down the road in Boynton Beach. Pete had verve and humor and opinions and good guests. Some callers would go off topic and tell Pete that by the way he would always be a Hall of Famer to them.

Pete had a stake in the gift shop, which was stocked with big league apparel and trinkets, along with all kinds of Rose-related collectibles— autographed balls, bats and baseball cards. You could buy clothes (caps, jackets and pants) with “Hit King” woven into them, garments that Pete himself often wore around the place. He’d stop by your table for a quick greeting or to join in with a “Happy Birthday” chorus for some Little Leaguer out with his folks. The Ballpark Cafe established itself as a lively, crackling place, much like Pete himself. One time Tommy Harper showed up unannounced after so many years and Pete threw his arms around him in the parking lot and they didn’t talk about the banishment at all.

At card shows he could earn $30,000 for an afternoon’s work, and he got hired for other private appearances as well. His golf game was better than it had ever been, which helped when he made celebrity appearances.

Pete’s brother Dave was around then, working for Pete as a cook in the cafe’s kitchen and achieving local notice for his soups and his spinach dip and for the chili he crafted in the Cincinnati style. Dave had been playing golf a lot too, and when he was asked, in 2013, to describe the best day he’d ever had in the 65 years of his boyhood, youth and adult life knowing Pete, this is what he said: “It was the 1990s and Pete was banned from baseball and I was working for him at the Ballpark Cafe. We played golf a lot in the morning. I’d go with Pete and make up a foursome. I couldn’t play that good at first but I stuck with it—I’d get out there and practice on my own—and I got myself a whole lot better.

“Around that time a casino in the Bahamas had put together a golf tournament, like a Pete Rose invitational. It attracted a lot of high rollers. Well, Pete had seen how my golf game was coming along and he said to me, ‘Would you like to come there and be on my team?’ I said sure— everything was all paid for by the casino, you know. So we get down there, me and my wife, and a limousine picks us up at the airport. They gave us a little suite up on one of the hotel floors that you needed a special key to get onto. They had these rooms set up with food and drinks and if you wanted a drink or anything anytime you just had to call and they brought it free. You know, the whole nine yards.

“The night before the tournament they had a reception, some cocktails and whatnot, and Pete comes up to me and says there has been a change. ‘I’m not going to be on your team. They want me to play with a couple of guys from New York.’

“I said that was fine. I didn’t mind who I played with. I ended up with a guy who made his money selling and leasing motor coaches. Terrific guy. The tournament was set up as a scramble of course, and I was the D player in our group. But I played my ass off that day and, well, long story short, we won the tournament! It was $750 apiece and it was Pete’s job to give out the checks. When it came time to give me mine, Pete made a joke like he wasn’t going to give it to me. Man, that was fun, he was all joking and stuff but I could tell that he respected me for winning that tournament. I remember being really, really happy.”

PETE HAD long been a fan of professional wrestling—the shtick, the theater, the absurdity, and the huge noisy crowds that are drawn to it— and in the spring of 1998 at the age of 56 he made his pro wrestling debut, hired as a guest ring announcer for Wrestlemania XIV at the Fleet Center in Boston. He came out wearing a tuxedo to big applause, but then immediately turned against the crowd. “The last time I was here we kicked your ass!” he said, going on to describe Boston as the “city of losers” and invoking the names of Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner, players associated with painful Red Sox collapses. Boos and shouts rang out from the seats.

And then, abruptly, the lights fell and fire exploded and out from an arena tunnel—“straight out of the mouth of hell” as a television announcer bellowed—came the character of Kane, an enormous and sinister figure clad in spandex and with long sweaty locks draped in front of his allegedly disfigured face. The organ music was deafening and dirgelike and beside Kane strode a pale, fleshy manager wearing a suit and named Paul Bearer. When Kane climbed into the ring Rose stared in mute terror, helpless as Kane picked him up, turned him upside-down and with his signature piledriver move, “tombstoned” Rose headfirst into the mat. Pete lay motionless before being wheeled off on a stretcher as the crowd remained in frenzy.

That same year in Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame established a new research center and named it in honor of the late commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti. “It’s the perfect way to recognize and perhaps fix for all time at the Hall of Fame the name of my husband,” said his widow, Toni. A plaque went up in Giamatti’s name and a painting of him was hung on the wall.

Rose got hired again for Wrestlemania XV a few months later, this time scripted for him to seek revenge by dressing in disguise as the San Diego Chicken and ambushing Kane from behind. The result: another emphatic tombstoning of poor Pete. The whole enterprise seemed ignominious to many, perhaps—and among baseball’s literati, Rose was roundly lampooned—but not at all to Pete. “I would let them throw me into the stands if they paid me enough,” he said of the wrestling promoters.

Rose’s devotion to money, to making it and showing it off and keeping it from the IRS, traces far back. In exile, as ever, Pete remains among those people for whom cash is always king. Eduardo Perez, Tony’s son, remembers being at the Roses’ house in Cincinnati in the 1970s, playing Monopoly with Petey when both boys were less than 10 years old. They had amassed stacks of the game’s colorful bills and when Rose came into the room, a spot of shaving lather still on his cheek, Petey called out, “Hey, Dad, look at all this money we’ve got!” as he and Eduardo giggled and fanned it out. “So Pete says, ‘Oh yeah?’ ” recalls Perez, “and then he goes into his room and comes back out with a $1,000 bill. He said, ‘Well I’ve got this. And it’s real!’ We all just cracked up.”

In the late 1980s, while Rose was managing the Reds, his former teammate Jim O’Toole visited Pete at his home in Plant City, Fla. “We had just played a ball game against some younger guys as part of a fantasy camp,” says O’Toole. “I asked Pete if he had a cold beer. And he said, ‘I’ve got something better than that. How about some cold cash!’ And he reached into the refrigerator and pulled out stacks of bills. I think he’d won a Pick-Four or something.”

Charles Sotto, the longtime memorabilia dealer who has been a friend and associate of Rose’s for many years—he was interviewed about his relationship with Rose for the Dowd Report and still organizes events for him in Cincinnati—may have said it best when he remarked not long ago, “Pete doesn’t have a gambling problem. He has a cash problem.”

Certainly Pete believed that for him gambling was no sickness. In a lukewarm attempt to appear reconfigured after his banishment, he attended some Gamblers Anonymous meetings and heard the people there talk about having gambled away their mortgage or their rent and describe themselves as suicidal. Pete just knew that that wasn’t him. An addicted gambler, in his eyes, was someone who “can’t go to bed with a dollar in his pocket” without having bet it on something.

“One of our screening questions when we are deciding what treatment someone might need, is to evaluate whether gambling is doing harm to their lives. If it is, that’s a problem,” says Dr. Timothy Fong, a codirector of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program who has treated numerous sports figures. “Another sign that someone has a gambling compulsion is if they repeatedly lie about it or hide it.”

Rose presents an unusual case. He didn’t hide his gambling at the horse tracks or dog tracks (he tried to hide his
winnings
sometimes, to be sure, but not the fact that he was there and betting), nor did he care how it looked when, in his exile, he did paid events at casinos or moved his radio show from Florida to Las Vegas now and then. (Rose discussed point spreads and betting lines with callers all the time.) People squawked and tsk-tsked about his behavior, but the way things looked to others never mattered much to Pete. He had a living to make.

Yet there was no question, of course, of the profound damage that gambling had done to his life—a specific type of gambling. Throughout the 1990s he continued to deny, fiercely and often scornfully, that he had ever bet on baseball. He denied it to his closest friends and to his family. He denied it on CNN to Larry King. He denied it to reporters who came by the restaurant. He absolutely did not bet on baseball, he said, and anyway the baseball investigation wasn’t fair. How could they have put a strike-force guy like John Dowd on a ballplayer? How could they have relied on testimony from all those untrustworthy guys who went to jail? How could Giamatti say that he believed that Rose had bet on baseball when the banishment agreement explicitly stated no finding on that issue? Rose said what he always said: that the only real mistake he made was picking the wrong crowd to hang out with. For that and his other minor peccadillos, he said, he deserved to be forgiven.

He put it this way: “If I was a cokehead, I’d still be managing the Cincinnati Reds. But I bet on some football games, so I’m out of the game. I’d hate to think I wouldn’t go to the Hall of Fame because I bet on
Monday Night Football
.”

In the opinions and arguments of many—and still Rose generated reams of copy and hours of debate; and still he commanded heavy discussion each summer on induction weekend; and still write-in votes appeared, and were discounted, on a score of Hall of Fame ballots each year—Rose’s plight was hitched not simply to the sin he committed but also to his lack of remorse or acknowledgement. There were still those who believed Rose’s denials, the willfully blind, but many others, especially among those closest to the game who might have influenced his fate, did
not
believe his denials and were vexed by his defiance.

This was a decade in America, a nation chock full of men and women granted second acts in their public lives, when a mayor of Providence (Buddy Cianci) was reelected after being convicted of assault and a mayor of Washington, D.C., (Marion Barry) was reelected after being caught on videotape smoking crack. It was a decade in which pitcher Steve Howe, a seven-time violator of baseball’s drug rules (a cokehead, as Rose might have said), came back with great success for the Yankees. Baseball, like America, was predisposed to forgive and to embrace. Rose had picked the wrong crime to commit, yes—though it was not football betting as he claimed—and now it was clear that he was choosing the wrong path to redemption. As Jack Lang, the baseball writer and Hall of Fame voter said, summing up the sentiment, “If he admitted his crimes, I think there would be a public demand he be eligible for the Hall.”

Rose might have done it so easily. With a few words of humility, of honesty, with an uncomfortable press conference or two, he might have changed course and pulled a raft of moralizers (and baseball executives) toward his side. Instead it seemed that he was not abiding by the code that Harry Rose had implicitly preached—that of owning up to one’s failings and of owning one’s sins. To all appearances, Pete was not taking responsibility for what he had done.

And yet, through the wider, deeper lens, he
was
taking responsibility. However conscious or not his intention, Rose was by his rigid stance choosing the life of exile, depriving himself of a chance not just at the Hall of Fame but also—and this was what really mattered to him in those years—to get back into baseball as a manager or coach. He was Socrates in the
Apology
, refusing to bow to the accusers and the dicasts who would seal his fate, unwilling to extend a conciliatory hand, bound almost smugly to his own version of the truth even at great cost to himself. There would be no compromise.

And so he beat on. Whenever the details of his banishment were brought up and rehashed, Rose stuck to his story. “I bet on football,” he said. “I’m the one who called the bookmakers and made the bets.” But still when it came to his betting on baseball there was always an explanation to counter what the evidence implied, always the noting of an errant detail or an irrelevant gap in logic. “They also said I bet the same amount on every game, $2,000. But you can’t bet two dimes on baseball games because every game, from what I’m told, is different,” he explained to
Playboy
magazine in the spring of 2000. It was always some kind of denial: The betting slips weren’t real and it was someone else who had written them and Dowd had not caught him in any lies. No matter what had gotten them there on that dark night, it was Daisy Buchanan behind the wheel of the car.

He remained on the outside, unbending, and so was finally claimed by the ruthlessness of the truth, paying for his mistakes by the life that he led. “Did he
want
to be forgiven? Did it matter to him?” asks Pete’s brother Dave. “I don’t know.”