Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (29 page)

ROSE RACED speedboats for a while in the ’90s, steering a boat that could get up to 100 miles an hour and that flew high through the air off the waves. (“Absolutely awesome,” he said.) He dabbled in horse breeding with a friend from Kentucky, went to the stock sale at Keeneland, invested in a couple of mares, had a winner at River Downs. Rose ran into a little more IRS trouble along the way in those years, leading to a tax lien of more than $150,000. He played nine holes of golf first thing in the morning most every day and he flew here and there for paid appearances and he got his regular rest.

“People say, ‘Wow, you were with Pete Rose, you traveled to shows with him. That must have been a wild time,’ ” says Warren Greene, who represented Rose in his business dealings during the Florida years. “But, really, it was pretty boring. It was do the event and go back to our rooms early and watch sports.”

In 1997, with his marginally reconfigured life—men such as Gioiosa and Janszen and Bertolini had long since disappeared from view—and with excitement building around his son Petey’s major league stint as a Red, Rose applied for reinstatement to acting commissioner Bud Selig. The Cincinnati City Council convened and passed a resolution “expressing the sense of [the] Council that Pete Rose should be reinstated to the game of baseball and immediately made eligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame” and sent it, signed by mayor Roxanne Qualls, to the commissioner. Others were less enthusiastic about Pete during that time. A car dealer in Florida, irked that Rose owed him about $10,000 after stiffing him on an appearance related to a car purchase (Pete had sold him a white Porsche), would write to Selig too. The car dealer didn’t want Pete in the Hall. As he later told Selig, and explained to
The Cincinnati Enquirer
: “I’m dead-set against it because Pete doesn’t conduct himself in the upstanding manner that you’d expect of a Hall of Famer.”

Everybody had something to say, people weighing in from all over on whether the ban might be lifted. Selig, though, never even gave Rose a hearing. He said at the time he could not do such a thing to Giamatti’s legacy, not with Rose still denying betting on the game, still disputing baseball’s findings. Selig was close to Giamatti and recalled well the heightened and harried summer of 1989. He said he believed the Rose case “literally” broke Giamatti’s heart.

The next March, when Pete went to Reds’ spring training to watch Petey prepare for a season at Triple A, one of the team’s front office guys asked him, impromptu, to say a few words to the minor leaguers assembled on the field. Pete cracked a few jokes to the young guys, talked a little hitting. “It was like having Bill Gates stand up in your computer class,” said Petey afterward. The short address was enough to draw an investigation from the National League and, at Selig’s direction, earn the Reds a stern and public reprimand. Even a little bit of Pete was against the rules.

So it was surprising to some (and either thrilling or troubling to others) when, in 1999, as baseball joined with MasterCard to initiate a fan ballot for an All-Century Team of major leaguers and Rose was voted onto it, that Selig said Pete could take part in the celebration. Certainly the people at MasterCard were pleased by Selig’s decision, certainly greater attention would be drawn to the event. Standing alongside the rest of the team’s living members, Rose would wear a Reds cap and be on the field in Atlanta—his first moments on a major league field in more than 10 years—when the All-Century Team was introduced and honored before Game 2 of the World Series between the Braves and Yankees. John Dowd, no longer in baseball’s employ, chafed. “It’s like inviting Willie Sutton to a bankers’ meeting,” he said. Baseball, through Selig’s right-hand man Bob DuPuy, told Dowd to pipe down, that such matters were not his affair.

Pete killed it in the media tent before the game (he had missed an earlier press conference because he’d been doing an autograph signing at a casino in Atlantic City), and when he was introduced during the pregame event, an ovation thundered out of the stands for 55 seconds, longer and more energized than any other received by any player that night. Longer than the ovation given to Atlanta’s hometown home run king Hank Aaron. “I said, ‘Hank, you throw out the first ball here once a month. They’re tired of seeing you,’ ” Rose said later.

When that cheering had died down and the ceremony had wrapped up and the game’s first pitch neared, Rose was interviewed by NBC reporter Jim Gray, a live broadcast. The two men stood on the grass in foul ground and behind them the grounds crew worked the field for the game. Pete gushed that the fan ovation had been “heart-stopping, heart-stopping, man” before Gray came with his first question, asking Rose if he would be willing to “admit that you bet on baseball and make some sort of an apology to that effect.”

“I’m not going to admit to something that didn’t happen,” Rose said, a tension taking hold of his face, and then he quickly got back to thanking the fans and saying that he was “just a small part of a big deal tonight.” Gray, though, did not let go. He talked about the “overwhelming evidence” against Rose and wondered why Pete would have signed the agreement if he hadn’t bet on baseball. Rose, no stranger to the line of questioning, grew testy and questioned Gray’s accuracy and also said that he had not heard back from baseball regarding his reinstatement application. “That guy surprises me,” Rose said of Selig. “It’s only been two years, though, and he’s got a lot of things on his mind.”

And still Gray pressed at why Rose would not make an admission, and the entire friction-filled interview—nearly two and a half minutes on air—was spent this way and many of the good feelings of the moment and of Rose’s brief but historic return to his element were drained away.

Phone calls inundated the switchboards at NBC affiliates across the country for an hour and then two—so many viewers angry at Gray for jumping Pete in that way, at that time. Gray, they complained, had been selfish to taint a long-awaited night of celebration by turning it into a rude hassling of the man. Dick Ebersol, the head of NBC Sports, later responded that Gray was an exceptionally fine journalist but Ebersol did allow that the interrogation of Pete might have gone on too long.

Ebersol then followed Gray onto the field before Game 3 of the Series in New York and during the pregame, Gray went on the air and apologized to “baseball fans everywhere” for the timing and persistence of his questions. He said he was sorry if it “took some of the joy out of the occasion.” The Yankees won that Game 3 in the bottom of the 10th inning on a home run by Chad Curtis and moments after that ball cleared the fence, Gray stood beside the hero, microphone in hand. “Tell us about that pitch,” Gray said.

“I can’t do it,” said Curtis. He explained that as a team the Yankees had decided that, “because of what happened with Pete we’re not going to talk out here on the field.” And he walked away.

The Jim Gray interview was another moment in the trajectory of Pete Rose’s fate that, much like the decision by the synod at the Hall of Fame to take Pete’s prospects out of the hands of baseball writers, won support for Rose. People saw unfairness and this created sympathy where otherwise there might have been none.

Really, for all his aggressiveness, Gray was simply mystified, as others were, as to why if Rose truly wanted back in the game he wouldn’t try the tack of honesty. Perhaps even at that time, more than a decade of denial after the fact, an admission and an appeal for forgiveness might have moved the needle on Rose’s reinstatement effort, might have been an olive branch to the game. Rose’s coming clean could have changed things entirely, or maybe not. But in any case, it seemed then, telling the truth certainly couldn’t hurt.

Chapter 20

His Prison Without Bars

E
ARLY EACH January the Hall of Fame announces its new inductees, creating a burst of energy around the institution and the game. Great players are celebrated, water-cooler debate ensues over who got in and who missed out and, all in all, induction-announcement week sends a warm current of base-ball through the heart of the cold, diamond-less winter. On Monday, Jan. 5, 2004, one day before the official (though much expected) revelation that pitcher Dennis Eckersley and 3,000 hit club member Paul Molitor had been elected, Jeff Idelson, then a vice president at the Hall of Fame and now its president, turned on the morning television shows hoping to find some talk about the incoming class. What he saw on
Good Morning America
was indeed about baseball and Cooperstown: There was Pete Rose discussing his new book,
My Prison
Without Bars,
in which, plain to see on page 123, he admitted for the first time that he had, while managing the Reds, wagered on baseball. On the cusp of a crowning week in their public and athletic lives, Eckersley and Molitor had been rendered afterthoughts, or less.

“It was inappropriate and, frankly, yes, it was kind of annoying,” recalls Idelson today of the timing of Rose’s book. “But to me it was ultimately irrelevant to how I feel about Rose. I know that it was not irrelevant to everyone.”

The fact that Rose, 15 years out of baseball and even longer into denial, would unleash his confession at this of all times of year led to ripples of disappointment. “It’s unfortunate because this should be their day,” said Hall of Fame chairman Jane Forbes Clark, referring to Eckersley and Molitor. As Molitor noted after the election announcement: “I answered questions for an hour yesterday but the only one that was used on the front page of
USA Today
was about Pete Rose.”

Rose said in a statement that he “never intended to diminish the exciting news for these deserving players,” and his camp of advisers suggested that the book’s release date had been solely the decision of the publisher, Rodale—saying, that is, that even as the subject, nominal author, exuberant copromoter and driving force of the book, Rose had no say in the book’s unconventional publication date. Most baseball books come out in midspring, closer to Opening Day, but according to Steve Murphy, then Rodale’s president, the plan to release
My Prison Without Bars
during Hall of Fame induction week had “been set for a long time.”
¹

Segments for
Good Morning America
and an excerpt in
Sports Illustrated
had been coordinated for that week, and right away on Rose’s website fans could buy autographed copies of
My Prison Without Bars
for $77.99. personalized autographs ran the price to $99.99. Crowds of more than 1,000 people waited for hours in the January cold outside bookshops in both New Jersey and New York at Rose’s signings (some 4,000 would turn out in Cincinnati) and the book shot to the top of
The New York Times
best-seller list. Most of the stories and discussions about the book mentioned that Rodale had paid a $1 million advance for the book.

Within the corridors of baseball power, the attention and the commerce led to a palpable distaste. In return for what he had done to base-ball, and then for his years of brazenly lying and of baselessly attacking the credibility of credible men, Rose was now reaping a payday, once again profiting at the game’s expense. The book was a product of cold calculation on another front as well: After 2006 Rose, even if he were to be fully reinstated by baseball, would not appear on the writers’ Hall of Fame ballots. He had played his final game in 1986 and by rule a player who is retired 20 years moves out of active eligibility and can only be inducted by a veteran’s committee. As Fay Vincent noted in
The New York Times
that week—he wrote an op-ed in which he compared Rose’s book, not favorably, to St. Augustine’s
Confessions
—if Rose’s public admission were to lead to a quick reinstatement, there was still time for him to get onto the baseball writers’ Hall of Fame ballots for a year or two of voting. In the ’04 election, Rose had received 15 write-in votes, bringing his 13-year total to 230 and further solidifying him, by an order of magnitude, as the most written-in Cooperstown candidate of all time.

Although Bud Selig would not comment on Rose’s book nor say anything about its potential impact upon Rose’s reinstatement chances (“The commissioner will take all of this into account,” said Selig’s deputy, Bob DuPuy), it was clear that Rose’s carefully orchestrated confession was not yielding the intended results. Not at all. Rather than inspire support for his reinstatement,
My Prison Without Bars
had reinvigorated those who wanted to keep him out. Later in the week that the induction announcement and the book’s release collided, Rose’s friend and former teammate Mike Schmidt—who in previous years had acted as a liaison between Selig and Rose—was interviewed by the Associated Press and asked how he thought the book might impact Rose’s chances for getting back into the game. “It doesn’t look good, it’s taken a turn for the worse,” Schmidt said. “It is a sad thing…I hope the commissioner is reserving judgment. I’ve heard some of the worst references about Pete.”

MY PRISON WITHOUT BARS
is a strange burlesque of a book, an occasionally engaging romp and a tour de force of spin. Very little can truly be taken at face value. A Rose first-person account written with a former television actor, Rick Hill, the book feels most of all like an extended alibi, a series of events framed and reframed to put Rose in the best possible light. There are some attempts at humor (an extended fart story, for example, and a joke about Jewish people eating lox, told twice) but the book is devoid of irony. The reader gets a sense of what he is in for during an early passage that speculates on the possibility that Rose suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as a child, a condition which, the text observes, has been “genetically linked to gambling in adults.” This ADHD section relies almost entirely upon the testimony of “David E. Comings, M.D.”, who gamely suggests that the “entire Rose family is a geneticist’s dream.” (!) What’s more, based on what he has heard about Rose’s mom and dad, Dr. Comings feels comfortable declaring that Pete was genetically “destined for greatness…as well as tragedy.” (Somewhere Mendel rolled over, Richard Dawkins scratched his head, and the field of genetics research pressed on.)

Dr. Comings, further considering Rose’s childhood personality, also advances the notion that, “In fact, Pete Rose is not unlike Einstein, who flunked English but excelled in math.” Furthermore, the doctor might have added, the young Rose was not unlike Mahatma Gandhi in that he too sometimes went about barefoot.

Rose gets around to his mea culpas (The biggie, near the end: “So let’s leave it like this. I know I fucked up.”) but they are invariably qualified, and braised with
tea
culpas throughout. A kind of schoolyard fingerpointing emerges as a staple of
My Prison Without Bars
. In one extended and mercilessly disjointed passage Rose muses about the many people in the history of America who have been involved in “questionable activities.” He mentions Elvis, Rock Hudson and John Belushi and then veers over to the rumored bootlegging activities of Joseph Kennedy Sr., leading Rose to guess that Kennedy “might have had some partners on the payroll from the political world, which would have made him one helluva lot smarter than me. Come to think of it—that’s probably why he never got caught! Maybe if I had enlisted the help of the mayor and the governor my life would have turned out differently.” Yes, maybe.

“I’m not trying to make excuses or shift the blame,” Rose writes amid his attempts to make excuses and shift the blame. We learn not only that Rose’s unique life circumstances propelled him toward gambling, but also broad physiological details about his dopamine levels and the “impulse disorder” that might have made it impossible for him to “distinguish between sports when it came time to place his bets.” (Dr. Comings again.) When, in yet another strategic tactic, Rose absolves gambling as a victimless crime, it seems unclear whether he realizes what a victim he himself has been.

Prison
is all dodges and feints. Although Rose writes that the Dowd Report “had more goddamn holes than Swiss cheese” he spends a large portion of his book plodding through and admitting to all the significant charges that Dowd laid forth. Rose hammers energetically (and mockingly) on some dates and nuances that Dowd may have gotten wrong, and he makes outraged allegations (relying on a few facts and a lot of exclamation points) of the supposed bias against him in the whole investigation. But in terms of the central issues and many of the specific events that Dowd outlined in his report—namely that Rose had been involved with all manner of unscrupulous men and, mainly, that he had bet heavily and often on baseball and on his very own Cincinnati Reds—well, Dowd’s case proved about as solid as a hunk of petrified Gouda.

“He pissed on me all those years, denied, denied, denied and then in his book he admits to everything,” says Dowd. “Well, not everything. He still made a mistake. He said that he didn’t bet while he was a player. But he did.”

There was something else that Rose did not get quite right. Or maybe he did, depending on which Rose you believe. About 14 months before the book’s release, in the autumn of 2002, Rose had, through the intervention of Schmidt and Joe Morgan, been granted an audience with Selig at his office in Milwaukee. DuPuy was there, along with Schmidt and also Warren Greene. As Greene recalls, “Selig was wonderful in that meeting—thoughtful and eloquent. He would point to the shelves around him and say that whatever decision he made on Pete would be recorded in those binders for all time. He was upbeat but he was careful in what he said. I didn’t hear any promises. Then we left the room, all of us except Pete and Commissioner Selig.”

Rose had come to this meeting with a clear purpose: He was there, and Selig knew it, to tell the commissioner privately what he would later reveal, in his book, to the public. Rose and his camp believed that a confession might in fact deliver his reinstatement. “From talks we had had with Bob DuPuy we had the feeling that it could happen,” says Greene. “But he often reminded us that the decision was not his, that he was just the number two.”

In
My Prison Without Bars
, Pete describes his discussion with the commissioner like this. “Did you bet on baseball?” Selig asked, and Rose responded, “Yes, sir, I did bet on baseball.”

Selig: “How often?”

Rose: “Four or five nights a week.”

Selig: “Why?”

Rose: “I didn’t think I’d get caught.”

So there it was. And there, as well, was this: “four or five nights a week.” In the aftermath of the book, that declaration became a point of fertile discussion, as well as concern. Why did Rose only bet that often? What information did he have that led him to lay off the Reds on other nights? And by not betting on certain games wasn’t he sending a message to other gamblers—his bookies and the guys who ran his bets at least—that they should lay off those games too? (Not unlike Paul Hornung’s decision in the early 1960s to stay away from wagering on certain Packers games.)

Most concerning of all: Did Rose manage a game differently when he had money riding on it than when he did not? Pete says no, and as yet no evidence has surfaced, neither from parsing his managerial moves, nor from his players’ comments or recollections, to suggest inconsistencies in how he ran a game.

Neither did Dowd, even in the fullness of his investigation (nor the reporters who descended in its immediate wake) ever produce any indication that Rose’s managing was influenced by his betting. Still, the questions around his betting frequency were troubling and the “four or five nights” comment did lend support to another Dowd charge, one that Dowd expanded on most pointedly in interviews outside of the report: That Rose had a tendency not to wager on the Reds when Bill Gullickson or Mario Soto were pitching. (“I didn’t know that but it doesn’t surprise me,” Soto said when he heard that.) A few years after
My Prison Without Bars
came out, Pete backtracked yet again, saying in a radio interview that he had actually bet on the Reds “
every night
because I love my team.” That has been his steady line ever since.

“The way that Pete has changed his story over time bothers some people,” says J.D. Friedland, an investment banker who since 2012 has helped run Pete’s autographing and other events in Las Vegas. “First, for a long time, he said he didn’t bet on baseball at all. Then he said five nights a week. Then he said every night. So, what is he not saying now? Knowing him, I don’t think that there is anything more there, but for some people it leaves an impression.”

For pure reading value,
My Prison Without Bars
—the title, of course, refers both to Rose’s incarceration at Marion and to his years of unfettered baseball exile—is not without virtues. It provides, for one thing, alternative spellings for the phrase “sumbitches” and the narrative at times reads quite well. There are some unfortunate misspellings (Pete’s very own Sayler Park is called Saylor Park throughout; the Braves’ Rico Carty becomes Rico Cardi) and details of significant events (the 1970 All-Star Game; the aftermath of the Jim Gray interview) are wrong, but those are small shortcomings. The book’s undoing is that it never stops giving the reader the feeling of being conned—about what happened with the gambling, yes, and also about every event of controversy in Pete’s life. After the initial burst of excitement sales of the book fell off dramatically.
²

The self-serving tone, along with Rose’s lack of remorse—he doesn’t say that he is sorry so much as say that he is sorry he got caught—as well as, again, the harsh timing of the book’s release, led to much strenuous objection on the part of some respected baseball writers. As the
rocky Mountain News
’s Tracy Ringolsby, a past president of the Baseball Writers’ Association said, “The way this whole thing came out probably took some people who were on the fence and pushed them over. I think he hurt himself.” Ringolsby, who had previously defined himself as “undecided,” on Rose’s Cooperstown worthiness, now said that he would not vote for Rose even “if he was the only person on the ballot.”