Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (32 page)

As unsettling as it is to imagine an active major league player deeply involved with baseball betting, a
manager’s
involvement may be even more ominous. A corrupted manager—for example, one who might want to throw a game as a way to help erase a personal gambling debt— would have ample opportunity to make lineup and strategy decisions that work to undermine his team.

Even if a manager only wagered on his team to win, he might be swayed to give that shortterm gambling interest precedence over his team’s longterm needs. Theoretically, for example, in the mid-1980s Reds manager Pete Rose might have called upon an already overtaxed relief pitcher to try to win a particular game rather than preserve the pitcher for the long haul of the regular season. While this may seem a trivial baseball subtlety to those outside the game, it’s a real issue on the ground. So it should be pointed out that Rose had a lefthander in the bullpen, Rob Murphy, who in 1987 and ’88 appeared in 163 games, the most in the National League. Murphy was effective (he had a 3.06 ERA over that time) but not remarkably so. In ’88, for example, he went 0–6. And he did appear suited to heavy use; after being traded to the Red Sox and later pitching for the Cardinals, Murphy continued to rank near the league leaders in game appearances.

“The idea that Pete might have overused me or overused some other pitcher I was in the pen with, I never saw that at all,” says Murphy. “I’d just about say it is a ridiculous idea. I wanted to pitch and there were a lot of situations that called for me to come in and get a couple of outs. If anything I wanted to pitch even more times than I got in.” Murphy, who’s involved in thoroughbred breeding, is still in touch with Pete. “Early May I know I might get a call,” says Murphy. “Pete will want to talk about who I like in the Kentucky Derby.”

Even aside from Murphy, there’s no indication, neither through game logs nor player testimony, that Rose’s betting influenced how he managed. But it could have. Speculation, sure. Evidence? Not yet. Rose himself, not surprisingly, says wagering had no impact on his managing—although there’s always the possibility that his stance will change. If there is enough money to be made, as even those closest to Rose will tell you, Pete can change his mind on just about anything.

Of all the ways one might characterize the differences and similarities between Rose and those players known to have used performance enhancing drugs, the Hall of Shamers as it were, at the bottom line it comes to this: Rose has been banished for the incalculable damage he might have done to the foundation of the game. Steroid users are reviled for the damage they actually did.

IN 2009, a special and unexpected visitor stopped by to see Rose at his table on induction weekend: Sparky Anderson. The two had been on uneasy terms ever since Rose’s fall—Sparky couldn’t get over Pete’s brazen lying—and had not spoken in many years. As Anderson approached, frail but still vital at 75, a smile broke over his creased face, and then a mock scowl. When he got to Rose he took off his baseball cap and, holding it by the bill, thwacked Rose back and forth about the head, muttering nogoods at him all the while. “He knocked my cap sideways!” Rose later said, laughing. It was the scolding of a boy who had strayed, a what-am-Igonna-do-with-you! display of benevolent pique. Anderson had come into Rose’s life less than a year before Harry died, and he had known the kid for nearly 40 years; Sparky’s wife Carol had been after him to bury the hatchet with Pete for years. “I owed him that visit. He played his heart out for me,” Sparky said later to friends at the Otesaga.

People around Rose say that for the rest of that day, after Sparky had chatted for a while and then left, and the tear between them seemed suddenly, miraculously mended, Pete was in an exceptionally light mood—easier and more forgiving than usual, with all of his ebullience coming through.

About a year after that Cooperstown exchange, on an August afternoon in 2010, Rose and one of his steady associates, the memorabilia dealer Charles Sotto, drove out from Los Angeles to visit Anderson at his home in Thousand Oaks. Sparky was thinner still than he had been in Cooperstown, smaller it seemed in every way, and his chalk-white hair was yellowing at the sides. Although the day was not at all cool, he wore a jacket inside the house. Sparky and Pete sat at a table and drank iced tea and told each other stories they both already knew—about the Big Red Machine, and Anderson’s own playing career, and Pete’s hit record and about so many people they had known in the game that had once been everything to both of them. Sparky had some trouble hearing Rose, had trouble at times deciphering the rapid, Roseian chatter-scat that had once been part of the soundtrack of his life. That was O.K., though, because Pete did not mind repeating himself for Sparky.

They phoned former Reds coach George Scherger and left messages on his voicemail—Sparky and Pete calling.
Together!
—and they took a few snapshots standing side-by-side in the kitchen. And when, five or perhaps six hours after pulling in, Pete and Sotto finally got up to go so that Sparky and Carol could eat their supper and Rose could get back to L.A., Sparky came to the front door and stood there watching them go.

Six weeks after that visit to Thousand Oaks—and six weeks before the November morning when Sparky quietly passed away—Rose officially returned to the ballpark in Cincinnati. The Reds had invited him to commemorate, before a Saturday night game on Sept. 11, 2010, the 25th anniversary of his 4,192nd hit. On the big screen, they aired video of the Ty-breaking at bat and the pandemonium surrounding it and then a recorded message played through the stadium: Pete’s voice recalling that night and hailing his teammates and thanking the fans who “made everything possible…made everything what it was.” The sky was clear and the evening sun still shone.

Rose was driven out in a cart from the bullpen, traveling in foul territory along the rightfield line until he signaled to the driver, “Here, this is fine.” The cart stopped and Pete lumbered out and began to walk—oh, maybe 90 feet or so—from the outfield toward first base as the crowd rustled and cheered, the hooting increasing when Pete neared the bag and, once there, raised his right leg and stomped his foot hard upon it. Home again. Cries of “
Peeete! Peeete!
” came out of the stands and then a spontaneous chant “
Hall of Fame! Hall of Fame! Hall of Fame!
” Former teammates of Rose were on the field that night, and Reds executives and Pete Jr. along with little PJ who, when he saw his grandfather out there and heard all the cheering, jumped his cue (What did the boy know? He was five) and ran out of the Reds dugout to clap his arms around Rose’s waist.

More than 36,000 turned out to the park that night and the Reds beat the Pirates 5–4.

The whole scene, this particular Cincinnati homecoming, almost never happened. The Reds organized it and Bud Selig gave the O.K., but at first Pete said he couldn’t make it to the ballpark for the ceremony that night on account of having committed to do a paid dinner appearance in a ballroom at the Hollywood Casino over in Lawrenceburg, Ind. The casino operators said that was absurd, that
of course
Pete should go and appear at the Great American Ball Park and that he could just come over to the casino afterward. They would just push the start time back, the customers could wait.

And would he still collect his check, the full amount? Pete wanted to know, making sure to get a guaranteed yes.

The purpose of the casino dinner was a roast of Rose, and teammates came up one by one to give him a zing: Tom Browning, George Foster, Tony Perez, Ken Griffey Sr.…About 500 people were in the room, seated at round tables of 10 or 12. Petey took the microphone briefly and made a crack about his dad’s retrochic clothes. At one point the lights dimmed and a clip aired of Rose singing in the old Aqua Velva commercial.

Then Pete himself got up there. By now the night was nearing its end and the coffee cups were half-full on the tables and the wine had been drunk. Everyone’s attention was right up front on Pete, this being the moment they had all really come for. Rose zapped Perez (for his unusual use of English) and Griffey (for his batting style) and he told the one about the time Petey had phoned him from the minor leagues, battling through an 0-for-22 stretch, to ask his father the best way to get out of a slump. And Rose answered, “How the hell would I know? I’ve never been in a slump. Call Concepcíon.”

Not only was Pete Jr. there, but Tyler Rose as well. Maybe what happened next was because those two were in the room (it was so rare to have his sons together) and maybe it was also because of the aftereffects of the celebration at the ballpark that night, and having so recently seen Sparky in the condition he was in, and also having those teammates in the room around him, but what happened next, to everyone’s great surprise, is that Pete broke down. His voice did not simply waver or crack, he began to sob, much as he had standing on first base 25 years ago that night.

“I was covering this dinner, and it was kind of standard stuff,” says John Erardi,
The Cincinnati Enquirer
reporter, “but then Rose started to lose it and that really got your attention. It felt completely unscripted, completely sincere and very powerful. I had covered Rose for more than 25 years and hadn’t ever heard him like that.”

Rose told the room that he finally understood what it meant to “reconfigure” his life. He said, “I disrespected baseball.” He looked at Perez— calling him, “like a brother to me”—and apologized directly, and also apologized to the other teammates from the Big Red Machine. “I’m a hard-headed guy,” Rose choked out. “But I’m a lot better guy standing here tonight…I guarantee everyone in this room I will never disrespect you again.” He said, as he fought to get his composure, that he wanted his legacy to be of someone who “came forward” and added, “I love the fans, I love the game of baseball, and I love Cincinnati baseball.”

Before that night, even in the years after he’d made his admissions in
My Prison Without Bars,
Rose had talked about his gambling with a kind of swagger, that familiar screw-you defiance. “It was like, ‘Yeah, I bet on my team every night to win! So what? I’m a winner!’ ” says Greg Rhodes, a longtime Reds team historian. But this was completely different. Something had come over Pete. As Browning puts it, “We saw a man humbled that night. Pete was definitely humbled and he was ashamed. You could see inside him and with the way Pete usually is, that was not something any of us expected.”

Browning and Erardi, Perez and Rhodes, and other people around the Reds had similar thoughts in the days after that night, a few questions they would discuss among themselves. Was this the kind of apology everyone had been waiting for? They wondered. When word got back to baseball’s leadership about how contrite Pete had been up there, would it matter? Would Bud Selig think anything of it at all?

EVER SINCE taking on the commissioner’s role, replacing Fay Vincent more than 20 years ago, Selig has been caught in the middle when it comes to Rose, straddling a line. As owner of the Brewers, he had been on the Hall of Fame board that, in 1991, voted to deny Rose his appearance on the writers’ ballot. Selig cared a good deal about Giamatti and he has no tolerance for a manager doing the things that Rose has done. The commissioner has been asked about his position on Rose, publicly and privately, many hundreds of times, and he has never suggested that he would bend on Rose’s permanent ban. But he has listened to Rose and his advocates, and also, in recent years, to an informal whisper campaign from the Reds. (“There’s a hope on our part that maybe when Selig leaves office [after the 2014 season] he might pardon Rose on his way out,” one member of the team’s brass told me.) And Selig has, through his office, feuded with Dowd, sought to muzzle him from talking about the Rose case. Selig let Rose participate in events such as the All-Century Team and the 4,192 celebration at the Great American Ball Park, because he knows that a chance to embrace Pete Rose is something that some fans want.
⁶

“Selig has been pretty good when it comes to Rose,” says Vincent, “but he has also shown a lack of conviction. One problem with Bud is that he does not like to get booed, and that has an impact on his choices. When he lets Rose onto the field, when he does not enforce the rules, then what do the rules mean?”

Selig came to Cooperstown for the 2012 inductions, as usual, and on Sunday morning he was standing near the entrance of the Otesaga about to get into a car to take him to the induction ceremony when Larry Christenson, Rose’s former teammate, spotted him. “I went over and asked, ‘Would you listen if Pete were to come and talk with you again? Would you be open to talking about him getting back into baseball,’ ” says Christenson. “I tried to make a quick case for it.” But Christenson says Selig did not give an answer. He smiled, shook his head and politely put up a hand before getting into the car.

A couple of hours later, Selig stood on the broad outdoor stage at the induction ceremony, reading, as is the commissioner’s charge, Barry Larkin’s newly created plaque. “Smooth-fielding steady-swinging shortstop whose dynamic defense and all-around play sparked his hometown Reds,” Selig read. There were 44 Hall of Fame players seated behind him, and more than 18,000 fans sprawled out on the great lawn before him, on folding chairs, blankets, coolers. It was a bright and very hot day, and though the stage was well-shaded in an elaborate clamshell, out on the lawn people slathered on sunblock and fanned themselves with paper fans and occasionally poured bottled water over their brows.

The Hall of Famers had come out one by one, introduced by the deepvoiced broadcaster Gary Thorne and then Larkin’s daughter Cymber had sung the national anthem. First Vicki Santo had accepted a Hall of Fame plaque on behalf of her late husband Ron, and she delivered a beautiful speech about the way Ron played third base for the Cubbies and the diabetes he had battled, and his deep love for the game, which especially came through during his broadcasting years. Then Johnny Bench had gotten out of his chair and to please the many Chicago fans out there donned a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses and pulled on a Cubs jersey and done his Harry Caray impression.