During the 1989 baseball season I found myself around Pete Rose a lot. The commissioner’s office was pursuing him for gambling on the sport, a charge that would ultimately get him suspended from Major League Baseball for life.
He died this week at 83 still in that of state of suspension. Still ostracized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Still on the outside of MLB, never to come back.
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“I really have no place in the game,” he told me three years ago, the last time I interviewed him on the record. “I don’t get along with baseball. And I don’t need to get along with baseball. I’ll live with that, because I’m the one who screwed up.”
Boy did he ever. It’s a tragedy of epic proportions. The all-time leader with 4,256 hits and one of baseball’s greatest players of all time is known more for gambling on his own games as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, and then compounding the error by lying about it.
Back to 1989. In one of our more private conversations, he was seated behind his desk at the Riverfront Stadium and looked up at me from under his red cap.
“Do you think I bet on baseball?” he asked, staring directly into my eyes.
I did, but I decided to be prudent with my response.
“Look, Pete,” I told him. “Only you know in your own heart and mind what you did. But if you tell me you didn’t bet on baseball I have to believe you.”
When I recalled that conversation to him years later, after he admitted publicly what everyone knew to be true, he apologized.
“I listened to my lawyers,” he tried to explain.
Typical, Pete. He rarely took responsibility for anything.
But he did say he had made a huge mistake when he met with commissioner Bart Giamatti before the suspension came down.
“I should have told him the truth,” he said.
When Giamatti died weeks later, his fate was sealed. Giamatti died of a heat attack, but many people blamed Rose for his death, including the next two commissioners, Fay Vincent and Bud Selig, who held a grudge and wouldn’t give him a break.
His deal with Giamatti gave Rose a lifetime suspension reviewable in a year. Rose couldn’t even get a hearing in the immediate years after.
Things might have worked out differently if he had agreed to treat his gambling addiction and done a public mea culpa. Americans love a story of redemption. He was beloved, despite a number of other off-field indiscretions. His comeback story would have been one for the ages. He was still beloved in the years before his death, making a living selling his autograph on just about anything at shows and shops across the country.
One of his favorite shops was in Cooperstown, N.Y., called Safe at Home. He once owned a piece of that store on Main Street, a few blocks down the hill from the Hall of Fame and Museum where he was persona non grata. Still is.
Every Induction Weekend, on the Saturday prior to the ceremony, Rose could be found signing his name at a table in the rear of the store, usually with a couple of other veteran players. Fans didn’t mind paying a few hundred dollars for the privilege. Usually, the line was long.
I’d visit with him there every year just to say hello, just to be social. The last time he was signing with Reggie Jackson and Tony Perez on either side of him.
The conversation always rolled around to the fact that he couldn’t get into the Hall. He asked customers if they thought he should be shunned. They always told him no.
He’s on baseball’s restricted list, and the Hall voted early on that anyone on that list was ineligible for selection. Pete made a big deal that it didn’t bother him anymore. It most certainly did.
“I’ve given up on that, and I’m not a give-up type person,” he told me. “I’m not going to go to bed at night and dreaming about going into the Hall of Fame. I’m going to go to bed at night, hoping I get up tomorrow. [But] I would be the happiest guy in the world if I ever had that honor bestowed on me.”
Now that Pete is gone, MLB should take him off the restricted list. There’s no reason for it any more. As the Grateful Dead once sang, “He’s gone, he’s gone and nothin’s gonna bring him back. He gone.”
I’m not advocating he be in the Hall, but I do think he should get a vote. Just like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and all the steroid candidates. They were on the writers’ ballot for the duration, and we didn’t vote them in. So be it.
I’ll be the first to admit Rose’s case is quite complicated. I loved the guy, but I hated what he did, all of it well-documented. As a young writer breaking into the business in 1976 he was a joy to interview. He took good care of us. I always said if Pete didn’t fill your notebook or tape recorder, you didn’t belong in the business.
One day before a game in that same Riverfront Stadium office, we were shooting the breeze when a bat boy came running up the tunnel and told him he had to get down to the dugout. The game was about to start.
Did I know he gambled? Sure, but not on baseball. Every September he’d pick my brain about the Sunday slate of NFL games and then disappear into the food room to watch some of those games. Colleagues of mine used to go with him to the race track. I never did. It wasn’t my thing.
I went to the Cincinnati neighborhood he grew up in to write his story. I was there on the night of Sept. 11, 1985, at Riverfront when he broke Ty Cobb’s hit record with a line single to left. Leading up to that night he did a press conference before and after every game. Nobody else has ever done that.
In 1989, as the hammer was about to come down, he was always accessible even as cameras of all the national television networks trailed him everywhere he went.
Did I believe he bet on baseball? I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to. I hope you have some peace now, Pete, wherever you may be.
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