Total Crap Ace. I'm Standing with Pete. Bowie Fucing Kuhn needed someone to screw back then for some reason. Pete was the one he Pounded up the ass. They are still effing him.
If Bowie Kuhn needed someone to screw for some reason, why is it that Kuhn investigated Rose
in the 1970s but either a) came up with nothing, or b) at least looked the other way, which is
precisely what Kuhn did during his initial probe into Rose's gambling life. Bowie Kuhn was no
saint (ask Jim Bouton about Kuhn's attempt to suppress
Ball Four by trying to coerce him
into signing a statement that he hadn't done it, that it was all the nefarious idea of his editor
Leonard Shecter), but neither was he necessarily looking for Pete Rose's scalp in that time and
place. (The story of Kuhn's probe was told in Michael Sokolove's
Hustle: The Myth, Life, and
Lies of Pete Rose.)
Of course in those years there was no general manager in baseball willing to risk Rose's box
office appeal and no writer willing to risk access to one of the maybe ten best quotes in the
game. Only
a decade later---when first Peter Ueberroth and then A. Bartlett Giamatti discovered
Rose's gambling habit was just too flagrant to ignore---did Giamatti, picking up the ball Ueberroth
dropped when he resigned as commissioner, undertake a full investigation into Rose's gambling
and how deep it went. Was he just a guy who couldn't stay away from the ponies or the greyhounds,
or was he a guy who couldn't resist or stop betting on baseball, maybe even on games involving
his own teams?
Pete Rose wasn't pounded up the ass or anywhere else. He was investigated and found to have
violated baseball's Rule 21(d). For those who don't know or have forgotten the language of the rule,
here it is:
(d) BETTING ON BALL GAMES. Any player, umpire, or club official
or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game
in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared
ineligible for one year.
Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any
sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor
has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible.
(Emphases added.)
If Rose was betting only on games not involving his own teams, and nothing more than that,
he would have received a one year suspension. Betting on games involving his
own teams---and smoking guns have long since emerged showing incontrovertible evidence
that Rose was betting on baseball and even on his own teams before he gave up the player
part of his player-manager job title---earned him permanent ineligibility.
Note the language of the rule. It doesn't say "who shall fix a series"; it says, "who shall
bet any sum whatsoever." Nor does it say
one word about that which was a longtime
fixation for Rose's dwindling legions of defenders---the distinction between betting on his
team to win and betting on it to lose.
We know further---from the discovery of Michael Bertolini's notebooks, Bertolini having been
a marketing associate of Rose's who also placed numerous Rose bets with assorted book-
makers some of whom may or may not have been mobbed up---that Rose was not only
betting on his Reds, he was withholding bets on certain days with certain pitchers starting
. . . a signal in the underground gambling world that
other bettors should bet against
the Reds on those days.As I wrote two years ago---to a correspondent to my baseball blog wondering aloud whether
baseball went after Pete Rose because of "union activities," meaning within the Major League
Baseball Players Association, which was preposterous beyond belief because a) Rose would
hardly have been the only player to support the union, and b) because he'd never actually
been known as one of the more outspoken players on behalf of it (he rarely spoke of or
within it, if ever, in fact)---I'm not arguing any of the foregoing lightly. I was once a Rose
defender when there was still something left to defend, when there was still reason to believe
one or two technicalities involving investigative mistakes might kick open the door to his
reinstatement to baseball.
I didn't change my mind capriciously or with malice aforethought, I changed it because of
evidence. And while I’m on the subject of Rose defenders, I give you the following from
a man who was
so staunch a Rose defender at the same time he was one of baseball’s most
respected and groundbreaking analysts that some feared his Rose defenses might injure his
own hard-earned reputation:
Pete Rose isn’t banned from baseball because he’s a bad person. He’s
banned from baseball because he broke the rules . . . [T]he problem isn’t that
he gambled. The problem is that he broke the rule against gambling.
Think of Pete Rose as being in a baseball prison. Suppose that we applied the
same slipshod argument to those who broke the rest of our rules. Should we,
in order to send anyone to prison, have to prove that everyone who isn’t in
prison is a saint? Of course not, but what would happen if, before we could
send anyone to prison, we would have to show that he was a bad person, that
he was a worse person than all the other people who aren’t in prison? It wouldn’t
work, would it? That doesn’t have anything to do with it; you don’t go to prison
for being a bad person. You go to prison for breaking the rules.
. . . Babe Ruth, who was married, entertained groups of naked women in his hotel
room. You may or may not choose to condemn this, but there is no rule against
it. For very good reasons, there is a rule against betting on baseball.
And in baseball, you get fired for gambling. It has to be that way, because
1. The gambler’s interest in baseball is slightly different from the fan’s interest
or the interest of the team, and
2. The gambler’s interest, once it takes root, is so powerful that it will warp the
game, pushing the sporting interest aside like a tree root pushing away a
sidewalk.
That is what Bill James wrote, in 1994, in
The Politics of Glory, republished a year later as
Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame: Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory.
That addresses the issue that got Rose banished from baseball in the first place. The issue now on
the table in court has
nothing to do with the reason for Rose's banishment and
everything to do
with his character, not to mention whether he may be guilty of a long-ago crime according to the laws
of certain states.
We know from the evidence that Pete Rose was a gambler who bet on his own teams either way, as a
player, a player-manager, and strictly as a manager. Denying it with the evidence both mulcted originally
and since augmented, sometimes dramatically enough, equals denying Bill Clinton committed real crimes
trying to cover up what was merely egregious extramarital behaviour but not itself a properly-defined
crime; it equals denying Lois Lerner abused her power at the IRS when she launched tax investigations
into groups whose politics stood athwart hers and those of her boss His Excellency Al-Hashish Field Marsh-
mallow Dr. Barack Obama Dada; it equals denying that Donaldus Minimus is a) his own worst enemy and,
while he's at it, b) an almost congenital liar.
But as to whether Pete Rose was a statutory rapist, as opposed to a mere serial adulterer (even his
staunchest admirers have quit denying he ran around on his first two wives), I say again---
let's see the
evidence before we decide whether Pete Rose was a statutory rapist. There can hardly be
anything in that suggestion that equals trying to do nothing more than pound another boot up Poor Pete's ass.
