Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (18 page)

The first pitch from Show came in high and away and Rose let it go by. Ball one.

“Before the game we were talking about what we would do if we wound up with the ball,” recalls Royster. He and shortstop Garry Templeton and Bevacqua were saying how if Rose singled into the outfield, they would jostle all over one another to try to catch the throw back in and be the one to bring the ball to Rose. “Or maybe I will just take it and run out the tunnel and never come back,” Bevacqua said.

Show’s next pitch was a fastball, on the inside part of the plate, and Rose fouled it straight back. The noise out of the crowd was loud and constant. Most everyone in the place knew that Pete had grown up seven miles to the west, by the river. “If you have a lump in your throat, you’re only human,” said the Reds broadcaster Ken Wilson over the air.

“Carmelo Martinez was our leftfielder and he was talking with us before the game too,” Royster recalls. “Carmelo was saying how if he got the ball he wouldn’t throw it into the infield at all, he would just run the ball back in and give it to Pete himself.”

The third pitch was low and inside and Rose laid off. Two balls and a strike. It was exactly to the day 57 years since Cobb had appeared in his final big league game.

Show wound up and threw a slider, once again over the inside of the plate, belt high, and Rose was right on this one, knocking it into left centerfield—a clean single. The ball took a high hop on the turf and Martinez gloved it. His plan to carry it into the infield was foiled, though, when Rose rounded first base aggressively, ready to try for second if Martinez didn’t get the ball in quickly.

This was it. 4,192.

Fireworks exploded in the Cincinnati sky and paper streamers fell onto the field and the sound from the stands was like nothing you had heard before. People yelled full throat and hugged one another. Dave Rose wrapped his arms around his mother and jumped up and down. LaVerne had been living back in Cincinnati for six weeks by then, waiting for this moment, staying with Pete’s sister Jackie at the house on Braddock Street.

The Reds players poured out of the dugout and ran in from the bullpen and surrounded Pete at first base. John Franco and Ted Power, Buddy Bell and Nick Esasky, Petey the batboy, Billy DeMars the hitting coach—every Red in uniform that night. Bobby Brown, a lightly used and little-known Padres outfielder burst out of the third-base dugout and ran across the field to get a piece of Pete. It was Templeton who had taken the throw in from Martinez and he came to present the ball. Show walked over and shook Rose’s hand. Within the Red sea, Perez and Concepcíon hoisted Rose onto their shoulders. Marge came on the field and at her beckoning a candy-apple red Corvette appeared, driving slowly toward first base, a gift to Pete.

Those moments all passed in a heady bliss—too quickly for anyone’s liking—and even after the players and Marge had gone in and the Corvette had been driven away, there was absolutely no quieting the crowd. Many people were in tears at their seats. Nobody was ready for the game to start again. Show sat down on the mound to wait.

The fans kept cheering. Four minutes after he had stepped into the batter’s box, nearly three minutes after the hit had landed, Pete stood alone on first base, the game on hold. Already he had saluted the crowd several times. He took his helmet off of his head and he slapped himself playfully on each cheek as if to show that he was not dreaming. Then he put his helmet back on again, and clapped and nodded and swung his arms.

Later Pete would sell the bat that he used to get his hit. He would sell the red Corvette, and he would sell the T-shirts that he wore beneath his uniform. But right now he was not selling anything. Other people, though, were seizing the situation to sell other things, to push some product in the American way. The TV announcers were Wilson and Joe Morgan, who was less than a year out of his playing career and who wished more than anything, he said, that he could be down on the field with Pete.

“Pete, this Bud’s for you,” said Morgan. And then the cameras showed Morgan and Wilson standing beside one another in the booth, each with a can of that beer in his hand—a drink, it might be noted, that Pete never drank—and clanking them together. Wilson added, “This Bud’s for Pete Rose and baseball because this, Joe Morgan, is what it’s truly all about.”

Now, more than five minutes after they had gotten to their feet the fans suddenly began to roar even louder, a new burst, as if realizing that it was up to them to make sure that this moment did not end. Pete grinned and blew out through his mouth and raised his helmet to acknowledge the crowd yet again. He could see the faces in the stands. Carol. Karolyn. His children. His mother. His sister. His brother. So many others that he knew. But then, beneath the stadium lights, that detail would blur away and what Rose saw was not the individuals but more of a single, rippling mass— wide and moving and infinite—like looking at the ocean from the shore.

He stood uncomfortably with his left foot on the bag, his hands upon his hips. He looked up into the sky. He looked down to the ground. He blinked and shook his head and worked his chewing gum across both sides of his jaw. And then, there it was. With the crowd some six minutes into its full and unchecked embrace, Pete could not contain himself any longer. He would say later that he had given in and wept because he had seen Harry looking down upon him from the heavens (though Pete had never been religious in that way, or in any way). And as he stood there, after all that he had now done in his baseball life, all those hits he had gotten, all the money he’d made, all the fame he’d achieved and, at the core of it, the singular way he had competed on the baseball field—Harry would have taken note that Pete had rounded first base hard and alert just minutes before—he could feel, he could
know,
that his father would have been proud.

Whatever may have been going through Rose’s mind, he knew something else then too. He knew there were also many things he had done of which his father would not have been proud at all, things that would have made Harry stern and angry, and even ashamed. If that knowledge lived always like an invisible little pickax inside Pete’s chest, usually, almost unfailingly, he could bury it away. Pete did not linger on feelings. He did not linger on thoughts. He was not an emotional kind of guy. Only now, here, with the crowd cheering and cheering, his own Cincinnati crowd, the all of it—the good, the great, the bad, Harry—fell upon Pete with a force he could not hold off.

He grabbed onto the first base coach, his old friend Tommy Helms, and put his face into Helms’s shoulder, and when Petey came out to first base again from the dugout Pete clutched him and held him in a way that he never had. Over the travails in the years to come for Rose, the unraveling of so much of his life, the many chances he would have to show contrition or sadness or regret, or really any emotion at all, anything but defiance, he would not shake like this in public again—not, that is, for another 25 years.

Finally, close to nine minutes since he had begun that walk toward home plate—and to truly understand how long a nine minute-ovation is, one needs to stand in a room, clapping, and time it—there was calm and resolve enough to let the game begin again. Padres first baseman Steve Garvey, the former Dodgers’ glamour boy whose poster Fawn had pinned as a teenager on her bedroom wall, came back to his position pounding his glove. Just before getting into his fielder’s stance, Garvey winked over at Pete. “What happened, did I miss something here tonight?” he said grinning. “What did you just do?”

ROSE LINED a triple late in the game, hit number 4,193—“When he got to third base he started chattering about the pitch he’d just hit, about the situation in the game, like it was any other night,” Bevacqua recalls—and he came in to score on a sacrifice fly. The Reds won. Afterward, during the ceremony on the field Cincinnati radio voice Marty Brennaman read aloud a statement from baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth: “Not only has he reserved a prominent spot in Cooperstown,” Ueberroth had written of Rose, “he has reserved a special place in the heart of every fan alive today.” Marge came back out and gave Pete a silver cup-and-bowl set, and he took the microphone and thanked her and thanked especially the fans and said that by the way, he would just as soon call the color of the new Corvette “Cincinnati Reds red.” He got everyone cheering again when he said he planned to come back and play another season. People held up signs that said, only,
PETE
.

President Reagan phoned in again, and Rose took the call on the field, practically used to this by now and as at ease and unadorned as ever. “You missed a good ball game tonight,” he told the President.

Years earlier Andy Warhol had advanced an observation about America, something he had noticed about how popular products and popular culture could bridge a class divide.

Which is, in a way, how it was with Rose. It’s as if Warhol had Pete’s number long before starting on the portrait. You’d get the same Pete Rose whether you were Ronald Reagan or a fan in the leftfield bleachers. Whether you were Marge Schott or a bookmaker; a trackhand or the commissioner of baseball; the third baseman on Pete’s team or the third baseman on the other team. You could be a guy mooked up on steroids running shitcan errands for Pete or a gentleman in his tennis whites up on Given Road. Dugout, green room, box seat, back alley. For better and for worse, everyone got the same Pete Rose.

He taped the Phil Donahue show at the Riverfront Coliseum the next afternoon, more than 5,000 people in the arena seats, and he played into the hometown feeling, saying that of the 50,000 people who had been in the ballpark, “I’ve probably had an iced tea with 35,000 of them.” He said he had gone out to the Precinct, Jeff Ruby’s hot place, for steak after the game the night before. “I got home about a quarter to four,” Rose told Donahue. “But I had to get up at six and do
Today
and
Good Morning America
and CBS. You’re asking me how I slept? Like a dog named Schottzie.”

He needled Marge some more and he praised Perez (both of them were there) and Donahue went through the crowd with his microphone, taking questions. A man stood up and said he was proud that Pete “always recognized your fellow players.” A woman held a sign that said
THANKS PETE. AMERICA NEEDS HERO’S
. Each time Pete said something the people liked they broke into applause.

Petey, 15, sat quietly in the audience wearing a Reds cap, and Donahue turned the conversation his way for while. Junior gave short answers to a couple of questions and the worried look about him eased only when the camera swung back to his father. At one point in the broadcast, Rose autographed some baseballs and Donahue, in his shirtsleeves now, tossed them into the crowd.

That same day in Washington, D.C., a federal resolution was passed: “That it is the sense of the Congress to commend Peter Edward Rose on the achievement of becoming the alltime Major League leader in base hits and to recognize all the accomplishments and the inspirational manner in which Pete Rose has played the game of baseball, the National Pastime.”

It all amounted to a dizzying stretch of hours, both enormous and precious. “Someday, when things are going bad,” Rose had said during the postgame of 4,192, speaking as if he somehow already knew, “I’ll be able to reminisce about tonight.”

Chapter 11

Cooperstown, 2012

W
ALKING AROUND Cooperstown on induction weekend you can see the darnedest things. Such as a pair of slight, white-haired men in flannel baseball uniforms intently flipping baseball cards outside Doubleday Field, or 68-year-old Denny McLain (of all people) signing autographs in front of a memorabilia shop called (of all things) Paterno Brothers Sports.
¹
McLain weighs about 100 pounds more than he should, and he tends to give a merry dose of live-for-the-day optimism with every signature.

McLain’s extravagant success on the baseball field, his 31-win season in 1968 and his back-to-back American League Cy Young Awards, gave way to a life touched by almost Biblical distress—a lot of Judas and a measure of Job. His rap sheet includes convictions for racketeering, conspiracy, mail fraud, money laundering and attempting to distribute cocaine. He has been to prison twice. A judge at a bond hearing once called him “a professional criminal.” Out of jail, McLain has suffered through a fire that destroyed his home (as well as his Cy Young Award trophies), personal bankruptcies (he had to sell off his
replica
Cy Young Award trophies) and, most tragically, in 1992, the death of his 26-year-old daughter Kristin in a car accident.

McLain first made the wrong kind of headlines after he invested in a sports betting operation while pitching for the Tigers in the late 1960s. McLain, like Rose later, was investigated by Henry Fitzgibbon, the former FBI man turned baseball’s head of security. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn wound up suspending McLain for three months in ’70. Although he has committed crimes far more wide-ranging and sinister than Rose ever has—McLain once robbed the pension plan of a small business—McLain, like Pete, had the roots of his troubles in a powerful weakness for gambling. And his public trajectory from base-ball superstar to pariah has made McLain the closest thing, from a public perception standpoint that is, to a poor man’s Pete Rose. That can be read literally or figuratively.

“Pete and I have a bond,” says McLain, who broke into the big leagues in 1963, Rose’s rookie year. “The two of us share something. And we both like to bet. I’ve been a gambler all my life.”

When McLain signs a jersey he adds beneath his name: 31–6, 1968/ Cy 68–69/MVP 68. Although his body of work is far from Hall of Fame– worthy (over the last three of his 10 seasons he won just 17 games while losing 34), McLain was, in 1978, on the ballot and as eligible for election that year as were Eddie Mathews, Duke Snider and Gil Hodges. McLain received one vote that season and three in ’79. Although there were heavy suspicions that some of his cohorts in that 1960s bookmaking scheme wagered on baseball, any connection between McLain and base-ball betting proved speculative. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, in levying that three-month suspension, said, “There is no evidence that [McLain’s] activities in any way involve the playing or outcome of baseball games.”

“The big difference between me and Pete when it comes to gambling,” says McLain, failing to note that his list of crimes committed and his swindling of innocent people out of their retirement funds is another big difference between them, “is that he bet on baseball and I did not.” There it is. The cardinal sin.

GAMBLING HAS circled around baseball from the game’s roughknuckled start, intertwined with its early popularity and immediately a concern for the governors of the game. In 1858—a time when, as baseball’s supreme historian John Thorn has written, bookmakers worked the sidelines of league games, adjusting the odds as the score changed, and taking wagers from fans and players—the National Association of Base Ball Players laid out the rule: “Betting prohibited. No person engaged in a match, either as umpire, scorer, or player, shall be directly or indirectly interested in any bet upon the game.”

By the time the National League began, in 1876 (and then the American Association six years later), the consequences, as specified in the rulebook, were clear: “Any player who shall, in any way, be interested in any bet or wager on the game in which he takes part, either as umpire, player, or scorer…shall be dishonorably expelled, both from the club of which he is a member and the League.” Betting on a baseball game that you weren’t directly involved with meant expulsion for a year.

Those stipulations form the basis of Rule 21 (d), also known now as the rule that Pete Rose made famous. The language has been honed and codified over time and has for many decades included “any club official or employee” among those forbidden to bet. (This covers managers of course.) The rule has also, since the time of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who came in on the heels of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, stated that such betting involvement would result in becoming “permanently ineligible.”

That is the ineligible list that Rose has been on, now alone among the living, since Aug. 23, 1989.

The risk of a dishonorable expulsion was not always a deterrent in the early years. There were sporadic attempts (some almost certainly successful) to fix games throughout the late 1800s and well into the 20th century. Gamblers made overtures to fix the first modern World Series, in 1903, and numerous players, as well as an umpire and at least one manager, were banned over the years either for betting on games or attempting to influence an outcome on the field. It was in the ’20s that Cobb and Speaker were investigated for wagering on a game; Dodgers manager Leo Durocher was set down for the ’47 season in part for having consorted with gamblers suspected of betting on baseball. Other incidents arose.

For the general public, wagering on baseball continued, through the decades and still today, to hold a broad appeal—the same appeal that the NFL, it’s worth noting, has long embraced as a key to its popularity.
²
Although the betting lines on baseball games were not published in the 1940s and ’50s, as they were for fights, football games and golf matches, all the local bookies knew the odds. In so many neighborhoods across the country you could lay a bet with the butcher or the baker, with the grocer, the tailor, the tobacconist. By the 1950s more people bet on baseball than on horse racing, and the occasional police raid found daily odds written and annotated on chalk boards—at the back of a barber shop in Harlem, N.Y., at the back of a barroom in Covington, Ky. It was not unusual for gamblers to cold-call a major league clubhouse seeking information, and for the longest time managers refused to reveal, in the days before a game, who the starting pitcher would be. Giants manager Alvin Dark, for one, held to that practice into the ’60s, believing the information to be tantamount to a gambling tip.

Rose’s entrance into the majors coincided with an exceptionally prominent sports gambling case, not in baseball but relating to two highly visible NFL players: the Green Bay Packers’ Paul Hornung and the Detroit Lions’ Alex Karras, both of whom were suspended indefinitely for betting on NFL games, including games involving their own teams. Commissioner Pete Rozelle levied the ban—which created front page news coast-to-coast—on April 17, 1963, just as Rose, living on Braddock Street and reading each day the newspaper that Harry brought home, was finishing his first homestand as a Red. Hornung had been the NFL’s Player of the Year in ’61. Karras had been an All–Pro on the defensive line.

Hornung, 27, got news of the ban over the phone from Rozelle while sitting on his bed in Louisville and with his mother standing in the doorway. He was contrite and forthcoming, detailing how he had indeed placed bets, at $100, $200 or more a game, with his friend Bernard (Barney) Shapiro, a slot-machine and pinball baron with interests in Las Vegas. The two men spoke a couple of times a week during football season and Hornung said he answered questions for Barney along the lines of “How are you doing?” and “What do you feel about the game?” Hornung would respond with things like: “We’re a good bet on an eight-point spread.”

Both Hornung and Karras, who in addition to the betting was cited for spending time with “known hoodlums,” had violated their contracts’ clearly stated prohibition of gambling on football.
³
Commissioner Rozelle made a point of saying that neither player had been found to have bet
against
his team, although Hornung allowed that there were some games on which he did not bet at all, not feeling quite as confident as he usually did in his Packers. What Barney Shapiro or any other bettors might have surmised from Hornung’s nonbet, no one could really say.

In his first public appearance after the ban Hornung was teary and red-faced, telling the press, “I made a terrible mistake. I realize that now. I am truly sorry.” Although Karras was initially defiant, saying “I’m not guilty of anything. This isn’t over yet,” he eventually relented, accepting the ban and acknowledging what he had done. Rozelle said that both Hornung and Karras would be considered for reinstatement after the 1963 season but that for the time being they were out of the league and on a kind of probation. He laid forth a guideline for how the players needed to behave to have a chance at getting back in: “They must avoid the things they were found to have done before—gambling and associations.”

Hornung blossomed during his suspension, honing his public speaking skills during a run of 28 banquet appearances. He worked on television and radio (the
Paul Hornung Show
aired in 22 states). He emceed a car show and he made in-store appearances for the sportswear company Jantzen. Karras stayed active too. Just 10 days after being banned he went through with a previously scheduled pro wrestling match against Dick the Bruiser (a ring villain and a retired Packer) at Detroit’s Olympia Arena.

Both players were reinstated before the 1964 season, and both continued to have productive careers. Karras made All-Pro again while Hornung won two more NFL titles with Green Bay before retiring after the ’66 season. In ’86, after 15 years of eligibility, Hornung was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the length of his wait attributable not to voters’ squeamishness about his betting history but because, over the whole, his raw statistics were not overwhelming. Quipped Hornung when he went into the Hall: “Statistics are for suckers. Ask any bettor.”

Hornung—who was raised 100 miles from the Anderson Ferry and who was surrounded by low stakes sports gambling throughout his Kentucky youth—got to know Rose in the 1960s. They kept up a relationship over the years; Pete sometimes went on Hornung’s radio show in Louisville and Hornung went on Rose’s show at the Ballpark Cafe in Florida during the 1990s. They also played a fair amount of golf together around that time. Says Dave Rose, who sometimes joined a foursome with those two and Dave Thomas, the founder of the Wendy’s hamburger chain, “Between Paul and Pete there were some bets going down on the course. You could definitely say that.”

The two stars have also been hired to do events together and in 2010 they appeared as guests of honor at a sports stag for a high school on Cincinnati’s West Side. Rose lit the spirit of what would be a lively, laugh-filled night, when, standing on stage, he gestured toward himself and Hornung and said into the microphone, “This looks like a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous up here.” The crack brought down the house. One refrain in Rose’s calibrated appeal for public sympathy is to remind people that in the sin of gambling he is not alone among his athletic peers.

THE MOST notorious gambling case in baseball history is, of course, the fixed World Series of 1919, when White Sox players agreed to take money from gamblers to throw the games to the underdog Reds. Eight players were later permanently banned by Commissioner Landis and the one among them whose name most often comes up in discussion of Pete Rose is Shoeless Joe Jackson. Shoeless Joe was one of baseball’s greatest players and the only one, aside from Rose, who would be in the Hall of Fame if not for his gambling-related sins.
⁴
Over the course of a 13-year career, Jackson, a splendid outfielder and dynamic base runner, batted .356, the third-highest career average ever. Ty Cobb called him “the finest natural hitter in the history of the game.” Babe Ruth, who said that he modeled his batting stance after Jackson’s, labeled him “the greatest hitter I have ever seen.”

Jackson was never judged to have actually bet on baseball games, or even suspected of it, but simply to have been in on the Series fix. The Sox, heavily favored, lost the best-of-nine series to Cincinnati five games to three and the revelation that the players had lain down rattled the country immediately and for many years afterward, blossoming into popular culture and imagination long before the 1963 book and ’88 movie
Eight Men Out
. Covering the grand jury investigation into the fix in 1920, a newspaper man from Chicago reported the first version of the immortal exchange outside the courtroom: a small boy confronting Jackson and demanding, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

Baseball was a far-reaching and immensely popular game, and the sabotage of its championship, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald a few years later, proved powerful enough to “play with the faith of fifty million people.” It’s an early and undeniable sign of the moral imbalance of Jay Gatsby— born fully formed from Fitzgerald’s mind in the 1920s—that he consorts with Meyer Wolfsheim, “the man,” as Gatsby puts it, “who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

Some historians then and now have presented Jackson as more victim than perp in the scandal, defending his name primarily on the grounds that 1) he batted .375 over the eight games of the Series and he swore that he had tried his hardest, and 2) he was illiterate and so, perhaps, not entirely witting as he entered into the agreement. Yet it remains hard to get past some of the things Jackson said under oath to the grand jury in Cook County:

Q: Did anybody pay you any money to help throw that series in favor of Cincinnati?

A: They did.

Q: How much did they pay?

A: They promised me $20,000 and paid me five.

And, from later in the testimony:

Q: Then you went ahead and threw the second game…is that right?

A: We went ahead and threw the second game.