Pete Rose’s supporters have always been asked to take a great deal on faith; that even though he has admitted to gambling, he always knew where to draw the line. Rose, his supporters will tell you, would never give anything less than 100 percent as a player; Charlie Hustle was too single-minded, they say, to throw a game.
Besides, Rose never bet on baseball games as a player, right? That was his story all along, and even John Dowd, the former federal prosecutor whose work led to Rose’s banishment from the game, couldn’t find concrete evidence to the contrary. Until now. Until ESPN’s Outside The Lines reported Monday that it had documents in its possession that showed Rose had bet on games when he was a player-manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1986 – his final year as a player.
Let’s be clear: the documents do not show any evidence that Rose bet against his team. But the documents showed that Rose bet on at least one MLB team on 30 different days from March to July, 1986. On 21 of those days, he gambled on the Reds, including games in which he played. The book shows most of Rose’s bets were in the neighbourhood of $2,000, and Rose lost the largest single bet he made: on the NBA’s Boston Celtics. During one seven-day span covered in the book, Rose lost $25,500.
The revelations are contained in a copy of a notebook seized by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service during a raid in October, 1989, at the home of Michael Bertolini, a former Rose associate who was being investigated for mail fraud. OTL obtained documents that were not made available to Dowd, who told ESPN the evidence supports the charge that Rose was betting with mob-connected bookies through Bertolini. “This does it; this closes the door,” Dowd told OTL. “Bertolini nails down the connection to organized crime on Long Island and New York. And that is a very powerful problem. The implications for baseball are terrible; the mob had a mortgage on Pete while he was a player and manager.”
The timing could not be worse for Rose, and it could not be more interesting for proponents of legalized gambling.
With the handing off of the commissioner’s mantle from Bud Selig to Rob Manfred, there had been growing indications that the time might be right for Rose to be welcomed back into the game’s good graces. (Pete Rose back in the game; baseball possible back in Montreal … all our sacred cows are going away in front of our eyes.) Rose started doing studio work for FOX Sports and there has been a groundswell of support for Rose to have a formal role in celebrations surrounding next month’s All-Star Game in Cincinnati.
This report must surely give Manfred pause to re-consider the quickness of Rose’s return to the game’s good graces. Whether it does damage beyond that remains to be seen, since there has been a shift in how professional sports teams and leagues view the whole matter of gambling. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has been especially open to considering some kind of formal relationship with the gaming industry – his sport has almost as many historical issues with gambling as baseball – while Manfred had sent out much less obvious signals. The reason for the shift in tone is obvious: money. Once you’ve built a new stadium, staked a claim to the internet’s use of your product, put in place a regional sports network for 20-odd years, where is the next source of untapped revenue? Gambling, of course.
I doubt that these new revelations will stop what now seems to be an obvious formalized marriage. I’m not even certain they will change baseball’s views of Rose, although the further chipping away of his story makes it less inconceivable that he’d bet against his team. Ask anybody who has lived with or known a problem gambler whether they believe that person is able to draw a line in the sand, and the answer would be almost unanimously negative. It is an illness.
There are those who will wonder what all the fuss is about, who will say that the game has welcomed steroid cheats back from suspension, so why not expedite Rose’s return? The answer at a very base level is there is a difference between, say, possibly throwing a game and using performance enhancing substances to better your play. A paying customer should expect the game’s outcome to be above board; there is, frankly, no unfairness if it’s one team of steroid-enhanced goofs beating another team of steroid-enhanced goofs. Having an outside economic interest dictate the playing of a game is something else entirely.
An unfortunate moral dilemma? Certainly. But what professional sport or other form of entertainment doesn’t demand that?