It’s Unlikely That Small Victories Will Change Rose’s Fate

Pete Rose is two for two against the commissioner of baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, but what’s it gotten him? Developing is a sad pattern for Rose that very likely began quite a while before this week: short-term success, long-term losses.

Rose is in a rundown just now and about the only thing in his favor is that he apparently will determine where he gets tagged: in Giamatti’s office or a court. The closer this Rose gets examined the less fragrant the aroma.

The matter is where it ought to be, under scrutiny by someone outside baseball, even if the judge sits in Rose’s home town and stands soon for reelection. I’m uncomfortable with the commissioner of any sport being able to act as prosecutor and judge.

Still, Giamatti has been fair to Rose. Dumb, for writing that letter in support of Rose’s chief accuser and thus weakening baseball’s once-firm position with the courts, but generally generous.

By late April, Giamatti seemed to have enough evidence to do to Rose what former commissioner Bowie Kuhn had done to Denny McLain: suspend him. During his two days of depositions, April 20 and 21, Rose admitted owing a bookmaker $34,000 in the spring of 1987.

At one point, Rose said: “I’m guilty of one thing in this whole mess, and that’s I was a (bad) selector of friends.” In baseball, that’s a punishable crime.

Giamatti could have said to Rose: “You have a gambling appetite that’s a major problem for you and a minor one for us. Even if you’ve never bet on baseball, there’s the appearance that you could be compromised. Take some time off. Straighten yourself out.”

That would have cut everybody’s losses. Giamatti pressed on -- and, when Rose wanted more time to respond to investigator John Dowd’s report, he got it.

Rose on Sunday won a temporary restraining order from a Cincinnati judge to block a Monday hearing with Giamatti. Monday was a blue one for Rose anyway, because the Ohio Supreme Court triggered the avalanche of accusations that came tumbling into public view.

The 225-page Dowd report and accompanying exhibits were stunning beyond what even those cynical about Rose had imagined. As always with baseball, the stats were most revealing. The relevant ones against Rose were those in tiny type that listed the alleged baseball bets placed by him from April 8 to July 5, 1987.

It took 15 inches of agate to report those 88 days of action. The box score of most major-league games runs three inches. So the space necessary to report allegations of specific baseball bets by Rose before the all-star break could have housed five complete box scores.

“It was not baseball that first placed the report into the public record,” a spokesman for Giamatti said. It was Rose.

Even worse were charges not included in Dowd’s report but part of the seven volumes of exhibits: that Rose wanted to get involved in cocaine deals, that Rose once said he might throw a game if the bet was a large enough amount.

According to one of Rose’s two chief accusers, Paul Janszen: “He did say to me once, he said, ‘You know, if I had enough money riding on a game, I’d think about throwing the game’ ... He said there are a lot of easy ways to do it. He said, ‘Hell, Paul, hell, I could pinch-hit a guy at the wrong (time) ... or hit and run at the wrong time. I could have a guy bunt at the wrong time.’ ”

This supports why in baseball guilt-by-association is especially severe. There are so many ways a player or manager can influence games. And baseball, as well as any sport, has little to sell other than integrity.

Anyone in baseball who gambles seriously on other sports chips away at integrity; anyone in baseball who bets on baseball hammers away at integrity; anyone in baseball who bets on his own team blows integrity away.

It sometimes is worse when someone who has bet on his own team all of a sudden doesn’t. In a manager’s case, the implication is no confidence, or perhaps an injury not known outside the team. The obvious signal: If I’m not betting on us, dash to bet against us.

Let’s give Rose the presumption of innocence he deserves. Let’s say he maneuvers his case away from Giamatti and into court. Let’s say he picks apart everything Dowd has accumulated and wins.

How might he be judged outside the law?

In many situations, the fluff is what sticks. Scenes and quotes that never get attended to during the normal progress of justice outside of baseball.

From Rose during his deposition is the admission that middleman Tommy Gioiosa “called me up and said this guy was going to burn my house down and break my kid’s legs if I didn’t pay him.”

From Janszen to baseball’s investigators is Rose saying to him in reference to a bookmaker delinquent on his $40,000 payment: “Paul, you go up there, take a gun if you have to, get my money.”

Baseball will survive this. It will survive Giamatti’s blunder. It will even survive some tinkering with the overly awesome powers of the commissioner.

Rose’s judgment, denial after denial, causes deeper concern. Proving prejudice to Judge Norbert N. Nadel led to his soon being savaged by David Letterman. To get his day in court, Rose risked humiliation even if he walks out not guilty.