Squeezed Play Ensures His Place in Hall of Fame

Well, never mind say-it-ain’t-so. It’s so.

Or is it?

Pete Rose got an intentional base on balls.

Or did he bunt?

Bart Giamatti pitched around him. Put him on, so to speak.

It looks from the sidelines like the legal equivalent of both sides falling on the ball till the clock runs out.

Baseball is saved. Pete Rose’s niche in the Hall of Fame is secure because he didn’t admit anything. In courtroom parlance, he pleaded nolo contendere.

Pete says he gave himself up for the good of the team. Sort of like hitting behind the runner. His troubles were distracting attention from the great game of baseball, he explains. He was overshadowing the All-Star game, the pennant races. He didn’t want it to extend over into the playoffs and World Series. Pete took himself out of the lineup.

Baseball Commissioner Giamatti just wanted to get the matter out of the courts. Baseball fears the courts the way safecrackers do. And for somewhat the same reasons. It is operating outside the law and knows it. Giamatti well knows it takes years to convict serial killers through American jurisprudence. Appeals take longer. In this country, a man is presumed innocent even after he’s been proved guilty.

Pursuing a living legend, the man who got the most hits in baseball history, through the courts would have been like pursuing little Liza over the ice in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Is the integrity of baseball preserved?

Well, that depends on what integrity you’re talking about.

The integrity that prompts an outfielder who traps a ball to hold it up in triumph to deceive the umpire into thinking it was a legal catch?

The integrity of the pitcher who scuffs up or spits on a ball, or the hitter who corks the bat?

The catcher who shifts an outside pitch to fool the umpire into thinking it was a strike?

The groundskeeper who wets down the basepaths or lets the infield grass grow to slow down a faster team or foil a harder-hitting team?

So what has happened here?

Well, it would appear that Pete Rose has been banned for life--or one year. Whichever comes first.

What does this do to his eligibility for the Hall of Fame?

Well, Pete appears to have thought of that. By making it a condition of the compromise that he not have to make a clear admission of guilt, he maintains the fiction that he is throwing himself into a volcano--or on a grenade--for the good of the game. He’s a team player. Injured innocence plays well in the provinces.

Most everyone else banned from baseball for life was banned for fixing games, not betting on them.

Pete Rose is not Shoeless Joe Jackson. What Pete did is against the rules. What Jackson did was against the law. Pete made a mistake. Jackson committed a felony. Pete bet--if indeed he did--on his own team. Jackson bet on the other team. In a World Series. One guy is a crook, the other just dumb.

To get into the Hall of Fame, a player must pass a six-man screening committee and get 75% of the baseball writers’ votes, around 400. Rose, of course, would have gone in by acclamation.

But what if he’s still under suspension in 1992, when he becomes eligible for the Hall? The critical paragraph in the rules for election reads: “Candidates shall be chosen on the basis of playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, their contribution to the team or teams on which they played and to baseball in general.”

Is that Pete?

Well, look, Babe Ruth is in the Hall of Fame, right? Everybody loves the Babe, but he wasn’t Frank Merriwell, now, was he? He had character flaws.

Ty Cobb, if you can believe what you read, was all character flaw. Grover Cleveland Alexander had troubles. Don’t forget, Prohibition was the law of the land in their days.

Baseball makes a crime of an activity that is not only legal in some states but is even run by some states.

You can’t fire the president of General Motors for betting on baseball games. In fact, you can’t fire the President of the United States for it. I’m not even sure you can fire the president of the Cincinnati Reds. But you can fire the manager. Bart Giamatti did.

A. Bartlett Giamatti is a tough guy. Don’t let the button-down collar and the Ivy League background fool you. He won’t cop out to a deal.

“(Rose) has stained the game and must pay the consequences,” Giamatti says coldly. “He has violated Rule 21 by betting on his own team.”

Pete Rose is not used to people blocking the plate on him like that. He usually knocks them into the first row of seats. But Giamatti makes the tag. The agreement with Rose is what’s on the table, not under it, he claims. Reinstatement, he insists, will be based on “confident steps toward rehabilitation, which should be taken.”

But the agreement does not mandate rehabilitation or treatment for this gambling Rose. And Pete Rose wants it known he does not need any. He is not a compulsive gambler, he says. The agreement does not mandate admission (or denial) of guilt. So Pete denies it: “Regardless of what the commissioner says, I did not bet on baseball.”

This is known in the better care units as “denial.”

The evidence is pretty clear that Pete Rose’s life was spent ricochetting from the pick six windows at Turfway Park to the back rooms around Fountain Square. If it moved, Pete bet it.

But does anyone seriously think Babe Ruth didn’t have a bet down on Dempsey-Tunney in 1927? Pete Rose is not the only ballplayer in history to have had his own bookie. At least it wasn’t Arnold Rothstein. Ruth had his own bootlegger.

Has a deal been cut? Giamatti won’t admit it, but plea-bargaining is the American way of life. Rapists get in on it, mass murderers, bank robbers. Pete Rose sees himself as the Prisoner of Shark Island. The victim of historic injustice. A guy ridden out of the game he loves on a rail because of bad companions. But he has agreed not to take the commissioner to court any more or challenge legally this apparent death sentence.

Almost everyone would feel better if he would get on TV, like Jimmy Swaggart, and cry a lot. But Pete’s no good at crying. He better hope Bart Giamatti is.

RELATED STORY: Part I, Page 1.