THE PETE ROSE DECISION : Legal Opinion : The Rose Settlement Was Mostly a Surrender

Although Pete Rose billed his settlement with Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti as a compromise, legal experts said Thursday that it was really a capitulation.

“It’s just a surrender,” said law professor Gary Roberts of Tulane University, an authority in sports law. “Rose got nothing from this deal.”

Experts in sports law speculated that the Cincinnati Reds’ manager caved in to the commissioner for a variety of reasons, including desires to end the financial drain of his legal battle and the relentless media spotlight that went with it.

They suggested that a ruling last week by a federal appeals court on a technical point of law accounted for the timing of the surrender.

That ruling against Rose, they said, hammered home the exceedingly slim chance Rose had of prevailing in his efforts to avoid a hearing conducted by Giamatti into allegations that he bet on his own team.

“Rose, I think, finally got an injection of reality and realized that he was spending himself into the poorhouse (with attorney’s fees) and that his reputation and his chances of getting into the Hall of Fame were dwindling daily,” Roberts said.

Roberts and others discounted any suggestion that Rose had scored a victory with his right, spelled out in the settlement agreement, to petition for a lifting of his ban after a year.

“You can always ask for something,” Roberts said. “It’s only if you have the right to get something that it’s important.”

They also discounted the importance of Rose’s not formally admitting any wrongdoing. They said such refusals to admit wrongdoing are routine in legal settlements of civil matters, and may be important to Rose only if he is the subject of separate investigations for criminal wrongdoing, such as income tax evasion, or simply as a way of saving face.

If so, Rose didn’t save much. Although Rose, at a news conference, again denied having bet on baseball, his position was not entirely logical in light of his other provisions in his agreement with Giamatti.

Rose acknowledged in the agreement, for instance, that the commissioner had factual evidence to impose the penalty of permanent ineligibility. Giamatti said he had imposed that penalty because Rose had bet on his own team.

The settlement was reached less than a week after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rose’s lawsuit against the commissioner would be heard in federal rather than state court.

“Because the federal courts have traditionally upheld the power of the commissioner, it’s possible that Rose’s attorneys did not envision a very happy ending for them,” said Professor Daniel E. Lazaroff of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “It’s possible, had it remained in state court, they might not have settled for this kind of deal.”

Rose’s lawyers put up a good fight.

They filed their lawsuit in state court and won a temporary restraining order there that banned Giamatti from holding the hearing into the gambling allegations.

Lawyers for the commissioner then attempted to appeal that restraining order, but a higher Ohio court declined to take the case.

Attorneys for the commissioner then tried to move the case to federal court, claiming it should have been there in the first place.

They noted that Rose had named the Cincinnati Reds as a co-defendant in his lawsuit against Giamatti, even though he said in the lawsuit that the ballclub had done nothing wrong.

They argued that Rose named the Reds as a legal trick--a way to avoid subjecting himself to diversity of citizenship--a legal principle that would bring the matter under the jurisdiction of a federal court since Rose and Giamatti live in different cities.

This principle holds that a defendant and plaintiff from different cities are entitled to have their case tried in the neutral territory of a federal court, rather than on the “home turf” of a state court where, the feeling is, judges might be more tempted to yield to public pressure to save a hometown hero.

But the principle is nullified if at least one defendant--in this case the Reds--comes from the same city as the plaintiff.

Responding to the arguments by Giamatti’s attorneys, U.S. District Judge John D. Holschuh, sitting in Columbus, ruled July 31 that “for the purpose of determining of diversity of citizenship, the defendant Cincinnati Reds was, in a legal sense, fraudulently joined as a defendant, and that it is, at best, a nominal party in this action. Consequently the citizenship of the Cincinnati Reds as a defendant may be disregarded . . . for purposes of determining diversity of citizenship.”

That meant the case belonged in federal court.

Rose’s lawyers tried to challenge the ruling by asking the the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene. When the appellate court declined to do so, they settled.