ANALYSIS : Giamatti Had Little Choice but to Ban Pete Rose From Baseball

It was a monumental sentence for a monumental ballplayer: Pete Rose banned for life.

Bart Giamatti made the decision and stood up and made his thinking clear enough for anyone who cared to understand. He was what the commissioner of baseball ought to be.

The overwhelming weight of testimony and evidence says Rose broke the rule that cannot be broken, no matter how many monumental records Rose owned: He bet on baseball and he bet on his own team. From his first day in baseball every player knows he must not bet on baseball; it’s posted on the wall in every clubhouse like one of the Ten Commandments.

Ultimately, if Giamatti were going to be a genuine commissioner, he had little choice in how he concluded the most agonizing moment of baseball since the Black Sox Scandal. “Baseball,” he said, “almost died in 1921” in the wake of the 1919 World Series the Chicago White Sox conspired to fix for the gamblers. Judge Landis created the gambling rule that evolved in 1928.

Forever is a long time. The fact that Rose can appeal after one year is only a matter of form, according to the baseball rules. Giamatti could not have defined the suspension with a pound of his gavel as irrevocable. He likened it to a life sentence with the right to appeal after one year. There is nothing that says this commissioner or his successors are obligated to accept the appeal.

It was a strong action that resulted from an investigation that began in February when Peter Ueberroth was the commissioner. It was a just decision. However baseball is woven into the fabric of life, it is entertainment and an optional pastime. It is not milk and bread on the table for the kiddies. Once there is a question of its honesty, baseball may as well be professional wrestling.

There is no accusation that Rose deliberately caused the Reds to lose or that he bet against them, but there’s little distinction in the rule. “The wisdom of Landis’ rule is that it does not make any difference whether you bet for or against,” Giamatti said. “The act of betting on a game you are involved in ... is to place your desire for monetary gain ahead of the team.”

And it was a bravura performance by Giamatti Thursday on the stage of the Sutton Parlor of the New York Hilton Hotel. Rose used a baseball bat; Giamatti uses the English language. He was witty and expressive, as always, and enlightening and expansive. He showed more of all of those qualities than any commissioner since Happy Chandler, who suspended Leo Durocher for the 1947 season for associating with known gamblers.

This is a time when public gambling abounds in state lotteries and in the threatening wave of legal football betting cards. Giamatti does not accept baseball betting on the grounds that everybody else does it. “I will be told I am an idealist,” his prepared statement said. “I hope so.”

Both Giamatti and his office come out of this episode stronger because of it. Baseball had this “stain,” he called it, and he did not make an exception for Rose’s stature. To the contrary, it was more agonizing because Rose had his public image as the unyielding competitor baseball liked as its example.

“If anybody thinks I wanted to start my time as commissioner of baseball by going through this with regard to one of the greatest players the game has ever seen, they’re wrong,” Giamatti said. “I am sure there was great agony for Pete Rose and his family. Of course there was considerable personal agony for me and my family. There is no pleasure in any of this.”

No doubt Giamatti would have preferred to find evidence that Rose was innocent of the charges. But when his predicament demanded that he make his defense before the commissioner, Rose could only seek to delay the process.

In the end, Rose and his lawyers chose to sign the Agreement and Resolution accepting Giamatti’s judgment. They knew what they were signing and chose to resolve the matter that has been ticking since February. Rose still would not defend himself at hearings before the commissioner.

He chose a path of no contest. The Agreement and Resolution he signed specifies that Rose neither admitted nor denied the charges that he bet on baseball and on his team, but he knew the penalties were grave. He did not plead no contest to some misdemeanor. One does not lightly plead no contest to a life sentence.

He cannot manage or have any part in the operation of a baseball team. He cannot take a job broadcasting games so long as baseball teams have the right of approval, which means any big-league team. He cannot play in an oldtimers game in a big-league ballpark. His status for election to the Hall of Fame is a separate matter, subject to the voting of the Baseball Writers Association of America, but what once was automatic is now heavily clouded.

Consider that Rose, in his statement in Cincinnati, said, “My life is baseball.” He said he made some “mistakes” and was being punished for them. “My only regret up to this time,” he said, “is I will not have the opportunity to tell my side of the story.” Giamatti, to the contrary, said Rose repeatedly had declined invitations to hearings. Thursday, in fact, he said he was prepared to be in Dayton for a hearing with Rose.

Instead, Rose and his attorneys chose on Wednesday to end the matter by accepting the judgment of the commissioner. Apparently, Rose’s counsel could see no gain in further delaying it. Perhaps the matter would have been concluded earlier if Giamatti had not been advised by his investigator, John Dowd, to sign a letter commending a witness who was a convicted felon for the “truthful” nature of his testimony. Giamatti got bad advice and took it.

Perhaps Rose would have been wiser to have admitted betting on baseball back in the spring, before the issue became whether he had bet on the Reds. Perhaps Giamatti -- or Ueberroth -- would have ruled a one-year suspension. Rose’s lawyers did ask earlier if the commissioner would be satisfied by public service or charitable work or a fine. Giamatti would make no deal.

This was a bigger issue. Even Thursday Rose was denying all. Perhaps that is evidence of sickness in Rose, an addiction to gambling. “I am not practicing clinical psychology or psychiatry,” Giamatti said. This was a willful crime against baseball, and neither Rose nor his lawyers would claim Rose needed help.

In fact, a matter of hours after signing the papers, Rose was blithely selling his autograph on bats and balls and stuff on a cable shopping program. The baseballs were going for $39.94.

That from the player who said he would be the first singles hitter to be paid a million. And was.