Even After Time in Prison, They Still Care About Rose : Baseball: He has done most of his sentence, but he is still on the outside of the game he loves.

They were teammates once, not so very long ago, vital cogs in the Big Red Machine that dominated major-league baseball in the mid-1970s. George Foster still remembers the first time he walked into the Cincinnati Reds clubhouse in 1971, still remembers how most of the veterans wouldn’t even say hello, how are you, kid, make yourself at home. He also will never forget the one who did.

“Pete Rose walked right up and made me feel at ease,” George Foster was saying recently. “They can say whatever they want to about the man, but you’re not going to hear me say anything bad. Anyone my mother likes has to be good people. My mother always liked Pete Rose. That’s good enough for me.”

On this day a few weeks ago, Foster, now retired, was sitting in a small meeting room in a New York hotel signing autographs at a baseball-card collectors show. Upstairs, right above him, Pete Rose was signing too, more than 1,000 items, $20 on a flat surface or a baseball, $50 for a bat. One man showed up at the Roosevelt Hotel at 6 a.m., three hours early, just to be first in line for Rose’s autograph. When the doors opened, there were 500 people behind him.

Downstairs, Foster’s signature was a relative bargain at $6. No one was waiting in line, so he was more than happy to talk baseball and, when asked, about all the passion his old teammate still generates whenever his name is mentioned.

“Sure, people care about Pete,” Foster said. “And they should care. From what I hear from the fans I talk to, people definitely still like the guy. He played the game the way it was supposed to be played. He made mistakes, sure, but he ain’t the only one.”

At the moment, however, Pete Rose is the only living qualified player banned from being eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. He’s a convicted felon, who was released Friday after three months of living in a halfway house in Cincinnati that was preceded by five months in federal prison in Marion, Ill., for filing false income-tax returns.

Barbed wire and guards have kept him on the inside for most of the last year, and now, while he will complete his punishment with community service in Cincinnati until next January, he is being kept on the outside of major-league baseball, by the invisible fence of baseball’s permanently ineligible list. He was placed on that list in August 1989 by the late commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti.

Rose’s fall from grace has been Page 1, prime-time news ever since it was revealed in the spring of 1989, while he was manager of the Reds, that baseball was investigating whether he had bet on baseball games while so employed. After a six-month investigation conducted by Major League Baseball, he was banned, although he’s never been convicted in a court of law for that transgression. And still, mention Rose’s name and it’s likely to start a lively discussion at a bar, at the ballpark, on any radio talk show in America.

“People are very opinionated on the subject,” said Philadelphia sports talk host Howard Eskin, who covered Rose when Rose played for the Phillies. “The man’s a lightning rod, always has been. They love him, or they hate him.”

And always, they talk about him. The night the bombing of Baghdad began, humorist Mark Russell was set to begin a five-night stand at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. He wrote about the experience in a recent first-person story in The New York Times. After debating about going on at all, Russell stepped out in front of a packed house and said: “I know what you’re thinking. You are thinking, how is he going to get out of this one? We’re thinking now of only one thing, this overriding event upon which this nation is transfixed. Topic A: Should Pete Rose be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame? ... “

Rose’s trial and sentencing played to packed courtrooms. Media hordes followed his first step into prison and his first step out. The National Enquirer even managed to obtain a so-called story from the inside. His first public appearance at the card show in New York attracted the networks, ESPN, CNN and newspapers up and down the East Coast.

Lately, Jim Palmer’s failed comeback and Bo Jackson’s vicissitudes have been the big stories in baseball, but the Rose saga will continue as long as he is on the outside looking in. Every time the Baseball Hall of Fame is set to vote on its latest class, the subject of Rose’s banishment will be debated.

Commissioner Fay Vincent has given no indication how he will rule if and when Rose applies for reinstatement. In response to an interview request, a league spokesman said “the commissioner is not going to talk about Pete Rose in any context.”

Rose, who can apply for reinstatement to baseball at any time, is not talking much either, the better to let time heal some of the wounds, to get public opinion back on his side. This stoic silence from a man who never met a sportswriter he wouldn’t talk to seems to be another reason his story has taken on a life of its own. And Rose has never really said he’s sorry, or admitted that he bet on baseball. That rankles some while at the same time it punctuates the defiant image he once personified as Charlie Hustle, the workingman’s ballplayer who ran out his walks, dove headfirst every chance he got and earned every nickel he was paid.

Why the fascination with Pete Rose? The theories probably surpass the man’s base hits -- a major-league record of 4,256 set in the course of a 24-year playing career.

“I guess he symbolized so much to so many people,” said Michael Y. Sokolove, author of the unauthorized biography, “Hustle: The Myth, Life and Lies of Pete Rose.” “He was their vision of the way baseball ought to be played. He was the pure, old-time player and people were looking for that and found it in Pete. His fall was more astounding than if it happened to someone else. It’s the classic American story, up so high, fall so far, so suddenly. As far as the media, they loved Pete and they glorified him. When he fell into disgrace, a lot of them got mad at him because he made them all look so silly.”

Roger Kahn, who collaborated with Rose on the autobiography, “Pete Rose, My Story,” says the obsession with Rose is purely media-driven, what he described as “high-focus journalism. You’ve got the greatest hitter of all time falling from grace. It’s a pretty good story. It’s about the way people cover the news now. But I can also tell you gambling is nothing new in baseball.”

Paul Hornung, the Golden Boy of the Green Bay Packers, knew a thing or two about betting. In the 1960s, he and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions were suspended a year by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle for gambling. Hornung still believes that suspension during the 1963 season kept him out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame far longer than he deserved (he was inducted in 1986, 14 years after becoming eligible). Karras never did get in.

“We were gambling on pro football,” Hornung said. “Not games I was playing in; hell, with the Packers you had to lay off too many points to do that. I was probably betting $300 to $400 a game with a friend of mine. They had me dead to rights. They had me wiretapped. There was never any question about it, and Rozelle did the right thing, very definitely.”

Hornung has been following Rose’s trials and tribulations with more than casual interest. He went through a similar ordeal, with one major difference.

“At that time I said I had screwed up, and I really had. I asked for forgiveness. Vince Lombardi told me if I kept my nose clean for a year, he’d help me get back in, and that’s just what happened. I knew I’d made a mistake, and I wasn’t afraid or ashamed to say it. The American public is the most forgiving people in the world. I think if Pete had done that, it would have helped. The man’s served his time, he’s paid the price. Just say you’re sorry and see what happens.”

The American public may also be slightly confused on the issue of Pete Rose, particularly his exclusion from the Hall of Fame.

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Armand Nicholi Jr., who has worked with professional athletes, describes the preoccupation with Rose as “a reflection of moral confusion. Ever since Watergate, we have been preoccupied with moral issues; all the professional journals are filled with these kind of articles. We are very confused, more than any time in our history, I believe. That confusion is reflected by people being more bothered by the right and wrong of what Rose did.

“We tend to identify with people who are successful in sports because it gives us a feeling of being successful too. We invest so much emotionally in these athletes. So it’s not only the hero who’s being judged, but also the people who identify with him.”

University of Virginia sports psychologist Bob Rotella also wonders about people who still consider Rose a hero.

“America is becoming a country of false heroes versus real heroes,” he said. “We’re losing sight of values that we used to hold near and dear to our hearts. It’s as if people don’t even care about character anymore. We’ve lost sight of what sports is all about. We’ve put so many of these athletes above the law, and look what happens.”

At the Hall of Fame, curator William Spencer says he found himself deeply troubled by the brouhaha surrounding Rose’s exclusion. He will not offer an opinion on the issue, other than to say he noticed “a lot of sarcasm” when fans stopped by the exhibit from Cincinnati’s great teams of the 1970s. “People would say, ‘You going to put bars around that case?’ -- stuff like that,” he said. “Every day coming to work I was bothered by the Rose business. Then the war started. I know kids who are over there. I started thinking about things in a little different perspective. It hasn’t bothered me since.”

Judging strictly by the reaction to Rose at his card-show coming-out, it seems fair to say that the longer he is kept in limbo and out of the game and the Hall, the more sympathetic figure he will become.

As he walked to his seat on a balcony overlooking the Roosevelt Hotel ballroom to begin his three hours of autographing, Rose received a warm ovation from several hundred fans watching from below.

“Regardless of what he did, people still like Pete Rose,” said Howard Wagner, a plumbing-supply salesman from Queens, N.Y., echoing the thoughts of many fans standing in line that day. “He had a disease, just like a drug addict, a drinker, an overeater. He deserves a second chance in life. What’s he supposed to do, get down on his knees and beg?”

Rose will now make a living from shows like the one in New York, where he can earn an estimated $20,000 a day just for signing his name. His business manager, Cal Levy of Hamilton Projects, a Cincinnati marketing firm, says he has received countless offers from shows around the country, as well as inquiries about speaking engagements and personal appearances.

Levy admitted he was a bit apprehensive before Rose’s trip to New York. “I travel around the country and there is still some mixed reaction to Pete. I hear lots of positive and some negative too. I think it will become more positive the longer he’s kept out of the Hall of Fame.”

The price of Rose memorabilia has held steady, according to several dealers at the show. His 1963 rookie baseball card is priced from $400 to $700, depending on its condition. An autographed bat was selling at the show for $125. “These things hold their value for the collector,” said Paul Lewicki, a dealer from Elmwood Park, N.J. “It doesn’t matter if he went to jail or heaven. If you’re a collector, you want to have the card.”

Despite the depth of feeling, Rose has not become the attraction that Joe DiMaggio is. In New York, they are still talking about DiMaggio’s February appearance at the Armenian Church in Manhattan, with lines around the block and the police finally ordering promoters to close the doors.

That was not the case for Rose’s visit, and his appearance the next day in Waterbury, Conn., but Levy said he was pleased with the turnout, and more important, the reaction of the people who came.

“It was good for Pete because he had a chance to go back out and see how real people feel about him,” Levy said. “It was proven to him that there was a level of acceptance there. That’s not a surprise. I didn’t expect people who didn’t like him to be there.

“He enjoyed himself. He had some fun, and he’ll do it again.” (Levy said Rose is set for a paid personal appearance in Birmingham on Friday, the day of his scheduled release.) “Now it’s a business. This is how he’ll have to earn his living. That’s the reality of everything that’s happened to Pete Rose.”