Rose Should Be Brought Back to Bat

Pete Rose is going to make the Hall of Fame. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, not the one in Cooperstown. The one at the City of Hope.

The one at Cooperstown remains remote. But can you imagine what baseball historians of the future will think when they sift through the game’s records in the 20th Century and ask themselves whatever became of Peter Edward Rose in the game’s Valhalla?

How about this bouquet of Rose’s? Number of hits, 4,256. That is 65 more than Ty Cobb, the only other player ever to get 4,000 hits. It’s 485 more than Henry Aaron had, it’s almost 1,000 more than Willie Mays had, it’s 1,300 more than Rogers Hornsby had and it’s nearly 1,400 more than Babe Ruth had.

This Rose had 200 hits a season 10 times, another record. He had the most singles in history, 3,215, and the second-most doubles, 746 (Tris Speaker had 792). Rose is fourth in runs scored.

He was more or less constantly on base. He ranks 10th in lifetime walks. Most of the guys ahead of him were home run threats.

But individual statistics are not the only measure of a ballplayer. After all, the object of the game is to win. Well, Pete Rose won. He appeared in six World Series. He was in seven playoff series. He was a winner.

His absence would seem to diminish the Hall of Fame. But he can’t get into the Hall of Fame because he can’t get on the ballot. The reasons have never been sufficiently explained.

Ax murderers get a right to be confronted by their accusers. Multiple murderers get 13 years of appeals. Embezzlers get a right to counsel.

Have you ever seen any cogent evidence that Pete Rose ever fixed a ballgame or bet against his own team? I’m not even sure he bet on his own team, although that was the extent of the testimony against him.

In a society that frees confessed killers on technicalities, a society that frequently bends the law into knots in favor of a defendant, Pete Rose was charged, arraigned, tried and found guilty by a jury of one, the commissioner of baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a non-jurist, on largely suppressed evidence. Rose was reduced to a non-person by baseball. The death penalty. Exile.

Extraordinary. Ever see a transcript of exactly what his transgressions were? He apparently accepted the banishment, but we were never told exactly why.

It is a matter of record that, in the most famous expulsion in the history of baseball, the Black Sox scandal of 1919, all of those expelled were acquitted in a court of law of the charge of conspiring to throw the World Series. But the commissioner of baseball, who had been brought in for that express purpose, threw the players out of the game anyway. Even though he had been a federal judge himself, Kenesaw Mountain Landis declared that “regardless of the verdict of juries,” the players were guilty.

The rest of us have to live with the verdicts of juries.

Rose’s case never got to a jury. He was banished from baseball without a formal hearing. True, it was with his acquiescence. There were reports of betting slips, fingerprints, testimony from questionable accomplices. But none made their way to a formal court of law. That was it. No smoking gun.

And now, there is no commissioner. Rose was banned from baseball by an extinct process. Baseball is now run by a vague committee. The commissioner himself has been banished.

Who enforces Rose’s banishment?

Unfortunately, society holds its icons to a higher standard of morality than it does its ordinary citizens. It holds vigils for serial killers, but a President better not get caught double-parking.

How guilty was Rose?

Here are the words of the late commissioner Giamatti in driving Rose out of the garden of baseball: “In the absence of a hearing, therefore in the absence of evidence to the contrary . . . I have concluded that (Pete Rose) bet on baseball.”

Can you imagine what Alan Dershowitz would do with that if he got it in an appellate court?

Rose was in town to accept induction into the City of Hope’s Hall of Fame, which will be part of the hospital’s Victor Awards banquet at the Las Vegas Hilton on June 26. He joins former winners Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio--guys who are in the other Hall of Fame.

Rose was appreciative of the honor, but skirted the question of applying for reinstatement in the grand old game.

“Commissioner Giamatti told me to ‘reconfigure’ my life, whatever that means,” he said. “I think I have done it. I have a 300-seat restaurant in Florida, a syndicated radio show and I have put my life on the positive side in all respects.”

Rose shuns the role of victim.

“I would apply for reinstatement, but it seems to me baseball has a full plate of problems right now--the Marge Schott affair, a new television contract, a problem with its public image.”

There is also the little matter of whom he would apply to. The game is run by committee, and we all know what that means.

Rose, who served time for income tax evasion, faces that problem head-on.

“I deserved punishment, but I don’t know as I deserved prison,” he says. “I underpaid only 6% of my taxes. I paid 94%, over $2 million. There were 230 guys in that prison, and I was the only one who was guilty. The other 229 were all innocent. I know, because they told me so.”

Rose does not claim innocence. He simply would like to get off death row. In his original settlement with Giamatti--and Fay Vincent after Giamatti’s death--he had the right to apply for reinstatement in a year. That was four years ago. That was almost the only strike three Rose ever took in his life with the bat on his shoulder.

Maybe it’s time for him to go back up swinging. The trouble is, no one’s on the mound for baseball now.