It’s a Good Bet the Latest Pete Rose Tale Runs Foul

One evening with nothing better to do, the television carried pictures of the intrepid reporter Geraldo Rivera conducting an excavation.

He was in a basement in Chicago, if memory serves, and the idea was to reveal the contents of Al Capone’s secret vault. For two hours--it came to feel like two days--Rivera informed his increasingly stupefied audience of the treasures Capone might have buried during his reign as a gangland king.

Finally, we made it inside the vault.

And there it was.

A broken bottle.

No cash, no checks, no diamonds, no FBI machine guns bearing Elliott Ness’ name.

Much the same feeling of silly search settled upon more than one reader recently when Vanity Fair magazine conducted the latest excavation into Pete Rose’s life. For maybe 7,500 words--felt like 75,000--we paid attention to the mewlings of convicted felon Tommy Gioiosa. Because Gioiosa had been a live-in gofer/sycophant of Rose’s, and a man scorned on top of it, the magazine promised dirt galore in “A Darker Shade of Rose.”

So we read the whole thing.

And there it was.

A corked bat.

Certainly, Gioiosa’s act of vengeance was complete. We read about Rose’s near-pathological gambling on the Reds, the drug-trafficking innuendoes, the amphetamine purchases, the guttersnipe womanizing. To read about this Pete Rose is to wish he’d been a .210 hitter at Poughkeepsie rather than a man whose work was so sensational he’d be on a plaque at Cooperstown if they called it the Hall of Great Work rather than the Hall of Fame.

“Fame” has a reverential glow.

Pete Rose doesn’t glow.

But we knew that. We’d heard Gioiosa’s stuff from other lowlifes, parasites and pond scum attached to Rose. So Gioiosa’s only addition to our knowledge was the suggestion that Rose, in gathering the last few of his 4,256 base hits, may have used a corked bat.

Heavens!

Call out Elliott Ness’ grandson!

Say it ain’t so, Pete!

In fact, Rose has said it isn’t so, that he never used an illegal bat, that the only one he ever saw was created by teammate Jose Cardenal, who’d been so bold as to do the criminal drilling right there in the Reds’ clubhouse. Or, as Rose put it, “Zzzzzzzz.”

If it were vengeance Gioiosa sought, he failed. Not so curiously, as we should know by now, the attack more likely produced sympathy for Rose instead of anger at him.

A trip to paradise, kind of, would explain why.

“Par-A-Dice” is a boat. It’s in the Illinois River, and it has the look of a cruise liner, and it may even float. But it goes nowhere because it’s attached to the shoreline by steel beams embedded in concrete. Such an arrangement satisfies Illinois taxpayers and their elected officials. They want to gamble, and they’ve decided that if they gamble, they shouldn’t do it in a church or in a school or--get thee behind me, Satan--in a downtown casino. But it’s hunky-dory if they do it on a boat going nowhere on a river.

Q: How does the boat make gambling OK?

A: It’s out there somewhere.

Q: Huh?

A: Out there, taxpayers can play the slots and roulette and 21. They can roll dem bones. And they can do it all because they’ve left the neighborhoods of their real lives and stepped off solid ground into the fantasy world of a boat going nowhere.

Or they can stop at a gas station in Morton, a beautiful little town where the streets are named for presidents and states, a cameo brooch of a place set among cornfields on the golden Illinois prairie.

At the gas station, waiting to pay, a visitor stood behind a grandmotherly type. He waited. Waited some more. And then noticed why he had to keep waiting. Grandma had the clerk busy punching out Illinois Lottery tickets. Hmm, three of these, five of those, a Midday Pick Three, a Little Lotto, and, oh, yes, an Evening Pick Four.

If gambling is so much with us, if it’s sanctioned by the government, if grandmothers do it and Illinois corn growers do it, then it’s fair to ask what’s the big deal about Pete Rose gambling on baseball games?

It’s not as if he did what Shoeless Joe Jackson once confessed to (only later recanting). Jackson said he took money from gamblers with a promise to lose World Series games. Rose’s transgression was of a different kind, not as dark in the public mind but no less a crime under baseball law. He bet on games.

That’s putting it mildly, for a mountain of evidence supports major league baseball’s conclusion that Rose bet on games in both leagues and on his own team to win--and not just one or two bets, but hundreds of bets for hundreds of thousands of dollars with gamblers maybe a step removed from organized crime.

Whether or not it’s despicable that a Tommy Gioiosa comes out of the gutter to smear Rose, baseball has it right. Rose doesn’t belong in the game. To allow him in is to have excised a cancer only to do a second surgery and reintroduce the malignancy.