A Thin Red Line for Rose Betting

Some of the men who played for Pete Rose when he managed the Cincinnati Reds from 1984 to 1989 have the same conflicted feelings about Rose’s admission that he bet on baseball as fans do.

Dave Parker, Dave Collins, Nick Esasky, Todd Benzinger and Tom Browning all said they had never witnessed Rose placing a baseball bet from the Reds’ clubhouse, but none would be surprised if he had.

All knew Rose was a serious gambler, but none worried about Rose’s probable addiction at the time or ever thought Rose might be managing games in any way that compromised baseball’s integrity.

Benzinger, 40, grew up in the Cincinnati area and idolized Rose as a player. He said he wanted to play as hard as Rose, care as much about the game as Rose and ached to love the game as much as Rose. Yet Benzinger said Wednesday from his Cincinnati home: “No, I am not convinced Pete wouldn’t have thrown a baseball game.”

Benzinger played in the majors for nine years -- one under Rose -- and now coaches a girls’ high school basketball team. He understands how young athletes look up to pro athletes. He is puzzled by Rose.

“Some things don’t make sense,” he said. “For 14 years Pete stuck to a story even though it kept him out of baseball. Now he admits to gambling on baseball and the Reds, which the rules say should keep him out of baseball, and this statement gets him back into baseball? Now he admits he deserves a lifetime ban so he can get out of his lifetime ban? Who knows what to believe?”

Benzinger’s father had worked at Cincinnati-area horse racing tracks and came home one night excited to tell a story of Rose’s winning $52,000 that afternoon.

“But I didn’t think anything of that,” Benzinger said. “All I knew was what I saw on the field. Pete was magical to be around and sometimes those who didn’t know Pete can’t understand why anybody defends the guy. But Pete is such a people person, he had so much charisma and so much love of baseball.

“Pete played the game in a way nobody has played it before. All out. If people now want baseball to rebound, before every baseball game they should show a three-minute video of Pete Rose playing baseball and compare that to the kind of baseball fans will see in the next three hours. Maybe some of today’s players will look up there and understand. That’s what fans get into.

“But what Pete will be remembered for was that he was a gambler. Should he get into the Hall of Fame? Yes. Should he be allowed to manage again? No. How could you believe anything he says?”

Browning, 43, who pitched for manager Rose in Cincinnati (including a perfect game in 1988 against the Dodgers) and still lives less than 10 miles from where Riverfront Stadium once was, said he knew Rose bet on horse racing, basketball and football but also said, “It never crossed our minds as players that Pete would bet on baseball.” And now that Rose has admitted to that? “So what?” Browning said.

If Rose was betting on the Reds, if the manager might even have placed bets from the clubhouse, “So what?” Parker said.

Life’s a gamble every day you get out of bed. That’s what Collins thinks. And if you gamble, Collins said, “doesn’t it make sense to gamble on what you know best?” So Pete Rose bet on baseball, Collins said. “So what?”

Esasky said he “didn’t have a lot of respect for Rose as a manager,” called Rose “self-centered,” and said Rose “was always quite busy with his own particular situations and couldn’t take the time to communicate with young guys like me.”

A first-round draft choice of the Reds, Esasky felt stymied under Rose, who often put himself into games at first base and consigned Esasky to the bench. It wasn’t until Esasky went to Boston, where he had a breakout season in 1989, hitting 30 home runs and driving in 108 runs before losing his career because of a severe case of vertigo, that Esasky found baseball fulfillment.

“Am I surprised Pete has now admitted to gambling on baseball and the Reds? Not at all,” Esasky, 43, said from his Las Vegas home. “Of course we knew he gambled. He was a very driven, very competitive man and when I played for him he often seemed distracted. To be a manager takes total concentration and commitment and, to me, Pete was not able to pull that off. Was it his outside activities that caused that? Who knows?”

Browning knows that not betting on baseball “was kind of a cardinal rule and of course Pete shouldn’t have done it.” But Browning also argued vehemently that to compare what Rose did to the 1919 Black Sox scandal is wrong-headed and unfair.

“The 1919 Black Sox went on the field and purposely threw baseball games,” Browning said. “There is not a chance Pete Rose ever did that, as a player or a manager. It was just gambling to Pete. Gambling was gambling, whatever sport he was gambling on. To compare him to 1919, that’s just wrong. It’s hard for me to correlate the two.”

“Look,” Browning said, “everybody gambled a little. The day we all got those stupid pagers that gave us up-to-date football scores, heck, that was a huge day.

“I am not going to defend what Pete did, but it doesn’t matter. Pete is baseball.”

Parker, who played for Rose for two seasons, said he never saw evidence of the red book that was mentioned in the Dowd report, the result of baseball’s investigation of Rose’s gambling. The red book was supposed to be a record of Rose’s betting. “I never saw the red book,” Parker said, “but if I had, it wouldn’t have bothered me.

“I love Pete, I respect him, I competed against him and for him and there was never a better competitor. We’d go to the dog track in Sarasota. I’d go three times a week, Pete would go every night and bring a handicapper with him. So, yeah, I knew Pete gambled. But Pete lived, slept, ate baseball. I played for him 270-some games and I never saw one incident that would make me think Pete wasn’t trying to win.”

Collins, who played for Rose in 1987 and 1988, echoed Parker. “I was in the dugout with Pete as a player and a manager,” Collins said, “and I’ve never seen a player or manager with as much determination to win as Pete.

“One thing I can tell you, if Pete bet on the Reds, it was only to win. Yeah, he bet. And you’re not supposed to. But in no way did Pete ever go out on the baseball field and do anything but try to win. He bet on baseball because he knew baseball better than anything. That’s all. He’s paid a penalty, a stiff one. Now let’s move on.”

Benzinger wonders about the penalty though.

“He’s made millions and millions of dollars over the last 14 years,” Benzinger said. “He gets cheered everywhere. He’s not ostracized. He’s been treated right by a lot of people.”

It would be impossible for Rose to manage again, Esasky said.

“You will have players on the team, with their job for next year on the line, who will wonder if Pete left them on the mound too long because he might have a bet going,” he said. “He would cause a lot of disruption for a team and that would be unfair to the players.

“It’s like John Rocker. Rocker might be totally apologetic and repent. But whether he’s forgiven, people can’t forget.”

What’s sad to Benzinger is that he thinks the 62-year-old Rose might make a special manager now.

When he came up in the Boston organization, Benzinger said he watched Rose as a manager, talked to some of the Reds and found that Rose “seemed distant and disinterested as a manager and some of the players said Pete was envious of them because they still played.

“By the time I got to Cincinnati in 1989, stuff was starting to come out and Pete was always hiding from reporters. But in spring training that year, it seemed like Pete had started to get his competitive juices back for just managing. He was really, really into it and he showed me things about playing first base, it was amazing. He’d take me to a side field in a way that was fun, funny, amazingly enlightening. That man would make a great manager.”

But that man would still be a gambler, Esasky said.

“Gambling is about wanting to win, just like sports,” Esasky said. “Gambling can be an aggressive way to compete. I have never lived and died baseball in the same way some players have, but baseball is still important enough to our future that I still feel the integrity of the game is sacred. How could you ever believe in Pete Rose and still believe in the integrity of the game?”