Never Bet Against Pete Rose

New York Times

15-05-2025

A. Bartlett Giamatti, in an academic gown or a J. Press suit, owned lecterns the way Pete Rose owned big-league dugouts. Giamatti was the former Yale president who became baseball's seventh commissioner. Rose was baseball's hit king, amassing 4,256 of them over 24 seasons, most of them singles in the service of his hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds. Both were career .400 talkers.
On the day in 1989 that Major League Baseball placed Rose on its 'permanently ineligible' list for betting on games, Giamatti read a eulogy for Rose's baseball career that opened with this: 'The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode.' Giamatti was drawn to the biblical power of that word, banishment. He wasn't trying to make friends in Cincinnati's river wards. He was answering to a higher authority: the rule of law, the foundation of a civil society.
Rose, by contrast, had a certain outlaw, populist appeal. He was all business in the batter's box, crouched so low umpires struggled to find a strike zone for him, but loose most everywhere else. After he was booted from baseball, Rose served a short stint in prison on a tax-evasion conviction. His private life was made for reality TV.
'The matter of Mr. Rose,' as Giamatti called the gambling-on-baseball affair, might have been about assembled facts and reasoned adjudication. But the force of personality, featuring towering representatives from two great and wildly dissimilar American camps — the establishment and the renegades — has always hung over this contretemps.
Or at least until the current commissioner, Rob Manfred, decided to step in. On Tuesday, Manfred removed Rose and 16 other deceased ballplayers, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, from the permanently ineligible list. That means there is now a clear path for Rose's enshrinement in the National Baseball Hall of Fame's Plaque Gallery (Jackson, too). It's some room: cold air, oak walls, bronze plaques, hushed voices, all those legends crowded together.
With one signed document, Manfred gave populism a big win. You could say populism is on a hot streak. So is legal sports betting, now permitted in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Baseball fans are bombarded with bet-now messages, courtesy of FanDuel, Major League Baseball's official bookmaker.
Gambling is a magnet for compulsives and always has been. Manfred is well aware. Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator for the great Japanese slugger and pitcher Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has been sentenced to a nearly five-year federal prison sentence for embezzling nearly $17 million from Ohtani. He needed the money to pay gambling debts from betting on sports, baseball not among them, according to investigators. But compulsion is an open door to desperation.
In the 35 years after his banishment, Rose signed autographs (for a fee) at racetracks, at televised wrestling events and in the quaint upstate New York village of Cooperstown, in the shadows of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. When Rose died last September at his home in Las Vegas at 83, that two-word phrase, permanently ineligible, followed him into his obituaries.
Giamatti delivered his banishment speech on Aug. 24, 1989. Eight days later, he was dead, after a heart attack in his modest summer home in Edgartown, Mass. He was 51. He was a chain smoker and a compulsive eater — and he was drowning in stress. The Rose gambling scandal consumed Giamatti's days and nights all through his five months as commissioner.
In the coming years, Rose will almost surely get consideration from a 16-member Hall of Fame oversight committee and an opportunity to win the 12 or more votes necessary for induction. Joe Jackson will, too.
Jackson, the unassuming and illiterate son of a South Carolina sharecropper, was a career .356 hitter whose life and times, and role in the fixed 1919 World Series — the famous Black Sox scandal — are shrouded in mystery. But mobsters did try to buy the outcome of that series, which is why baseball brought in its first commissioner, an imposing federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis understood that if the public did not have faith in the purity of the effort in every last baseball game, it wouldn't bother watching.
For over a century, gambling on baseball was the game's cardinal sin. That was one of Giamatti's core beliefs and he was following Landis's example when he banished Rose.
Giamatti was loaded with charisma. He was a public intellectual, a true believer in the value of critical thinking and academic independence. But he is known, all these years later, chiefly for the matter of Mr. Rose. It's painful.
Manfred is baseball's 10th commissioner. He made his move a month after discussing the matter of Mr. Rose with President Trump. Rose had been on Trump's they-treated-him-very-unfairly list for years. Manfred said, 'Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.' Enter Bart Giamatti, laughing. 'Obviously.' Athletes in interviews abuse that word all the time.
'What's obvious is that Manfred needs certain accommodations from Trump for baseball, and Trump wants Rose in the Hall of Fame,' Mark Mulvoy told me the other day. Mulvoy was the managing editor of Sports Illustrated in 1989 when it published the first deep dive into Rose's gambling compulsion. Mulvoy told me he delivered football betting slips for the mobster Whitey Bulger as a kid in Boston in the 1950s and was paid handsomely for it, cash money and 10-cent beers. He doesn't romanticize any bit of it. He loves baseball. But baseball has lost him. The final straw was Manfred's decision.
Anything populist is smack-dab in Trump's wheelhouse. Years ago, during an interview, he turned the tables and asked me how I felt about the 50-game suspension that the prodigious home-run hitter Manny Ramirez had received for violating baseball's rules on performance-enhancing drugs. I gave a high-minded, bag-of-wind answer of support. Trump smirked and said pleasantly, 'I do not care. I just want to see them hit the long ball.'
As for the permanent part of permanently ineligible, it had a good run. Now? Whatever.