The Name of Rose
April 7, 2015
There has been a lot
made of new commissioner Rob Manfred’s comments regarding Pete Rose’s recent
bid for re-instatement but the fact is that he deserves the fate he’s been
given. Actually, “given” is not the appropriate word; Rose has been the
architect of everything that has happened to him. Everything has been due to
the choices he made. The fact that he never considered the repercussions of his
actions is his fault and nobody else’s. Pete Rose should be banned from
baseball and the Hall of Fame. End of story.
From the outset, there
is one thing that will get you banned from baseball permanently. It is
elaborated in Rule 21 (d). It states:
Any player, umpire, or club official or employee, who shall bet
any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor
has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year.
Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who
shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which
the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.
Permanently ineligible. It’s pretty clear.
And it’s
not like players and managers are told this once on the first day of their
major league career and never told again. This rule is re-iterated literally
more than a hundred times every season, from the first days of spring training
until the final game of the World Series. It is impossible for anyone in
baseball to not be aware of this rule and its specifics.
And in
Pete Rose’s case we’re not talking about one instance. Or even two. Or three. In the Dowd investigation report they catalogued
more than 400 pieces of evidence that connected Rose to betting on baseball
games.
Some have
offered the caveat that the evidence in the Dowd report points to Rose having
only bet as a manager and never as a player and should thus be enshrined as a
player in the Hall of Fame. To that I would counter who has more control over
what happens in a game? A player, who bats four or five times and maybe has eight or nine plays in the field, or a manager who
influences every pitch both when his team is pitching and when they are
hitting. A manager calls pitches, positions the fielders, puts plays on,
decides when pitchers will pitch and when pinch hitters will be used or not
used, etc. A manager who bets on baseball has exponentially more influence on
how that bet plays out than a player does. It’s not even comparable. The reason
there’s a ban on betting is because of the damage it can cause to the integrity
of the game. So if a manager can cause exponentially more damage, then it
really doesn’t matter if he didn’t do it as a player. (As it turns out, later
evidence proved that he bet as a player as well).
Some have
offered that he never bet on the Reds to lose and that should carry some
relevance? Really? A manager’s job is to allocate
resources for 162 regular season games in order to give his team the best
chance of winning a post-season berth. Sometimes that means accepting a loss
today so that the team is in a better position to win the next two or three
games. For example, if a starting pitcher gives up four runs in the first
inning, during the regular season a manager is likely to let him stay out there
and for a number of reasons. The first reason is that four runs, in the grand
scheme of a 9-inning game, isn’t an insurmountable lead. Lots of teams come
back from a four-run deficit, especially with that much of the game yet to be
decided. The second reason, and perhaps most
importantly, is that the starting pitcher’s job is to go for as long as he can
in a game in order to preserve the bullpen. Having a rested bullpen is one of
the surest formulas for post-season success.
But let’s
say the manager has bet on his team to win this game. Now he has an incentive
to manage this game more like a playoff game, where he has to make certain that
no further runs will be scored. So a manager who bet on his team to win could
and probably would be inclined to take his starter out and bring in the
relievers so that the deficit doesn’t become greater. So now one has to get
eight innings out of what in most cases is a crew of seven or eight pitchers.
Typically, that many innings will be covered by four or five pitchers – one
long reliever who could go three innings before being taken out for a pinch
hitter, and then two or three middle relievers and then a closer to finish the
game. The problem arises in what happens on the subsequent days. Relief
pitchers can usually go on back to back days, but few can go more than two
games without a rest of a day or two. So if the manager used 5 relievers to win
the game he bet on, it is likely he can not use those same pitchers the
following day and the day after. He’ll have to make decisions over the
next few days that he normally would not make or need to, which means in order
to win one game, he has decreased his team’s chances of winning the next two or
three. Maybe my math isn’t great but I
thought the manager’s job was sometimes to lose one in order to win two, not
the other way around.
Some have
offered that the reason Rose isn’t in the Hall of Fame already is because of
the way he went about handling his transgression. Oh really? Do you mean the
sixteen years of denials, and accusations that there was no evidence? Or that
when he finally did admit that he bet on baseball, he did it in an
autobiography instead of to a reporter, and that the biography was published on
the same day that the Hall of Fame voting was announced, thus upstaging one of
baseball’s most celebrated days? So even when he did finally admit to
committing baseball’s ultimate sin, he did it in order to make a buck off it.
Or was it showing up in
Contrary
to the pro-Rose argument, Rose has never had baseball’s best interest in mind. NEVER. It has always been about Pete Rose because he
believes he is bigger than the game. Why else would he write himself into the
line-up as a player manager for the final six-years of his career, even when it
was clear the Reds had some pretty good minor leaguers ready to play. Does
anyone really think the Reds could not have done better than a 40+ year old
first baseman with no speed and no power with a slash-line of .256/.349/.305
(!) from 1983-1986? Rose collected more
than 1700 plate appearances over that span and hit exactly 2 home runs. He
averaged 12 doubles per season. Nick
Esasky, Rose’s replacement at first base in 1987, did more than that as a
part-time player in 1986 alone. To illustrate how pathetic Rose’s performance
was, only 21 first basemen in the live ball era (since 1920) have posted even a
single season in which they slugged lower than .320. Rose is the only one to do
it twice. He’s also the only first baseman during that period to post three
sub-.350 slugging seasons. He was one of the worst hitting first basemen in
history during his march toward breaking Ty Cobb’s
hits record. Esasky
made his major league debut in 1983. You
know who else played outfield for the Reds part-time as early as 1984? Eric
Davis, one of the best centerfielders of that era. But it wasn’t until 1986
that he saw more than 400 plate appearances. From 1985-1988 the Reds finished
in second place every year. Is it
possible that allowing better players to play could have made up the difference
in the standings? The Reds won the World
Series in 1990 with one of the best teams in baseball history so it’s not as if
they were far away while Rose was their manager.
Suppose
Rose only bet on baseball games in which he was not directly involved, what
then? The first part of Rule 21 (d) states that any bet made on another
baseball team requires a suspension for one year, and since we have evidence of
more than 400 potential occurrences, the punishment might as well be considered
a permanent ban.
Baseball
takes gambling very seriously, even if they don’t consider other issues that
affect competitiveness as much. Both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were banned
from baseball after their playing careers were over for simply advertising for
two casinos. Both men were working as instructors for major league teams at the
time and both men were relieved of their duties by the commissioner and kept
out of any further official baseball capacity. They were later re-instated by
subsequent commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, who made
the exception for only those two players because they had been so great and in
significant part because the casino industry had become so regulated. This is
not what Rose partook in. Mays and Mantle never made bets. They occasionally
shook hands with visitors at events. What they did was hardly different that
what Mike Trout does for Subway. Rose actively sought bookmakers to make bets
with. Huge difference.
Mantle and
Mays are two of the top 10 players to have ever played the game. As much as
Rose and his supporters bleat that he belongs in the same category, he clearly
does not. Yes, he tallied the most hits in history. He also tallied the most
outs in history and the worst stolen base success rate (59%) for anyone with at
least 150 attempts. Dave Concepcion and Tony Gwynn are the only two players to have more grounded into
more double plays yet hit fewer home runs than Rose. He often gets the benefit
of the doubt because of the way he played and because of his hit record, but
the fact of the matter is that Rose is as much a product of marketing (both
good and bad) as he is a product of his actual performance. Unfortunately for everyone, no amount of
marketing will change the substance of his transgression. And that substance
has a well-known and permanent price.