The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [50]
The late, great sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, “Rose seemed the eternal fourteen-year-old, cap on backward, socks flopping about his ankles, knickers with a hole in them from sliding.... He was born to play baseball. He never wanted to do anything else. He never could do anything else.”
Rose had great baseball intelligence, and was able to remember dates and records and stats, as well as detailed information on thousands of his at-bats. But he was not book-smart. Instead of reading books, he read box scores and horseracing forms. He loved to gamble, and bet on everything, including the sport he knew most about, baseball.
If Rose was the blue-collar dream of baseball lovers everywhere, then Commissioner Bart Giamatti was the white-collar counterpoint. Giamatti was a scholar and an academic, in addition to being a steward of baseball, a game he cared passionately about. Unlike Rose, Giamatti was one of the most intelligent, book-smart men of his generation. The one-time president of Yale University, he was one of the world’s foremost authorities on Renaissance poetry. What Rose and Giamatti shared was the sense that baseball was their religion. Giamatti equated baseball with high mass. In Rose’s 2004 autobiography, My Life Without Bars, he wrote that his daughter Fawn used to refer to baseball as her father’s religion, and he confessed that he “worshipped” baseball.
Giamatti suffered a massive heart attack in 1989, at the age of fifty-eight, just days after ending his summer-long battle with Rose, which resulted in the banishment of the sport’s career leader in hits, due to gambling. Still out of the game nearly twenty years later, some have suggested that Giamatti took a secret to his grave. Was there an unwritten agreement with Rose that made clear his re-entry into baseball? Is there any credence to this theory?
A secret agreement between these two men would explain much of Rose’s behavior over the years, certainly his refusal for more than fifteen years to admit betting on baseball games.
Giamatti’s deputy, Fay Vincent, succeeded his friend as commissioner, and was intimately involved in the gambling investigation in the spring and summer of 1989. It was Vincent who brought in Washington lawyer John Dowd, a man who had experience as head of a Justice Department strike force conducting Mafia investigations. Dowd was relentless in his pursuit of Rose’s gambling activities; some detractors say he was overly zealous, and trying to make a name for himself.
Dowd’s report would contain enough evidence to permanently ban Rose, and it was Vincent who was the go-between between Dowd and Giamatti. That’s why Vincent, as we shall see, was so vehemently against Rose being reinstated. That’s also why some people believe there was a secret agreement between Giamatti and Rose that bypassed Vincent.
There were three books that gave me the clues to piece together what happened: Pete Rose and Roger Kahn’s Pete Rose: My Story (1989), Fay Vincent’s The Last Commissioner (1992), and Rose’s 2004 confession, Pete Rose: My Prison without Bars.
Toward the end of Peter Ueberroth’s commissionership, Paul Janszen, a convicted felon awaiting sentencing, approached Sports Illustrated in February of 1989 with a damning story about Rose, then the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. The magazine went to Major League Baseball’s top brass, and Ueberroth, Giamatti, and Vincent met with Rose to discuss the allegations.
It quickly became apparent, after initial small talk, that the meeting was going to be serious. Vincent asked Rose the question that everyone assembled wanted to hear the answer to. The Reds manager made a decision to adopt a strategy that he rarely veered