The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [53]
Giamatti, who was not a lawyer, may have opened his mouth a little too wide in expressing his opinion to the press the very next day. He thought he only couldn’t say that he had made a “finding” that Rose had bet on baseball. In response to one of the first questions reporters asked him, Giamatti answered, “In the absence of a hearing, and therefore in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I am confronted by the factual record of Mr. Dowd. On the basis of that, yes, I have concluded he bet on baseball.”
Rose was livid, and he probably had a right to be. Would Giamatti, if there were an agreement, back down from that? Vincent wrote, “Rose’s lawyer, Reuvan Katz, may not have been wholly candid with him. I don’t think Rose understood the latitude Bart [Giamatti] had to speak about the agreement and how difficult it would be for Rose to be reinstated.”
MY OPINION
Was there a conspiracy to reinstate Rose in a year (or two) if he sought treatment, or reconfigured his life? I suspect that there was, due to the following: Rose accepted his punishment rather quickly for a man who had spent months proclaiming his innocence. It was almost plea-bargaining, with Rose fearful of what further disclosures might do to him. He had to know that in the fourteen previous lifetime bans there hadn’t been a single case of reinstatement. But Rose acted like a man who knew he would be back in the game before long. And why wouldn’t he be? Couldn’t you imagine a scenario in which Giamatti (assured privately by Rose that he would make major life changes) would make a grand gesture of allowing the legendary baseball superstar back in the game’s good graces? It would have had to have been done without the knowledge of Vincent or Dowd. Giamatti, ever mindful of his reputation, could have had it both ways. He could play the moral father figure and the benevolent mother-hen, the commissioner who had an unconditional love for the game and all who played it. In this scenario, only one thing could have prevented Rose from getting reinstated in the 1990s: Giamatti’s death.
Everything that happened after the agreement pushed Rose further and further from the game. Giamatti passed away. Shortly after Rose’s ban, he went to prison for income tax evasion. He pleaded guilty to failing to report $348,720 in earnings from baseball memorabilia sales. Vincent was not going to reinstate Rose, and neither was Bud Selig, his successor. The question remains, why didn’t Rose just come clean and confess to having bet on baseball? He finally did, in true defiant spirit. He did it to sell his book. “I knew that I had broken the law,” he wrote. “But I really didn’t believe I had broken the ‘spirit’ of the law, which was designed to prevent corruption. I never bet more or less based on injuries and inside information. I never allowed my wagers to influence my baseball decisions.”
On an ESPN radio show in March of 2007, Rose admitted to betting “every day” on the Reds, as proof of his “competitive fire,” not as a manipulator of games. If he thought that would ease his way back into baseball, he was probably wrong. That information not only contradicts the Dowd report (available to all on the Internet) but also contradicts Rose himself in his 2004 book. On page 158 of My Prison without Bars, Rose wrote that reports of betting “an average of $2,000 per game on as many as four to eight games a day, approximately four days per week,” during May 1987 were fairly accurate. To me, that means that even if he bet on his team to win approximately four days per week, he did not bet on his team the other game days. That means that as manager, Rose