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He spent over a million dollars in legal fees and investigations, fought the worst scandal in baseball history (until the modern-day steroids scandal), and came away with the same settlement that he would have received (a permanent ban) if he had just told the truth from the beginning! The one thing he negotiated and won was the agreement that “made no finding that he had bet on baseball.” Maybe the reason was that he needed that to protect his eventual (and secret) reinstatement into baseball.

Rose himself wrote in 2004 that, “Perhaps things would have been different if Mr. Giamatti hadn’t died. I might have gotten a fair hearing on reinstatement after a year’s suspension as we had all agreed.”

Giamatti was not a bad person. He was just thrust into an impossible situation. He was given the position of caretaker for the game he loved, and to do his job properly he had to ban one of its (and his) most beloved players. Perhaps he was tortured for trusting and listening so closely to bulldogs Vincent and Dowd? Perhaps he let them play bad cop, while he played good cop—privately—to Rose?

Reuvan Katz did an amazing job for Rose with the agreement, and didn’t feel that he had any need for a secret unwritten agreement. He and Rose had everything they wanted in writing. And then Giamatti blew it up within twenty-four hours. Reuven desperately needed something in writing to exonerate Pete, and he thought he had it with the original agreement. To some people, it’s not that Giamatti died before he could live up to the secret agreement, it’s that he couldn’t adhere to his signed agreement for more than a day.

I believe that there was an understanding that Rose would be back in the game within a year or two. Maybe Rose wasn’t contrite enough for Giamatti when the agreement was signed, and that pushed the late commissioner into damning Rose with his statement that he had bet on baseball. Maybe Giamatti wanted it both ways: He would be the judge and jury to “prove” Rose had bet (what a delicious detective story!), and also be the benevolent forgiver in due time.

CONCLUSION:

#12

Why were Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker allowed to remain in the league after being found guilty of gambling?

More than sixty years before Pete Rose was banished from his sport, there was a gambling scandal that featured not one, but two of the very best players in Major League Baseball history. The scandal became exposed when a disgruntled former teammate and friend went public with letters that implicated Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker for fixing and gambling on a game played seven years earlier.

There were several parts to this conspiracy. First, the American League president, Ban Johnson, was presented with evidence and tried to make the situation go away before the Major League Baseball Commissioner Judge Landis knew of it. Then there was blackmail and various cover-ups. This was one juicy story, concerning two of the greatest outfielders of all time.

There really isn’t any modern-day equivalent. Rose, despite being the all-time hit king, wasn’t as good of a ballplayer as either Cobb or Speaker. More than eighty years after his final game, Cobb is still considered one of the three or four best players ever. Speaker is still considered one of the top twenty. Imagine if in their final playing years it was found out that modern NFL star quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning had (seven years earlier) conspired to fix a regular season game; and since the outcome wouldn’t be in doubt; one of them had a third party place a sizable wager for all concerned. If that happened, and there was incontrovertible evidence linking and implicating both, you can see why efforts were made to cover everything up before the commissioner found out about it.

One has to be aware of the times in which this conspiracy took place to fully grasp it. In 1919 baseball had returned, after having been shut down on Labor Day the year before (Secretary of War Newton Baker had issued