Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [102]
Which reminds me. Nobody really knows this, but one of my favorite people in the world—Bob Lurie, owner of the Giants—had taken me to lunch at 21 in ’88. One of my goals in life was to do play-by-play for the Giants, and he offered me the job. I certainly didn’t know that was coming, but I was honored. Then I said, “Do you think I can make enough difference in your attendance to pay me what you’re going to have to pay me?” In ’88, I was making, it might have been six figures. He said, “Yeah, of course. That’s why I’m asking you.” He asked if I needed a day to think about it, but I knew then. I had two kids, one and two years old, and we had just gotten the NFL the year before. I told him, “You’ve come to me a year or two too late.” Years later, he said, “You were a very smart young man with that decision.”
PETER GAMMONS:
This was obviously a piece of baseball history. I stayed in San Francisco for two weeks. They wanted me to go do a piece with Bob Welch, who actually lived in San Francisco, in the Marina. In order to go there, you had to go line up at the middle school to get a permit to enter that area. It turned out that Bob’s wife had already done it for us, but as we were passing the middle school, who was standing on line, unshaven and in a windbreaker? Joe DiMaggio. So Bob says to me that we should go say hello, but I said, “I don’t think Joe DiMaggio wants anyone to speak to him when he’s unshaven.” So Bob let it go. A couple of years later, I told that story to DiMaggio, and he actually thanked me. He said, “Even then without knowing me you knew me,” and I said, “Well, I had a pretty good idea, Joe.”
JOE TORRE:
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was getting toward the end of my broadcasting career. The following August I started managing the Cardinals. I had been broadcasting for the Angels since ’85, but to get that national gig with ESPN was real fun. The point is never lose your connection with the game. You play it, you get to manage, you become an analyst. The only thing missing in the broadcasting part is you don’t know if you won or lost.
By March of 1989, Peter Edward Rose had long established himself as one of the greatest players in baseball history. When he retired from the Cincinnati Reds as a player in 1986, he had logged 4,256 hits, a baseball record. He’d also served as manager of the Reds from 1984 until 1989. But on March 27 of that year, the world of baseball and of sports was shocked by the news, in a Sports Illustrated cover story, that Rose had been charged with gambling on baseball, including many of the games in which his team had played.
Some compared the resulting scandal to the notorious Black Sox mess that befouled the 1919 World Series. Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti, who conducted the three-month investigation into the charges against Rose, had lamented pointedly that “baseball almost died in 1921” in the wake of that scandal and said, “The act of betting on a game you are involved in… is to place your desire for monetary gain ahead of the team.”
After the investigation was concluded in August of 1989, Rose reluctantly accepted a lifetime ban from the sport. Rose conceded the ban was based on factual reasons in exchange for Major League Baseball making no formal findings against him; he technically did not admit to gambling as part of the agreement.
But Rose’s troubles had only begun: the IRS and a Cincinnati grand jury had been investigating him on possible tax-evasion charges, an allegation that was first made public only a week after Rose accepted lifetime suspension.
In the end, it was the Feds that got him, at one point serving him with a lien for back taxes totaling $973,000 and change—money “earned,” at least partly, betting on horses at the track.