Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [104]
CHARLEY STEINER:
When the Pete Rose thing was happening, I was sent to Ohio to try and find a fella named Ron Peters who was making bets for Pete. My producer and I walked into this dark, woody bar in Hamilton, where the gambling money came and went. Feeling like a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Mike Wallace, I asked this one guy, “Do you know Ron Peters?” He replied, “Who are you? Wait, I know who you are. Well, he ain’t here.” I gave him a business card and my hotel phone number. Not to be impolite, the producer and I hung around, had a beer, but not a word was uttered in the saloon the whole time. The next day at the hotel, I got a call from that same guy at the bar. He was Ron Peters. He was Rose’s bookie.
CHRIS MYERS:
I can’t reveal how I came across it, but one of the breakthrough moments for me on these gambling charges was when someone got me some paperwork in an envelope—I didn’t pay for it—and some audiotapes, cassettes, of someone talking to Pete Rose—let’s just say of a mob-type nature, you know, threatening, “If you don’t pay up, this could happen, that could happen.” My God, I debated on what to do. I went to ESPN and said I got them by digging around—I didn’t steal ’em, I didn’t pay for ’em—and it became their decision on what we could put on the air and what we couldn’t. And Pete, I remember him being very cordial and friendly with me. I watched John Gotti later about the way he had handled things in front of the courts and the media, and I think Pete felt he was bulletproof; that’s just my perception. You loved the way he played the game so you hoped it wasn’t true if you were a baseball fan. He thought it was going to go away, that it wasn’t that big a deal.
I remember interviewing Bart Giamatti; I believe it’s one of his last interviews before he died from a heart attack, and I think it’s unfair, although some people still claim that the stress of the Pete Rose situation had an effect or had something to do with that for Bart Giamatti. But I remember him even off-camera, and he was a very smart guy but also a very passionate baseball fan. I could really see his angst when he said, “I don’t want this to tear up the game. I wish Pete would just step up and own up to this and we can get through it, but these constant denials, we have to take a stand on this; it’s the code of baseball.” I think it really just tore him up personally. He was so happy to be the commissioner of baseball and loved the game, and then something like this comes up. I think it was a very difficult thing because he really appreciated the baseball skills of Pete Rose.
ESPN’s broadcasting of Major League Baseball began on April 9, 1990. The event wasn’t attended by as much hype and hoopla as was the arrival of pro football in 1987, and CapCities and Bristol bean counters were still aghast at the price tag, but many others were thrilled to have this great American game on the network. There’s no fan like a baseball fan, and as if to reward them, it wasn’t very long before baseball rose to the occasion: on June 29, 1990, in two separate ESPN games seen the same day, both Oakland’s Dave Stewart and the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela pitched no-hitters.
JON MILLER, Sportscaster:
ESPN was the first national network with the Sunday night game to cover regular-season baseball as if it were the postseason. We would bring, as the technical people inside ESPN call it, the “Full Monty” production team, and to this day, nobody does that until the postseason or the All-Star Game. We have maybe sixteen to twenty cameras and eight replay machines, and the whole thing is like a military operation.
When we first started back in 1990, I was doing the Orioles games all week long, so I would tape the Tuesday night game of one of the teams we’d be seeing on Sunday, because generally speaking the guy pitching on Tuesday would be pitching again on Sunday. I wanted to look at that team and the pitcher to get an idea of what kind