pete rose

i read this article which i thought was very thought provoking.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/20021031zumsteg.shtml

[Clarkmeister]

My answer is simple.

So what?

He's banned from baseball. That's fine. The problem is that they changed the rule for admittance to the Hall of Fame after he was banned. Complete and total bullshit, so much so that our Constitution forbids similar acts by our government.

Should he be banned? Yes. Should he be in the Hall? Yes.

[andyfox]

I'm one of those guilty of not having researched all the evidence, I just assume Rose, with his personality, is guilty. But James sometimes has a was of "proving" a point with faulty logic. Once he tried to show that some player should have been the MVP of the World Series by changing the order of the games; another time he tried to show that one World Series team was superior to the other because one team bombed the other in one game. Anyway, good article.

[B-Man]

Rose voluntarily agreed to a lifetime ban. There is very strong evidence that he bet on baseball, including on Reds games. He knew damn well that there was a rule against betting, and he did it anyway.

I don't see how they could ever justify letting Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame under the current circumstances. If he wants to admit he was wrong and ask for forgiveness, I'm sure all of the bleeding hearts will demand he be forgiven and allowed into the Hall of Fame. But he is too stubborn to do that, instead he will try to back out of the deal he made which banned him.

Shoeless Joe Jackson isn't in the Hall of Fame, and he was a better player than Rose. Unlike Rose, there is a real question whether Shoeless Joe actually went through with the fix (I for one don't think he tanked the Series). I'm not saying Shoeless Joe should be in there, but he has a much better case than Pete Rose.

[andyfox]

. . .with everything B-Man says.

About baseball.

[B-Man]

[Zeno]

You Stated, "He knew damn well that there was a rule against betting, and he did it anyway."

I submit that is exactly WHY Pete Rose should be admitted into the Hall Of Fame.

By the way, who votes to let players in anyway? Some comminttee of moral High bodies floating in Celestial Splendor over Canton, Ohio.

[IrishHand]

Your argument is that a player should be rewarded for violating baseball's most sacred rule? Yeah...that makes sense. Let me know when you start your "Bin Laden in 2004" campaign.

~Irish

PS. Clarkmeister - the Hall didn't really engage in anything that would be seen as unconstitutional even had the federal government enacted it. Iit was long understood that a lifetime ban from baseball, a la Shoeless Joe, meant a lifetime ban from the Hall as well.

[MCS]

I also agree 100% with B-Man.

[adios]

I assume you mean Cooperstown and not Canton. If you really meant Canton why there?

[andyfox]

Pro football HOF.

[Zeno]

Pete was great! He was and still is very AMERICAN. And for that reason alone he should be in Canton or Cooperstown or Stink-ass Cleveland (rocka and rolla?) or Washingtion D.C. or where ever it is located, this Hall of Fame, or Hall of Shame or whatever else you wish to call these buildings or institutions invented by some ratpack committee of moneygrubbing pinheads and journalistic scum that have nothing else to do with their own pathetic lives and boy has this sentence gotten completely away from me so a period is about due. There. Take a breath. There is more coming.

Pete needs to be in one of these morbid muesums because that is precisely what these places deserve. Ty Cobb is in. He was a great American also. From a great line of Americans. His Mother shotgunned her Husband - a great Southern Tradition. And good ol' boy Ty once run into the stands during a game and beat up a cripple. He was supposed to be suspensed for the season but the Tiger's management got it reduced to a ten day suspension and a $50 dollar fine. No doubt Ty's glove or bat or dirty socks are dipped in gold and hanging over the entrance to the Baseball Hall of Fame for everyone to marvel over, ooooh and aaaah over, kiss and stroke, and thus worship the great sacredness of baseball!

Everyone that was great at baseball should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Pete Rose WAS GREAT!!!!
So put his ASS in.
Nuff said.
Methinks.

-Zeno

[Andy B]

Rose is not, as B-Man suggests, trying to "back out" of the agreement he entered into in 1989. That agreement said that there was no finding of guilt, and that he would be allowed to apply for reinstatement after a year. Rose agreed to this because he had a bigger problem than being banned from baseball at the time. He was also being investigated for tax evasion, something that he did time for. If he had defended himself against the gambling charges, he would have had to reveal information that would have hurt him in his tax evasion case. He entered that agreement in good faith, and Bart Giamatti turned right around and told the press that he thought Rose was guilty. I think that that was highly inappropriate. Rose has not been allowed to apply for reinstatement. Fay Vincent and Bud Selig have both refused to hear his case.

James has written about this before. He first wrote about it in his 1990 Baseball Book, the book that replaced his annual Abstract. I've been rereading The Politics of Glory (originally published in 1994, subsequently re-titled something like Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?), and there's a little more in there. The 2002 essay is mostly an updated version of the 1990 essay. I'd be willing to send photocopies of any of these articles to anyone who sends me a private message with a mailing address. I think that Zumsteg mischaracterizes what James is saying. James is not arguing that Rose is innocent. James has more than once said that he isn't sure that "Pete Rose" and "innocent" belong in the same sentence. What he has said is that the evidence against Rose is not overwhelming--that it is distinctly underwhelming--and that way too much of it originates from the same man--Paul Janszen. Rose is guilty of consorting with some extremely questionable characters, and he probably deserved to be banned for some length of time, but I think that he deserves to have his case heard.

I'm not going to pick the Zumsteg argument apart point by point right now, but he does spend a lot of time picking James apart for his assertion that there is a certain amount of evidence that Janszen was making his own bets using Rose's credit. This is a snippet from the Dowd Report quoted in Zumsteg's article:

<font color="blue"> Janszen: Now, what happened was that night I had asked Danita for me, I was leaving there OK, and Pete - you know, what happened was Pete would call here about every night about like a quarter to seven.
Chevashore: Yeah.
Janszen: And leave the..you know, the numbers of the teams he wanted and when I was leaving here I told her I wanted 3 on Cincinnati myself. Well, you know when she started you know putting in Pete's and everything else, she got confused and put 3 dimes for me and instead of 3 dimes it should have been 3 nickels.
Chevashore: Right.</font color>

Zumsteg seems to believe that Janszen bet $300 on this game, but I'm pretty sure that anyone reading this knows that three nickels is $1500, not $300. Dowd and Zumsteg both interpret the above conversation as evidence that Janszen did not have the wherewithal to make large bets. Now if a guy can bet $1500 on a game, why can't he bet $3000? This is a pretty fine line to draw. And say he didn't have the means to make large bets--couldn't he make them anyway, especially if he could use Rose's line of credit? I don't bet on sports, but anyone who spends a significant amount of time in card rooms is going to know a number of people who bet on sports. Don't you know a few people who bet more than they should on sports? I sure do. And I don't think that Dowd and Zumsteg are really in a position to know whether Janszen had the means to place large bets.

I haven't read the Dowd Report. It's available on-line at http://www.dowdreport.com, and I've tried to read it a few times, but it just goes on and on and on. From what James has said in the past, I gather that when Dowd first interviewed Rose, Rose lied about a number of things, and this pissed Dowd off. Dowd then set out to prove Rose's guilt. He was hired to do an impartial investigation, and I don't think he did.

I don't know whether Rose bet on baseball or not. Neither does Zumsteg, and neither do any of you. I'll admit that I'm borrowing from Bill James, but the idea that a man is innocent until proven guilty isn't some abstract legal concept--it is a fundamental principle that each of us depends on (those of us in the US, anyway). Rose deserves to have his case heard by a fair an impartial jury, and I suspect that, when the dust settles, there will be no finding of guilt.

[B-Man]

Andy,

I haven't read the entire Dowd report, either, it is just too long for the level of interest I have in this matter. But from everything I have read, it sure sounds as if Rose bet on baseball, and, more specifically, that he bet on his own team's games. Either is a serious violation of the rules of baseball, though the latter is obviously worse.

I would definitly agree (whether or not MLB does) that Rose had a right to have his case heard, but I would also say that he waived that and any other rights when he signed the agreement banning him from baseball. He can apply for reinstatement, but that doesn't mean MLB has to give him a hearing or reopen the matter. It is not MLB's fault that he was guilty of tax evasion and found it prudent to put the baseball matter to rest (for better or for worse), that is Rose's problem. Is baseball supposed to give him two bites at the apple because he is a criminal?

Aside from the fact that I have no sympathy for the man, I really don't think his rights have been infringed. He made his bed, now he has to lie in it. Reasonable people may disagree with that opinion, but that is the way I see it.

[IrishHand]

B-Man speaks the truth. Pete Rose bet on baseball. Pete Rose bet on games he played in. Pete Rose lied to investigators about the matter. Pete Rose - fully advised by counsel and fully aware of what he was agreeing to - agreed to a lifetime ban in exchange for baseball not investigating the matter to its inevitable conclusion.

To use a simple analogy - a man generally won't agree to life in jail unless he (and his lawyers) are pretty sure that he would have gotten that or worse had the matter gone to trial.

Pete Rose knew his association with baseball was done and over with the moment he got caught - so should you. /forums/images/icons/cool.gif

[Clarkmeister]

It has never been alleged that Rose gambled on games he played in. It has, however been alleged that he gambled on games he managed.

[Clarkmeister]

I simply don't think that banning him from the Hall is reasonable. His crimes have nothing to do with his career as a player. In fact, his crimes occured after he was a player. The distinction stating that one must not be banned from MLB before getting into the hall was made *after* he accepted the ban, otherwise he might have never accepted the ban. Finally, they took away his primary source of income, a fine that realistically exceeds $20 million over his career. That is penalty enough.

Besides that, you are penalizing the fans by not including him in the hall. The hall is there to show the greats of the history of the game. He is one of those and should be included.

[B-Man]

Whether or not there was a written rule barring Rose from the ballot before he was banned, it was an unwritten rule that a player who was banned from baseball could not be admitted to the Hall of Fame (see Shoeless Joe Jackson). That effect of the agreement should not have been a surprise to Rose nor to anyone else.

The fact that his crimes have nothing to do with his playing career is irrelevant. Baseball has such strict rules against gambling because baseball was almost destroyed by gambling (the "Blacksox" scandal). The rule against gambling is posted in every clubhouse, and Rose knowlingly and repeated violated it.

Baseball didn't take away his primary source of income, he took it away from himself when he gambled on baseball (then sealed his fate when he agreed to the ban).

I simply don't understand why people have sympathy for this guy when all baseball is doing is enforcing the penalty to which he agreed.

[IrishHand]

Yeah! What he said! /forums/images/icons/cool.gif

[Andy B]

I have started reading the Dowd Report in earnest, and will probably start a new thread when I'm finished. The agreement signed by Rose and Giamatti is a shade over four pages long, and is also available at http://www.dowdreport.com . I quote:

Nothing in this Agreement shall deprive Peter Edward Rose of the rights under Major League Rule 15(c) to apply for reinstatement.

End quote. I must admit that I am ignorant of exactly what Major League Rule 15(c) says, but my reading of the above is that they guy was eligible to apply for reinstatement at some future date, presumably less than 13 years after the date of the original agreement.

It's not like Rose is the only guy who has gotten in trouble for failing to report income from baseball card shows. Several other members of baseball's illustrious Hall of Fame have had run-ins with the IRS. I can't think of anyone else who did time for it, but I also can't think of anyone who did as many shows and reported as little income as Rose did. Rose didn't get banned for life over tax-evasion; he got banned for life over alleged gambling. And I don't think that being convicted of one crime causes one's rights to be waived in the matter of another alleged crime, unless there's a plea agreement, which there wasn't in this case.

[Andy B]

The Hall of Fame came into being in 1939. Most of the folks who were doing the voting at the time had a clear memory of the Black Sox scandal twenty years earlier, so there wasn't any danger of Joe Jackson getting elected anyway. I don't think that there were many Jackson sympathizers at that time, and there clearly are a fair number of Rose sympathizers now. What Jackson was accused of was, frankly, far worse than what Rose is accused of. If Rose were allowed on the ballot, I don't think he would have gotten elected if he were still banned, but we'll never know. It certainly wouldn't have looked good if he had been enshrined while banned.

I think that Clarkmeister raises an interesting point. Say that this whole investigation didn't take place until several years later. Say that he was enshrined in 1992 (or whatever year he would have become eligible), and then this investigation took place in 1994 (by which time I'm sure that the Reds would have fired him anyway). Do they then kick him out of the Hall? Of course not.

[B-Man]

I think that Clarkmeister raises an interesting point. Say that this whole investigation didn't take place until several years later. Say that he was enshrined in 1992 (or whatever year he would have become eligible), and then this investigation took place in 1994 (by which time I'm sure that the Reds would have fired him anyway). Do they then kick him out of the Hall? Of course not.

It may be interesting, but it is irrelevant. O.J. Simpson is still in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but I sincerely doubt he would have been elected if he committed the murders previous to his election. (Yes, I firmly believe he committed the murders, and I don't see how any reasonable person could think otherwise, the verdict in the criminal trial notwithstanding)

I believe the only person to resign/be removed from one of the major Hall of Fames is Alan Eagleson (I think that is his name, but I am not much of a hockey fan) of the NHL, who stole money from Bobby Orr and others.

[B-Man]

"4. Peter Edward Rose acknowledges that the Commissioner has a factual basis to impose the penalty provided herein, and hereby accepts the penalty imposed on him by the Commissioner and agrees not to challenge that penalty in court or otherwise. He also agrees he will not institute any legal proceedings of any nature against the Commissioner of any of his representatives, either Major League or any Major League Club...

(b) Nothing in this Agreement shall deprive Peter Edward Rose of
the rights under Major League Rule 15(c) to apply for reinstatement. Peter Edward Rose agrees not to challenge, appeal or otherwise contest the decision of, or the procedure employed by, the Commissioner or any future Commissioner in the evaluation of any application for reinstatement."


I also don't know what Rule 15(c) says. I assume he is eligible to apply for reinstatement, but that doesn't mean they have to rule in his favor or even give him a hearing, nor do I see why they would. There were already hundreds of pages of evidence produced, and the parties came to an agreement. Nothing has changed since he signed the agreement, it's not as if he is suddenly innocent.

He didn't waive his rights be committing tax evasion, he waived his rights by signing the agreement. He was represented by counsel every step of the way. It was a fully informed and thought-out decision. He has to live with the consequences. Pete Rose is not a victim; he created the situation, and he has to live with the consequences of the resolution he agreed to.