TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070389/07038900.032

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 109 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 57

The Darkening Cloud over Pete


Baseball's gambling probe of Rose moved toward a grim finale

By Tom Callahan


    The excruciating saga of Pete Rose and gambling seemed to be
coming to a shuddering finish last week. A common-pleas judge in
Cincinnati was pondering whether to issue a temporary
restraining order -- and perhaps turn the Rose investigation
over to the courts -- or leave Rose to face Baseball
Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and the music early this
week. After four months of husky whispers, the worst charges
imagined were spoken aloud at last. Giamatti's special
investigator, John Dowd, asserted in court that he has found
nine witnesses and enough corroborating evidence to prove that
Rose committed baseball's capital crime: from 1985 through 1987
the hustling heir to Ty Cobb routinely bet on his own Cincinnati
Reds. Even for history's leading hitter, who retired after 24
seasons to manage the team in 1987, the prescribed penalty would
be expulsion from the game.

    Dowd offered, as a smoking gun, Rose's fingerprints on
betting sheets. (Rose has claimed never to have seen the sheets
before.) A handwriting analyst, formerly with the FBI, contends
that they were written in Rose's hand. Meanwhile, as the
two-day hearing adjourned last Friday, the Reds' manager was at
an autograph show in Atlantic City, stoically selling his
signature at $15 per scribble. "Being fair and legally correct
aren't always the same thing," Judge Norbert A. Nadel noted,
though hoping to be both. He promised a decision on Sunday.
Rose's hearing before Giamatti was scheduled for Monday. Nadel
did not have to say the stakes were even higher than the legacy
of a legend, knowing that Rose's lawyers were hoping to "move
this lawsuit into previously uncharted waters" and challenge the
very foundation of the game.

    Rose's lawyers want the baseball commissioner, the sport's
all-powerful umpire, to disqualify himself for having prejudged
the case. At sore issue is an April letter, drafted by Dowd but
signed by Giamatti, that commended the "candid, forthright and
truthful" cooperation of alleged bookmaker Ron Peters, Rose's
principal accuser, who was seeking the lightest sentence to a
tax-evasion and drug-trafficking conviction. The judge who
received the commissioner's letter was so appalled that he
turned the sentencing over to another jurist (Peters got two
years) and leveled the loud opinion that by vouching for a
witness in a case he had yet to hear, Giamatti had biased
himself outrageously. George Palmer, a former
state-appeals-court judge, and Samuel Dash, famed Senate
counsel during the Watergate hearings, last week took the stand
on Rose's behalf to endorse that view. They thought Dowd's
225-page finding read less like an investigator's report than a
prosecutor's indictment.

    Robert G. Stachler, Rose's advocate during the hearings,
said, "If there is one American institution that the public
expects to adhere to the concept of fair play, that institution
is major-league baseball. All we're looking for is a level
playing field." Because the controversial Giamatti letter
predated Dowd's interview with Rose, let alone Giamatti's
hearing (originally scheduled for May 25), Stachler argued that
Rose had already been "found in effect guilty." The captain of
baseball's squad of attorneys, Louis Hoynes, talked about a
commissioner with two hats. He said Giamatti was wearing his
"investigator hat" when he sent the letter, not his "final
decision-maker hat." In any event, Hoynes argued, baseball
proceedings were less formal than legal ones, and the
commissioner of this private organization was entitled to
"depart from the rules of evidence if in his judgment the cause
of justice will be served."

    When Hoynes brought up former baseball offenders Leo
Durocher and Denny McLain, who received swifter punishments for
gambling violations "arguably less prolonged and offensive," he
was ringing an alarm that has chilled baseball since 1920. The
Chicago "Black Sox" threw the 1919 World Series and almost
threw away the public's confidence in the integrity of the game.
The club owners, acting in concert, created the commissioner's
office for the explicit purpose of clearing out the gamblers.
Without any process at all, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis
expelled everyone involved in the Black Sox scandal. His '40s
successor, Happy Chandler, gave Brooklyn Dodgers manager
Durocher a year's suspension merely for associating with
gamblers. In the '60s Bowie Kuhn docked Detroit Tigers pitcher
McLain a half-season for making book.

    The "questionable wisdom" of bestowing absolute authority on
a single person was brought up in passing by U.S. district court
Judge Frank McGarr in 1977. But he used that phrase in the
process of rejecting a complaint by Oakland A's owner Charlie
Finley that Kuhn was wrecking him financially by arbitrarily
keeping him from liquidating his team a player at a time. Judge
McGarr ruled, "So broad and unfettered was the commissioner's
discretion intended to be that the owners provided no right of
appeal, and even took the extreme step of foreclosing their own
access to the courts."

    Not being an owner, Rose may say he is no party to broad
discretions and unfettered agreements, but distancing himself
from any baseball tradition might be difficult. It is Rose's
place in that tradition, the fact that he is an embodiment of
his game, that makes these circumstances so compelling, and so
sad.