TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/070389/07038900.032

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 94 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.