He bet on Reds games while he was still a player, despite his loud assertions to the contrary.
For 26 years, Pete Rose has kept to one story: He never bet on baseball while he was a player.
Yes, he admitted in 2004, after almost 15 years of denials, he had placed bets on baseball, but he insisted it was only as a manager.
But new documents obtained by Outside the Lines indicate Rose bet extensively on baseball — and on the Cincinnati Reds — as he racked up the last hits of a record-smashing career in 1986. The documents go beyond the evidence presented in the 1989 Dowd report that led to Rose’s banishment and provide the first written record that Rose bet while he was still on the field.
“This does it. This closes the door,” said John Dowd, the former federal prosecutor who led MLB’s investigation.
The documents are copies of pages from a notebook seized from the home of former Rose associate Michael Bertolini during a raid by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in October 1989, nearly two months after Rose was declared permanently ineligible by Major League Baseball. Their authenticity has been verified by two people who took part in the raid, which was part of a mail fraud investigation and unrelated to gambling. For 26 years, the notebook has remained under court-ordered seal and is currently stored in the National Archives’ New York office, where officials have declined requests to release it publicly.
[…]
Dowd, who reviewed the documents at Outside the Lines’ request, said his investigators had tried but failed to obtain Bertolini’s records, believing they would be the final piece in their case that Rose was betting with mob-connected bookmakers in New York. Dowd and his team had sworn testimony from bookie Ron Peters that Rose bet on the Reds from 1984 through 1986, but not written documentation. Dowd also had testimony and a recorded phone conversation between Bertolini and another Rose associate, Paul Janszen, that established that Bertolini had placed bets for Rose. But Dowd never had the kind of documents that could cement that part of his case, especially in the eyes of fans who wanted to see Rose returned to Major League Baseball.
“We knew that [Bertolini] recorded the bets, and that he bet himself, but we never had his records. We tried to get them. He refused to give them to us,” Dowd said. “This is the final piece of the puzzle on a New York betting operation with organized crime. And, of course, [Rose] betting while he was a player.”
See here for the documents in question, and be sure to read the whole story. The main moral here is that one should never believe a word Pete Rose says.
I recommend you read Craig Calcaterra’s Q&A about what this all means. Remember that Rose has asked Commissioner Rob Manfred to review his case and reconsider the lifetime ban against him. I’ll qute from the last bit of Calcaterra’s discussion:
Q: Does this affect his Hall of Fame case? Should it?
A: He has no Hall of Fame case now, because people who are banned are not allowed to be on the ballot. If and when he is reinstated, he will be subject to the same sort of scrutiny any player is when considered for the Hall. Part of that scrutiny is the so-called character clause. As it was, some voters were probably going to hold Rose’s gambling history against him and make his Hall case, if he ever gets one, tougher than it should be. With new evidence that Rose’s lying didn’t end years ago when he finally copped to betting on baseball, it may turn a few more minds against him.
Personally speaking, I think the character clause is dumb and I’d put Rose in the Hall immediately. There are a lot of liars and cheats in there. None of them is the all-time hits leader.
Q: Got anything else, smart guy?
A: Just one observation: Pete Rose politics are dumb. There is no reason why people who think he should be back in the game or in the Hall of Fame have to believe he’s a great guy or that he’s a truth-teller. Those are not mutually-exclusive categories. Yet for years, including the past ten minutes, I have heard people believe that it is. That if you think Rose is a liar, you MUST be against him for all purposes, or that if you think Rose should be reinstated and enshrined in Cooperstown that you MUST believe everyone is out to get him and that he’s a choir boy.
That’s silly, of course. Rose is a liar. That’s pretty clear. He got a punishment he richly deserved and, because of the nature of that punishment (i.e. it’s permanent) — Major League Baseball is doing him a gigantic favor by even reviewing his case again. If they told him to pound sand, there wouldn’t be a great argument for him or any of his partisans to lodge in his favor. But you can also, like I do, think that Rose is a liar who should be in the Hall of Fame. And one that, at this point in his life, could be reinstated without much harm happening. It would make a lot of people happy to boot.
This new news — or this new corroboration of old news and the bad P.R. that attends it — could be bad for that reinstatement case. There’s no getting around that unless and until MLB says it doesn’t care.
As you know, I’ve long been in the anti-Rose camp, mostly because 1) baseball’s rules about gambling are simple and clear; 2) Rose agreed to the punishment he now serves; and 3) he’s been lying about it for a quarter of a century. I mean, if he’d ever shown any sign that he at least understood what he did was wrong and why, I’d have been less of a hardass about it. Be that as it may, I can see where Calcaterra is coming from, and I’d be willing to go along with it on two conditions. One, that any consideration for Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame happens posthumously, and two, that every self-appointed moralist with Hall of Fame voting privileges agrees to get over the whole ridiculous PED thing already. Put in everyone whose as-is numbers say they deserve it, and tell the unvarnished truth about them on their plaques. Then we can move on to less controversial things, like the DH and improving the pace of the game. Who’s with me on this?
I’m with ya on the second half.
Ty Cobb was a dirty player and an unrepentant racist. I’m not even going to check how many HoF members spoke out loudly against integration of the sport in the decades prior to Jackie Robinson, but I’ll bet they number close to a hundred. Gambling and ‘roids don’t come close to bigotry as a character issue, IMHO.
This is still a league with a team whose fans perform ‘tomahawk chops’ and “Indian” (sic) war moans, and another with a cartoon Chief Wahoo as its icon, for crying out loud.
Let’s leave the moral judgments to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and put the baseball players who are worthy in the Hall.
By DH, you mean getting rid of the abomination, right? After all, there’s no reason pitchers shouldn’t have to hit.
As for Rose, posthumous is good enough.
You know, I don’t really care about baseball, and I find Mr. Rose despicable, but I do like people who can perform something better than others. Gambling h as nothing to do with his hits record, as opposed to, say, someone using PEDs. Put him in. Keep him banned from owning, managing, influencing teams, call him a bastard publicly, whatever, but let him be nominated/put in.
I find it fascinating that many people care if there is integrity in entertainment. This fabricated controversy is internal to the MLB corporation and its former employee. Why does anyone outside of the corporation itself care?
I agree with you. If you’re gonna put him in the HoF, then all you moral scolds have to give up the whining about the McGwires and Palmeiros and Bondses and Clemens and the even flimsier excuses you use to keep Bagwell and Piazza out.
is shoeless joe in? no.
he goes first.