The day after a National Holiday is disorienting.
I loved some of the Fourth of July hats. Meanwhile the NL Central is separated from top to bottom by 2 games in the loss column and a listener wants to know if Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame.
The real question is does Pete WANT to be?
This is the Locked On MLB Podcast hosted by me, Paul Francis Sullivan. Please call me Sully.
Click HERE to listen to the episode
Bart Giamatti was named Commissioner of Baseball before the start of the 1989 season. Before that year was done, he was dead.
His death remains one of the most aggravating “What If’s?” in baseball history. Maybe he would have changed the course of baseball history forever. Maybe he would have made little difference. Maybe the strife that happened right after his death was necessary for the game.
But there is no denying that in less than a season as Commissioner, he became one of the most respected figures in the game. And with his passing, his stature grew to monumental levels.
A Boston native and lifelong Red Sox fan, he lived one of those academic lives that seem only possible in New England. A graduate of Phillips Academy, he went to Yale, wrote academic volumes and published volumes on English and Italian literature. He rose through the ranks at Yale to become the President of the University from 1978 to 1986.
And yes, he is the father of Oscar nominated actor Paul Giamatti. In fact when Giamatti’s character refers to his father in the movie Sideways, he is holding a picture of his real life dad.
Giamatti served that role with distinction but not in a manner that would have allowed him to emerge unscathed in today’s social media world. He was a bit of a union buster and Yale did not divest from Apartheid torn South Africa.
His great loved remained baseball and he wrote articles for Harper’s Magazine about the subject. Eventually the National League named him President in 1986. He had a few tough decisions to make in his time there, none more public than suspending Jay Howell for using a foreign substance in his glove during the 1988 NLCS between the Dodgers and Mets.
When Peter Ueberroth stepped down as Commissioner (and left his legacy of owners colluding) it was Giamatti who stepped in after the 1988 season.
1989 was a strange year for baseball as one scandal hung over the entire season. Pete Rose was accused of gambling on Reds games while being manager of the team. Rose was one of the great stars of the 1970’s and his respect poured into the 1980’s as he passed Ty Cobb as the all time hit king in 1985.
Now Giamatti found himself in a battle of philosophy as much as enforcing the rules. The Dowd Report showed the facts that Pete Rose did indeed gamble on Reds games. But how could the new commissioner ban one of the great figures in baseball history less than 4 years after his crowning achievement.
The investigation and tension between Rose and Giamatti stretched out throughout the season until it came to a head on August 24, 1989. Giamatti decided that the integrity of the game was greater than any player.
In the end, his wisdom turned out to be true. Rose, despite his claiming the opposite for decades and besmirching the honesty of Giamatti for all of those years, eventually admitted that he did indeed do what he was accused of. And the example set by the Rose suspension shows that even 4,000 plus hits in the majors and a Hall of Fame career does not put a player above the rules.
The stress of the Rose investigation led to Giamatti to take a vacation in the middle of the pennant race. 8 days after suspending Rose, he died of a heart attack in Martha’s Vineyard.
The death coming right on the heels of the suspension put Rose in an even worse light. And the example that Giamatti set of erring on the side of the good of the game made him a martyr of sorts.
The next few years saw baseball dive into chaos and the Commissioner’s office became a joke. Fay Vincent seemed totally unprepared for the job as baseball went into a lockout to start the 1990 season.
With labor strife looming and the effects of collusion making players distrust the owners more than ever, hardline owners wanted to go to war. Eventually Vincent was ousted and an owner, Bud Selig, became the nominal commissioner.
The chaos at the commissioner’s office and a small market owner now in charge of the game led directly to the Player’s Strike of 1994 and the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. That led to the steroid era.
Perhaps Giamatti would have been powerless to prevent those events. Maybe having a cancelled World Series and the limp aftermath was what baseball needed to learn never to have another work stoppage.
Or maybe a strong commissioner would have been able to stand up to both the hardline owners and the Player’s Association and avoid the work stoppages. Maybe tougher rules would have prevented rampant PED use.
When overwhelmed Vincent and scheming and untrustworthy Bud Selig manned the office of the Commissioner from 1989 to 2015, one could not openly wonder “What would Giamatti had done?”
His martyrdom made him a man of irrefutable wisdom, mainly because we didn’t get a chance to see him fail.
What would have happened?
It would have been different. The game of baseball breaks your heart, as he wrote so beautifully in his piece “The Green Fields of the Mind.”
There is something tragically poetic about this card, the final one issued by Topps before Pete Rose’s lifetime suspension.
Pete is looking over his shoulder.
He looks concerned.
He looks distracted.
He is removing his cap from his head.
Doesn’t that perfectly illustrate Pete Rose and his 1989 season as manager of the Reds.
I am not going to go over the obvious things about Pete Rose.
Yes, of course he had a career that is worthy of election to the Hall of Fame. Anyone with a set of eyes, a brain and an understanding what his numbers meant, especially the 4,256 career hits, knows that he earned a Cooperstown bid.
Also anyone with knowledge of the rules of baseball realizes that betting on baseball, even if it is for your team to win, violates the game and whether or not it is on the up and up.
And getting 4,256 hits does not exempt anyone from the rules.
If you need that explained to you, then please kindly click here to read this blog post or maybe listen to this episode of the Daily Podcast.
The 1987 Reds, a team Pete managed, fell apart down the stretch, as we found out he was betting on the games. A post season as a manager could have added to his Hall of Fame plaque. Instead he was banned, Lou Piniella took over and won the World Series the first year Pete was gone.
In the end, Pete has only himself to blame. He lied about betting for decades, throwing people like Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent and poor Jim Gray under the bus before finally coming clean when he was paid for doing so.
He could have made an ally of the Hall of Fame and instead kept showing up on induction weekend with sleazy characters to give impromptu paid autograph sessions.
I have argued that he would rather be on the outside looking in. The minute he is in the Hall of Fame, his story becomes irrelevant until he dies. Seriously, when have superior players like Hank Aaron or Willie Mays been in the news since their induction? Rarely and usually when people are approaching their records.
If Pete is in the Hall, how is he a story?
If he is out of the Hall, he can play the martyr card to his fans and have pay days.
But is anyone defending him now? Adding underage sex to the resume isn’t going to have people clamoring for him to have his day in the sun.
That could have him end up in jail and not for something that most people shrug about, like taxes or finances.
Was it worth it Pete? If Pete came clean back in the early 1990’s, he would have been suspended and probably in Cooperstown by the end of the decade. He would have been enshrined right around the time Jim Gray was grilling him at the 1999 World Series.
Now Pete Rose, one of the brightest stars in the history of baseball, is a 76 year old man staring at rape allegations and the reality that his Cooperstown moment will probably never come.
He has nobody to blame but himself.
Sully Baseball 
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