8-24-89 Two days ago baseball history was made when Nolan Ryan chalked up career strikeout number 5000. Today a different kind of history was made when baseball legend and current Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose was banned from the sport for life by Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti [1938-1989], who only recently assumed the position. According to longstanding baseball rules, any player or manager who wagers on baseball games becomes permanently ineligible to play, manage, or otherwise be affiliated with Major League Baseball. The charges against Rose were made many months ago. Giamatti appointed an attorney to investigate and file a report. A hearing was scheduled to give Rose an opportunity to respond to the charges, but he filed suit in Ohio to prevent a hearing from taking place. The matter has been in the courts ever since. But in the past day or so Rose, through his attorney, waived a hearing, thus submitting to Giamatti’s authority. Giamatti called a news conference for this morning and announced that he was banning Rose from the game for life. According to the rules, Rose can apply for reinstatement in one year, but there is no guarantee that he will ever manage again, let alone play. (He’s now well into his forties, so he probably wouldn’t have played again anyway.)
The puzzling thing about today’s events is that Rose vehemently denies ever betting on baseball. The investigator’s report, however, is filled with allegations by Rose’s fellow gamblers and friends that he did so. Why would Rose submit to a lifetime banishment from the game if he never wagered on baseball? That’s the great unanswered question, one that reporters kept asking at the news conference called by Rose and his attorney this morning in Cincinnati. The answer, I think, is that Rose wanted to save face. Since there has been no hearing on the matter, the Commissioner has been unable to make factual findings. His decision was based on the investigator’s report. So Rose can say, truthfully, that there has been no finding that he bet on baseball games. Had he presented a defense at the hearing, the Commissioner may very well have found, despite his denials, that he wagered on baseball games, and that would sully Rose’s reputation in and out of the baseball community. Rose is also facing federal tax-evasion charges, which is another reason to avoid a hearing. Personally, I think Rose is lying through his teeth when he says that he never bet on baseball. He has either convinced himself that he did not or thinks that lying is the only way to save face. Until Rose either explains away the allegations of gambling or seeks treatment for compulsive gambling, he has little chance of being reinstated. Giamatti is a stern and unmerciful [sic; should be “merciless”] commissioner.
There’s an interesting social angle on the Rose-Giamatti affair. Rose is the consummate hard-working, beer-drinking, macho male, while Giamatti has an air of elitism and effeminacy about him. Rose has never been to college, while Giamatti is a classical scholar and former president of Yale University. Rose speaks in short sentences, jumbles phrases, and angers easily; Giamatti speaks eloquently and stays composed in the face of reporters’ questions. I suspect that the typical working-class American sides with Rose in this affair, if only because Giamatti is not a sympathetic figure. People can identify with Rose, who grew up in Cincinnati and devoted his life to playing a game that everyone—male and female, young and old, black and white—understands. Giamatti spent the formative years of his life in academia, for God’s sake, reading and writing books that few others know or care about. Rose probably drinks beer, goes bowling, and owns a four-wheel drive pickup; Giamatti probably sips champagne, attends opera, and drives a foreign car. So there’s a social element to this affair. It symbolizes a tension between the intelligentsia and the proletariat, if you will. Americans have long been known for their anti-intellectualism, so I predict that in the long run, Rose will be the working-class hero, and Giamatti the elitist villain, in the minds of most Americans. [Rose, who is now 68 years old, is still banished from the game.]
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 