Pete has a point
Pete Rose has been ridiculed for what he said on Dennis Miller’s new show, Sports Unfiltered, about steroids in baseball.
“I never thought anybody would make me look like an altar boy,” Rose said. “I’ve been suspended 18 years for betting on my own team to win. … I was wrong. … But these guys today, if the allegations are true, they’re making a mockery of the game.
“If you’re gonna put these guys that supposedly did steroids into the Hall of Fame, I mean I gotta get a shot somewhere.”
John Dowd, the man former Major League Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti appointed to investigate Rose’s gambling, dismissed Charlie Hustle’s comments. He said Rose “committed the capital crime of baseball” and is the “king of capital crime.”
Dowd just doesn’t get it.
And others who think Rose is in no position to speak out — they don’t get it either.
Gambling, after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, was baseball’s cardinal sin. Obviously, it cannot be tolerated in any sport, because it strikes at the integrity of the game. Outcomes, numbers, record books and the equality of the playing field can’t be trusted if gambling is involved.
Same with steroids, the new capital crime of baseball.
Pete Rose came by all 4,256 of his hits naturally. You can’t say the same about Bonds’ 762 home runs or Roger Clemens’ 354 wins. You can’t even trust that recent World Championships haven’t been the products of synthetic drugs.
You can trust Pete Rose.
No evidence has suggested Rose ever did anything to throw a game, like the Chicago White Sox did in the 1919 World Series. No evidence has suggested Rose ever bet against his own team, and anyone who knows anything about Pete Rose knows he’d never bet against himself. In fact, the evidence is undeniable that Rose epitomized integrity on the field, maybe to a fault (just ask Ray Fosse.)
Steroids are the new Black Sox scandal. They’re even worse. They’re certainly worse than anything Pete Rose ever did to the game.
Under Bud Selig, steroids seeped into every corner of baseball, from perennial All-Stars to utility players to the most remote ouposts of the minors. There has been disparity in the game’s past, from segregation to the height of the pitching mound, but no era has been so disposable as the Selig Steroid Era.
After the 1919 World Series, baseball appointed its first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to restore and preserve the sport’s credibility. Baseball had an unbiased commissioner — not bound by the players or the owners — for more than 70 years. Then, on the heels of collusion and in a virtual coup d’état that forced out Fay Vincent, Selig took over as commissioner in 1992 while still owner of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Baseball was back to the pre-1919 Wild West, setting the stage for the corruption of steroids.
One of Vincent’s final acts on his way out was a hastily thrown-together ban on steroids, but Vincent would not survive his position long enough to expand or enforce it. What baseball needs now is a new comissioner, a real commissioner.
What baseball needs is a new Judge Landis, and subpoenas and sworn testimony in the meantime. That is how dire a state the game is in.
Laugh at Pete Rose all you want, but he’s old news. Just as Selig and the owners usurped the commissioner’s office, steroids and HGH have usurped gambling as baseball’s unforgivable sin.
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