Tuesday, June 21, 2005 | 9:39 a.m.
Rule 21 -- Misconduct
(d) BETTING ON BALL GAMES
Any player, umpire, or club official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year.
Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.
Pete Rose left a game at Coors Field in Denver last season wondering why he had even entered the baseball stadium.
Nicknamed "Charlie Hustle" by Whitey Ford for the way he sprinted to first base after drawing a walk during a game in his first spring training, Rose turned to a friend, a Cooperstown, N.Y., resident, and was a mile low.
"I said, 'Andrew, why should we come back and watch the Rockies play tomorrow? They walk on the field. They don't hustle,' " Rose said. "I mean, my players didn't do that when I managed the Reds.
"You have to give people a reason to come back to the ballpark. If you don't, they won't come back, 'cause there's so much to do with your sports dollar these days."
Like spend $149 for a Rose-signed Rawlings "Big Stick" bat or $799 for a framed Cincinnati Reds' No. 14 jersey bearing Rose's autograph.
Those and other items were available for purchase Saturday at the Hilton Race & Sports Superbook, where Rose, 64, held court for three hours in one of the many autograph sessions he has hosted in Las Vegas since the first of the year.
With that framed jersey came a signed copy of "Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars," the book he wrote with Rick Hill last year that quickly hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
He works for Dreams, Inc., which owns 45 Field of Dreams memorabilia stores in the country. The three in Las Vegas are among the chain's top four in sales, and Rose is under contract to work here for 15 days each month.
The trip from his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., is easy, but he is responsible for his own air fare and hotel arrangements.
Saturday, the queue for a memorabilia appraiser, around the corner from Rose's table, was regularly lined with at least a dozen customers. Rose endured long stretches in which nobody visited him.
"You don't make anyone buy an autograph," he said. "(In Caesars), I'm next to the Rolex store, next to a sunglass place. Everyone sells something. My time is as valuable as anyone else's ... the same as if I go do a corporate appearance or talk at a banquet.
"You get paid for your time."
Rose might be overexposed in Las Vegas, but that likely won't be the case in Cooperstown late next month. After a three-year absence, honoring a request by Major League Baseball, Rose plans to be a peripheral attraction at the Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.
Tommy Catal, who runs Mickey's Place down the street from the Hall, first coaxed Rose into signing autographs, meeting fans and drumming up support for his cause during those ceremonies in 1993. Rose has made $40,000 over those four days.
He will not stay away this year, as another summer heats up and the debate about his place in the Hall continues.
"I'm a big hit when I'm up there," Rose said. "It costs me a lot of money when I don't go up there. If they're not going to help me or do anything for me, what am I supposed to do?"
A Pete Rose-autographed color 8-by-10? $50. A baseball signed by Rose? $70. A suspension-lifting announcement by MLB commissioner Bud Selig, the first step required in landing on a Hall ballot for Rose?
Priceless.
Does Rose, placed on MLB's ineligible list by then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in 1989, believe he will be voted into that Hall in his lifetime?
"I sure do," he said, "'cause I'm going to live forever."
The update
Rose said his associates communicated with MLB officials about his status as recently as last week.
"I usually don't do that," Rose said. "My people do that."
Pat Courtney, an MLB spokesman, confirmed that Warren Greene, Rose's agent, has been mostly exchanging e-mails with MLB president and chief operating officer Bob DuPuy.
Rose, Hall of Famer and former Rose teammate Mike Schmidt, Greene and DuPuy met with Selig in Selig's office in Milwaukee on Nov. 25, 2002, a session that led to Rose's private admission to Selig that he bet on baseball while he managed the Cincinnati Reds in the late 1980s.
Rule 21(d), which bans baseball's players and officials from gambling on its games, is prominently displayed in every MLB clubhouse.
Courtney said Selig asked him Monday to respond to an inquiry about Rose.
"At this point," Courtney said, "there's been nothing new in that process."
Courtney also said MLB would not comment about Rose's intention to go to Cooperstown, where Hall of Fame ceremonies will honor Wade Boggs and Ryne Sandberg, during the last weekend of July.
DuPuy did not respond to interview requests via telephone and e-mail.
"This is America," Rose said. "I mean, everybody should be hopeful that you're given a second chance, as long as you don't do anything that doesn't warrant a second chance. I think that's my case.
"I'm a pretty good baseball ambassador, talking good about the game, never saying anything negative about the commissioner because I don't believe anything negative about the commissioner. I'm not here to get on a soapbox about steroids or anything like that."
Still, he watched those televised hearings, with Selig and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, in the U.S. Congress.
"And they were talking about getting four and five chances before they were ousted out of baseball," Rose said. "I'm not comparing the two. I gambled and I was wrong, I was absolutely wrong.
"(But) you have to have good people in your Hall, and I'm a good person. I just made a mistake. I paid for my mistake with my respect, I probably lost $50 million and I never had any due process. I've never been given an opportunity to have a second chance."
The book
Baseball's antitrust exemption allows it to virtually operate outside the laws of the land, Congress and steroids notwithstanding, so Rose was fighting an uphill battle with Giamatti.
Giamatti died nine days after suspending Rose.
Moreover, in light of his admission in last year's book, Rose looked foolish for writing "Pete Rose: My Story," a scrambled 1990 effort with Roger Kahn in which Rose insisted he never gambled on baseball while in the employment of one of its clubs.
Rose foes froth over his struggle with the truth.
Industry insiders, though, believe Rose did more harm to his cause than help it with his 2004 tome.
Every page led to the finale, in which he came clean with Selig. MLB's hierarchy supposedly did not appreciate Rose's abrasive, brash and insincere manner.
Rose wrote:
One source who speaks regularly with MLB brass, and who requested anonymity, said the book was a bad move by Rose, that it extinguished a tide that had been rising in his favor since he received rousing ovations at World Series appearances in 1999 and 2002.
"It didn't get him anywhere," the source said. "Because of it, he's dead in the water. He has no shot now. None."
The book contains regular punctuation and grammatical errors, and it can be redundant and trite. A reader would reap a small fortune if he were given a dollar for every "sumbitch," "reckon" and "hell" that Rose used.
Then again, its subject doesn't apologize for being a 10th-grade flunkie from the wrong side of the tracks near Cincinnati, in Anderson's Ferry on the banks of the Ohio River.
Rose wasn't raised to be warm and fuzzy, so he wasn't about to start. Details of his five-month stint in federal prison, on tax charges, can make a reader squirm.
The gambling bug bit him at an early age, when he went to the racetrack with his dad, Harry, and baseball lifer Don Zimmer's father, Dud.
As a big league manager, Rose dared to wager on his Reds because he needed the extra adrenaline rush, the excitement. More than once, he wrote that he never bet on the Reds to lose and he never bet on baseball during his playing days.
He cited hyperactivity and brain-chemical imbalance as sources of his problems.
After confessing to Selig in November 2002, Rose wrote that he had "every reason to believe" that he would be reinstated within a reasonable period of time.
"Mr. Selig said that it would take a 'nuclear bomb' to make him change his mind," Rose wrote. "He gave me something I had been deprived of over the previous 13 years -- hope."
Saturday, Rose doled out some thrills to a few of his legion of fans. Someone bought a jersey, and Rose signed the man's free book.
"And I said, 'Did I say I'm sorry enough?' He said, 'Yeah, you said you're sorry enough,' " Rose said. "Then, if you say you're sorry more than people (want to hear), you're phony. Can't win. You just go on and don't worry about it."
He regrets nothing about the book.
"Hell, no," Rose said.
Rodale Inc., which published it, announced its imminent release just as Dennis Eckersley and Paul Molitor were announced by the Hall as its next inductees early in 2004.
Why would a publisher give him a seven-figure advance and then ask him when it should be pegged for release, Rose asked. Any release date, he reasoned, would have been viewed as "stealing the thunder" from anything MLB-related.
"Why would I ever need to take the thunder away from Dennis Eckersley?" Rose said. "We came out with the book then because, if you were a betting man, you would have bet that (I was) going to get reinstated in November (2003), based on our conversation with Bud Selig.
"In the book, I was honest. The last 15 years, all I've heard is, 'If you come clean, everything will be happy. We'll forget about it.' Now, 'he's' come clean and they still keep 'him' out of baseball. I don't get it."
The debate
Al Bernstein gets it, he thinks.
The popular boxing analyst conducted his Saturday radio show in the Hilton Superbook. Afterward, he revealed that his father-in-law, Ray Shore, was the chief scout for the Reds during the "Big Red Machine" era in the 1970s.
Hence, at family gatherings, Bernstein said Rose and the Hall are always topics.
"I don't think there's a simple answer to it," Bernstein said. "You can make a case for him being in the Hall, but not being in baseball. That's probably one case that resonates the most, I think.
"But you understand why baseball has trepidations about him not being involved in their everyday operations. I see both sides. It's a very tricky issue. When you start analyzing this, you can go crazy."
Bernstein paused when asked how he would gauge Rose's chances of ever being a part of an official Hall of Fame induction ceremony during his life.
"Boy, I don't know," Bernstein said. "I know people who are voters ... if you're putting money on it, I think it's 50-50."
Told that Rose answered in the affirmative and that he'd "live forever," Bernstein chuckled.
"There you go. That's part of his nature," Bernstein said. "That's what he is. Pete's about as feisty as they come."
Paul Riccio, a 36-year-old bartender at New York-New York, bought the bat and got the free book Saturday, then he slipped his own color 8-by-10 for Rose to sign, a present to Riccio's father, Bill, for Father's Day.
Rose obliged with the freebie autograph, as he often does at restaurants and in airports.
"I remember my dad telling me to watch him on TV, and seeing him hustle around the bases," Paul Riccio said. "Mr. Charlie Hustle. I had some butterflies meeting him, and I'm still shaking."
Ron Weinstein, 56, showed Rose a framed tribute that included a color photo of him after he set the all-time hits record, with his 4,192nd, against San Diego in Cincinnati on Sept. 11, 1985.
Rose is pointing to the sky at first base, with Padres first baseman Steve Garvey in the background.
An unused ticket from that game, signed by Rose, adorned the top of the gem. Its highlight, to the right, is the lineup card that was taped inside the Reds' dugout that night at Riverfront Stadium.
The late Jack Krol, a Reds coach at the time, gave it to Weinstein. In a pact he made with Krol's widow, Liz, if Weinstein ever sells the piece, he will donate its proceeds to cancer research.
Weinstein said Rose immediately recognized the lineup card Saturday.
"And it hit me while I was driving over here today that 9-11 will be the 20th anniversary of his setting the record," Weinstein said. "That would be a great time for the commissioner to get a lot of publicity ... that could be a very deciding date."
Rose has not circled any dates on a calendar.
"I don't go to bed every night praying that I make the Hall of Fame, OK?" he said. "I know what the Hall of Fame players put into it to make it. I guess what I'm saying is, it doesn't matter how long that takes.
"It has to be worth waiting for."
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