The Darkening Cloud over Pete

By Tom Callahan

The excruciating saga of Pete Rose and gambling seemed to be coming to a shuddering finish last week. A common-pleas judge in Cincinnati was pondering whether to issue a temporary restraining order -- and perhaps turn the Rose investigation over to the courts -- or leave Rose to face Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and the music early this week. After four months of husky whispers, the worst charges imagined were spoken aloud at last. Giamatti's special investigator, John Dowd, asserted in court that he has found nine witnesses and enough corroborating evidence to prove that Rose committed baseball's capital crime: from 1985 through 1987 the hustling heir to Ty Cobb routinely bet on his own Cincinnati Reds. Even for history's leading hitter, who retired after 24 seasons to manage the team in 1987, the prescribed penalty would be expulsion from the game.

Dowd offered, as a smoking gun, Rose's fingerprints on betting sheets. (Rose has claimed never to have seen the sheets before.) A handwriting analyst, formerly with the FBI, contends that they were written in Rose's hand. Meanwhile, as the two-day hearing adjourned last Friday, the Reds' manager was at an autograph show in Atlantic City, stoically selling his signature at $15 per scribble. "Being fair and legally correct aren't always the same thing," Judge Norbert A. Nadel noted, though hoping to be both. He promised a decision ^ on Sunday. Rose's hearing before Giamatti was scheduled for Monday. Nadel did not have to say the stakes were even higher than the legacy of a legend, knowing that Rose's lawyers were hoping to "move this lawsuit into previously uncharted waters" and challenge the very foundation of the game.

Rose's lawyers want the baseball commissioner, the sport's all-powerful umpire, to disqualify himself for having prejudged the case. At sore issue is an April letter, drafted by Dowd but signed by Giamatti, that commended the "candid, forthright and truthful" cooperation of alleged bookmaker Ron Peters, Rose's principal accuser, who was seeking the lightest sentence to a tax-evasion and drug-trafficking conviction. The judge who received the commissioner's letter was so appalled that he turned the sentencing over to another jurist (Peters got two years) and leveled the loud opinion that by vouching for a witness in a case he had yet to hear, Giamatti had biased himself outrageously. George Palmer, a former state-appeals-court judge, and Samuel Dash, famed Senate counsel during the Watergate hearings, last week took the stand on Rose's behalf to endorse that view. They thought Dowd's 225- page finding read less like an investigator's report than a prosecutor's indictment.

Robert G. Stachler, Rose's advocate during the hearings, said, "If there is one American institution that the public expects to adhere to the concept of fair play, that institution is major-league baseball. All we're looking for is a level playing field." Because the controversial Giamatti letter predated Dowd's interview with Rose, let alone Giamatti's hearing (originally scheduled for May 25), Stachler argued that Rose had already been "found in effect guilty." The captain of baseball's squad of attorneys, Louis Hoynes, talked about a commissioner with two hats. He said Giamatti was wearing his "investigator hat" when he sent the letter, not his "final decision- maker hat." In any event, Hoynes argued, baseball proceedings were less formal than legal ones, and the commissioner of this private organization was entitled to "depart from the rules of evidence if in his judgment the cause of justice will be served."

When Hoynes brought up former baseball offenders Leo Durocher and Denny McLain, who received swifter punishments for gambling violations "arguably less prolonged and offensive," he was ringing an alarm that has chilled baseball since 1920. The Chicago "Black Sox" threw the 1919 World Series and almost threw away the public's confidence in the integrity of the game. The club owners, acting in concert, created the commissioner's office for the explicit purpose of clearing out the gamblers. Without any process at all, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis expelled everyone involved in the Black Sox scandal. His '40s successor, Happy Chandler, gave Brooklyn Dodgers manager Durocher a year's suspension merely for associating with gamblers. In the '60s Bowie Kuhn docked Detroit Tigers pitcher McLain a half-season for making book.

The "questionable wisdom" of bestowing absolute authority on a single person was brought up in passing by U.S. district court Judge Frank McGarr in 1977. But he used that phrase in the process of rejecting a complaint by Oakland A's owner Charlie Finley that Kuhn was wrecking him financially by arbitrarily keeping him from liquidating his team a player at a time. Judge McGarr ruled, "So broad and unfettered was the commissioner's discretion intended to be that the owners provided no right of appeal, and even took the extreme step of foreclosing their own access to the courts."

Not being an owner, Rose may say he is no party to broad discretions and unfettered agreements, but distancing himself from any baseball tradition might be difficult. It is Rose's place in that tradition, the fact that he is an embodiment of his game, that makes these circumstances so compelling, and so sad.