• McCaffery: Bad decisions haunt all-time hit king once again
PHILADELPHIA » The threeword chant was always meant to be taken literally. No more. No less. Free Pete Rose. Free him.
Written for years in this column, it was an objection to baseball’s one-man penitentiary. It was a reminder that an industry that permitted players to cheat the game and its fans by blurring their senses and blunting their skills with cocaine would ban a player for life for trying too hard to win.
Occasionally caked in a spirit of trolling, yet never with expectation that anyone would be inspired by the outburst to overturn Rose’s banishment from the game, it was a protest more than a proposal.
Gary Sheffield, who once threatened to deliberately make an error and later was sent to the minors for exhibiting indifference on defense, was never banned from baseball. Manny Ramirez, who basically quit on the Boston Red Sox, was never banned from baseball. Sammy Sosa didn’t receive a lifetime ban for manipulating the equipment. There were others. But Rose, who never tried to do anything but win baseball games, was banned.
It was unfair. It was wrong-spirited. It suggested that Rose, while convinced his team would win ballgames, was so wrong to place a wager that he should never be permitted inside a major-league ballpark without first stepping to the box office. Meanwhile, Ron Washington was not banned from the sport despite failing a drug test at a time when he was managing the Texas Rangers.
The No. 1 argument against Rose’s professional freedom was that his prior gambling would cast suspicion on whatever else he would do around the game. Did he use a reliever two pitches too long because he was desperate to cash a ticket? Yet it was OK for junkies to continue to play, even though reasonable fans should always have wondered whether they were sober and worthy of the ticket price. Perception: Why was the fear of that always so selective?
So, for all of those reasons, it was important for someone, at least, to howl … yes … free Pete Rose. Give him the chance to find baseball work … if anyone would give him some. Allow him to be a manager … if some team felt that there was no better choice. Punish him to a point. But not forever. Not in the modern game. Not with all of its questionable figures.
That’s as far as the argument ever went, at least here: Free Pete Rose. It was never: Hire Pete Rose. It was never: Enrich Pete Rose.
The Phillies have had seven full-time managers since Rose was banned in 1989. Even if it wouldn’t have been possible anyway, not once was it ever suggested here that Rose would have been the ideal choice. He would not have been the ideal choice. He would have been a distraction. Yet the Phillies, and every other major league team, should have had the right to consider Rose and then reject the idea. He might have been ideal someplace. He should have had the right to head-firstslide into the job market.
In recent years, baseball has relaxed its restrictions on Rose. He was permitted to make some on-field appearances. The Cincinnati Reds were green-lighted to honor him, and they did. The Phillies had the OK to pound a bronze plaque in his honor onto their Wall of Fame, and until Wednesday, that’s what they planned to do in an Aug. 12 ceremony that might have filled Citizens Bank Park. But Rose recently sued John Dowd for defamation, alleging that the former counsel to baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti compromised his potential to earn by saying in an interview on WCHE-AM in West Chester that during the 1970s an associate of his “ran young girls” to the ballplayer during spring training. From that legal endeavor, a “Jane Doe” was deposed under oath and alleged that she was not yet 16 years old when she had an affair with Rose. Rose’s attorneys have been quoted as saying the charges are false. Either way, it put the Free Pete Rose concept to a test: Suddenly, people who were free to conduct business with Rose were free, too, to say never mind.
That’s what the Phillies did Wednesday when, in tandem with Rose, they canceled the Wall of Fame presentation and a connected Rose bobblehead giveaway. SugarHouse, the Philadelphia casino, scrapped a Rose autograph session. Comedian Joe Conklin, who’d planned a roast of Rose to benefit Coaches vs. Cancer, called off the event, saying, “People want no part of him at this point. There is nothing funny about this.”
They were free — the ballclub, the gambling house, the comedian — to make a decision on Pete Rose. And their decision was to not be involved.
As a tenured baseball writer, I annually receive a Hall of Fame ballot. Invariably, my first move is to find a red pen and write “Pete Rose” somewhere on the sheet. Clearly, Rose’s 4,256 career hits make him Hall of Fame worthy. Yet he has never been permitted on the ballot. Writing him in was a rally against that injustice.
The next ballot will arrive sometime in December. By then, there should be more clarity in his defamation lawsuit. That could be good for Rose. That might be bad. But he was free to bring the suit. He should have understood the costs. All of the costs.