The Sad Ordeal of Mr. Baseball

By Tom Callahan

Baseball and Pete Rose, once thought to be inseparable institutions, teetered last week on the edge of an almost unbearable sadness. Several Cincinnati-area bookmakers allege that Rose has been betting on baseball games. If Rose is found to have gambled on baseball, he can expect a year's suspension as Reds manager. If he bet on Cincinnati games, Rose could be shunned for life by the sport he personifies, jeopardizing everything he has accomplished, even the place in baseball's Hall of Fame that awaits him in 1992.

The first alarm bell rang in February, when Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti summoned Rose to New York City for a private conversation on a secret subject. Reporters who knew Rose guessed gambling. Last week Ueberroth acknowledged that his office was conducting an ongoing investigation into "serious allegations" after Ron Peters and Alan Statman, a saloon-keeping bookie and his lawyer, claimed they had been cooperating with the commissioner's office. They offered to expand on their testimony for a fee to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Both publications demurred. But the story began to drip out, and its most graphic charge was that the leading hitter in baseball history may have exchanged signals with his bookie from the dugout. Rose denies betting on baseball games or indulging in any other illegal form of gambling, though he admits he is a habitue of dog and horse tracks.

The ordinarily bright spring-training atmosphere was further darkened by proliferating reports that Rose has blown his fortune on wagers. The Dayton Daily News stated that he recently sold the bat and ball from his record 4,192nd hit. Rose responded with a melancholy "No comment." None of his comments throughout the besieged week were more expansive than a flippant remark to S.I.: "I'd be willing to bet you, if I was a betting man, that I have never bet on baseball."

A hometown Cincinnatian too enthusiastic ever to walk to first base, Rose arrived in the major leagues as a flat-topped Reds second baseman whom Mickey Mantle rechristened "Charlie Hustle." Through 24 seasons at five positions, Rose devoured the game with such a primitive pleasure that people said he had skipped his true generation. Usually sliding on his stomach, he inched closer and closer to the dustiest of legends until in 1985 he passed Ty Cobb in total hits and kept on going to a record 4,256 hits and 3,562 games. Then he became the legend.

Always a numbers man, Rose was at the vanguard of baseball's economic revolt. His original ambition, "to be the first $100,000 singles hitter," sounds quaint now. In the late 1970s he made an auction out of the new free- agent system, and for $3.2 million over four years stopped off in Philadelphia to show the Phillies how to win.

As a player, Rose savored six World Series and three world titles. But in four seasons as a manager, he has directed the Reds to second place in the National League's West Division four times. Even before the gambling charges, Cincinnati owner Marge Schott was said to be impatient with him.

Particularly in the age of cocaine, all sports hold their breath over the specter of betting and its potential to devastate the integrity of players. But baseball is most sensitive to gambling. The commissioner's office was founded in 1920 in reaction to the rigged World Series the year before, when the Cincinnati Reds were the beneficiaries. First Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge from Illinois, ignored technical acquittals and permanently banned the eight Chicago Black Sox players involved. In 1947 A.B. ("Happy") Chandler suspended manager Leo Durocher one season merely for associating with gamblers.

Ueberroth's predecessor, Bowie Kuhn, banished Detroit pitcher Denny McLain for half a year in 1970 for financing a betting shop. In 1979 and in 1983 Kuhn politely ordered casino glad-handers Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle to stay away from baseball until they quit playing golf with gamblers. To much applause, Ueberroth rescinded that ban four years ago. In the last week of his tenure (Giamatti takes office April 1), the Rose affair may make him wonder if that was such a great signal.

Imagining baseball without Rose is hard, but imagining Rose without baseball is horrible. On plane rides home from the World Series, he used to calculate the number of days to spring training. He marks time by the inning, even in references to his birth in 1941, usually adding, "the year of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak." During Rose's own hitting streak in 1978 -- the National League standard of 44 -- he was caught in a paternity suit, and his marriage was dissolving. Only between the white lines of the field was he serene. Last week, before a mob of reporters, he tried for that carefree athletic slouch when he said, "This is great. My players can experience the kind of atmosphere they'll be facing in October." But his tone was tinny.