Inquiry  

Baseball's Bill Clinton

by R.W. Bradford

Pete Rose thought he could get away with gambling on baseball. When he got caught, he lied, and lied, and lied. Fourteen years later, he confessed, sort of. Should all be forgiven?

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On January 8, Pete Rose admitted that he had bet on baseball while a major league manager, something he had publicly denied for more than a decade. He confessed in hopes of being made eligible for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where, had he not been banned from baseball for betting on games while a player and manager, he would surely be honored today.

There is no question about whether Pete Rose was a very good baseball player. In a career lasting 24 years, he accumulated 4,256 hits, more than anyone else who ever played the game. For most of his career, his batting average was good. He also played with enthusiasm and was a colorful character. There is no doubt that he was a better player than many who have already been honored by election to the Hall of Fame.

But he is not in the Hall of Fame. He was ruled ineligible in 1989, after an investigation by the baseball commissioner concluded that there was overwhelming evidence that he had bet on major league baseball games while a player and a manager. The investigation was able to provide a list of more than 400 wagers that Rose placed on big league games during a single three-month period, including many bets placed on games in which he managed one of the competing teams.

For nearly a century before Rose began playing in the major leagues, professional baseball had prohibited players and managers from betting on games. The rule is plain and unequivocal: "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."

Gambling plagued professional baseball in its early days, when teams played informal schedules. One of the principal reasons why professional leagues were organized was to eliminate the influence of gambling to protect the integrity of the game. If a player is betting on a ball game, he might play differently than if he were not, and a manager who bets might make different decisions than if he were not. Gambling by players and managers violates the fundamental contract between the athlete and the fan: that the athlete is playing to win.

The rule prohibiting wagering is prominently posted in the clubhouse of every major league baseball park, in the plain sight of Pete Rose before and after every one of the 3,562 games that he played and the 1,198 games that he managed. Rose knew that every time he placed a bet, he was violating that rule. He nevertheless placed thousands of wagers on baseball games. When a huge amount of incontrovertible evidence proved that he had done so, he simply lied, and he continued to lie for more than a decade. It was Rose's repeated flouting of this rule that resulted in his being banned from organized baseball and ruled ineligible for election to the HOF.

There are two ways to be elected to the Hall: for a 15-year period following retirement from playing, a player can be elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America; after that, he can be elected by the Hall of Fame Committee on Veterans, which each year can select as many as two players whose careers ended more than 20 years earlier. Rose has far more support among current sportswriters than he does from the Veterans Committee, so his chances of election will decline substantially two years from now.

Sportswriters and fans have often opined that if Rose would simply confess his sins and apologize for them, he might be reinstated to the good graces of baseball and elected to the Hall of Fame. So Rose decided to confess and apologize.

"It's time to clean the slate, its time to take responsibility," he wrote. Yes, he had bet on games. And he'd admitted doing so in a private meeting with the commissioner last year. "I've consistently heard the statement, 'If Pete Rose came clean, all would be forgiven,'" he explained. "It's time to clean the slate, it's time to take responsibility. The rest is up to the commissioner and the big umpire in the sky."

But he was not particularly contrite. "I am sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong," he said. "But you see, I'm just not made that way. Sure, there's probably some real emotion buried somewhere deep inside. And maybe I'd be a better person if I let that side of my personality come out. But it just doesn't surface too often. So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans, and family that it hurt. Let's move on."

And he had good reason to lie all these years about his betting: "If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block. Lifetime ban. Death penalty." And, anyway, his wagering on baseball games wasn't really his fault. "If I had been an alcoholic or a drug addict, baseball would have suspended me for six weeks and paid for my rehabilitation," he said. "I should have had the opportunity to get help, but baseball had no fancy rehab for gamblers like they do for drug addicts," he explained. Of course, he didn't mention that alcoholism and drug use are problems that undermine a player's ability to play the game, while gambling undermines the game's very integrity.

The comparison to Bill Clinton is an obvious one. Both lied and lied and continued to lie until incontrovertible evidence proved their guilt, and only then did they grudgingly and half-heartedly admit what they had done. And both were inclined to blame others (remember Clinton's blaming a vast right-wing conspiracy?)

Just as Clinton survived impeachment, Rose may survive his banishment and find his way into the Hall. The question is back in the hands of the commissioner, the sportswriters, and the fans. The commissioner has been more or less silent, saying only that he intends to make no decision in the immediate future. While most news commentators were singularly unimpressed by Rose's confession, a recent poll of sportswriters eligible to vote for HOF candidates revealed that about 50% would vote for him if he were made eligible. Election requires a 75% vote, so Rose doesn't yet have enough votes. But fan sentiment supports Rose, just as public sentiment supported Clinton, and it may very well come to pass that the commissioner and the baseball writers will succumb to public opinion just as did the senators who acquitted Bill Clinton.

Well, would Rose deserve to be elected, if it weren't for the moral issue? Let me put it this way. Had he not been caught gambling, he would almost certainly have been elected, but not so much for his playing on the field as for his personality and his adeptness at public relations.

The Hall certainly contains players inferior to Rose. But most players in the Hall were demonstrably better. As a player, Rose was greatly overrated. Several important factors, often overlooked, enabled him to accumulate his record-setting career hit total, despite his only moderately impressive lifetime batting average of .303:

1. For most of his career, he batted leadoff for the Cincinnati Reds, a team that scored a tremendous number of runs, thus giving him far more appearances at the plate than any other player of his time.
2. Unlike most leadoff hitters, he was a free-swinger who got relatively few walks. This further increased his opportunity to accumulate hits.
3. He played at a time when the season included more games than it had during most of baseball history, and when season interruptions for such things as strikes and wars were few.
4. He continued to play as a regular at least five years after his skills had deteriorated to the point where he hurt his team's performance. (He continued to play because of popular support for his pursuit of the lifetime hits record and his popularity with the fans.)

Furthermore, the one normalized statistic in which Rose performed substantially above the average major league hitter was batting average, the least significant of the normalized statistics used to evaluate hitting. Of his 4,256 hits, 3,215 were singles, making him one of the least powerful hitters in the past 75 years. And his free-swinging ways meant that his ability to get on base was below average for a leadoff hitter.

To put it in perspective, compare Rose to the man whose record he broke, Ty Cobb, who played in the major leagues from 1905 to 1928. His batting average was 21% better than Rose's; his slugging average was 25% better, and his on-base average was 15% better. Rose led his league in batting average three times and in on-base average once; he never led his league in slugging. Cobb led his league in batting average twelve times, in on-base average six times, and in slugging eight times.

What does this mean? It means that in his career, Cobb produced 29% more runs than Rose, while going out 26% less. Statistical models show that a team composed of nine Cobb clones would score 74% more runs than a team composed of nine clones of Rose.

Rose was a fine player. But he is not in the same class as the game's greats. He was as one-dimensional as any baseball player in history, but in that one dimension, he excelled. He hit singles, a lot of singles, more singles than any other ballplayer ever. But he is at best a marginal candidate for the Hall of Fame. His career hitting was inferior to that of Rico Carty, who played in the same league at more or less the same time, but who was never even considered for the Hall. (He received a single vote in 1985; 297 votes were needed to win.)

Carty may have been a superior performer on the field, but Rose has several major advantages when it comes to election. Carty was from the Dominican Republic, and his inexpert English prevented his becoming much of a favorite with sportswriters; Rose was a local boy who always had something colorful to say to them. Carty was black; Rose was white. Carty played for several big league teams during his career, his teams finishing no higher than fifth in their league in all but one year; Rose spent most of his time with the team in the city where he grew up, a team that dominated baseball during much of his career.

Rose was a good player on a very good team. And he was popular. Should he be in the Hall? He certainly is not the best player who is absent because of violating baseball's rule about gambling. That dubious honor goes to Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Comparing Rose and Jackson as ballplayers is akin to comparing a high school art teacher to Rembrandt. Jackson had the third highest lifetime batting average in history, and he hit with power. Depending on which statistical method is used, he ranks as the third or fourth best hitter ever to play the game.

Why was Jackson permanently banned from baseball and made ineligible for election to the Hall of Fame? He was involved in the infamous "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, in which several players for the American League champion Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to throw the World Series. During the investigation of the fix the following year, Jackson testified before a grand jury that he had agreed to throw the series and accepted $5,000 for doing so. He also signed a confession to that effect. This confession, along with the confessions of other players, was stolen from the state's attorney's office. When Jackson was tried in court, he repudiated his earlier testimony and was acquitted. Partisans of Jackson have since argued that he was framed, and that he was too stupid to realize what he was saying in his sworn testimony and, as an illiterate, unable to understand the confession he had signed. There is ample evidence that Jackson was indeed quite stupid, though whether he was stupid enough to confess to something he hadn't done and that would surely end his lucrative livelihood is dubious. He certainly was an illiterate and unsophisticated, what in those days was called a "rube." His defenders argue that while Jackson was aware of the attempted fix and tried to get in on the deal, he was not an active participant. They also note that he had a .375 batting average and hit the only home run in the series, and hope to this day that he will be declared eligible for the Hall. Defenders of his banishment argue that even failing to report a fix and trying unsuccessfully to get in on it is ample reason to make him ineligible.^*

Fifteen years ago, Bill James, the best baseball thinker of the past century, wrote this about whether Jackson should be elected to the Hall of Fame:

"My own opinion as to whether or not Joe Jackson should be put in the Hall of Fame is that of course he should; it is only a question of priorities. I think there are some other equally great players who should go in first, like Billy Williams, Herman Long, Minnie Minoso and Elroy Face. Then, too, the players of the nineteenth century have never really gotten their due — Ed McKean, Pete Browning, Harry Stovey and several others have been waiting a long time.

"The players of the Negro leagues committed no crime except their color; I think we would need to look closely at the credentials of several of those before we decide where Jackson fits in. You wouldn't want the great stars of the thirties and forties, who are still living and can enjoy the honor, to pass away while waiting for the Hall of Fame to get done with the Black Sox, would you?

"And then I think there are some other players who should be considered strongly — Ron Santo, Ken Boyer, Larry Doby, Al Rosen, Roy Sievers, Vic Wertz, Lefty O'Doul, Sadaharu Oh; there should probably be better provisions made for people whose contributions to the game were not made on the field, like Grantland Rice, Barney Dreyfuss, Harry Pulliam, maybe Mrs. Babe Ruth and Mrs. Lou Gehrig, the guy who wrote 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame,' Harry Caray.

"And, too, we do not want to forget the many wonderful stars of the minor leagues, who brought baseball to most of the country before television and expansion — men like Ray Perry, Larry Gilbert, Jack Dunn and Nick Cullop. When they are in we can turn our attention to such worthwhile players of our own memories as Roger Maris, Buddy Bell, Fred Hutchinson, Larry Bowa, Bill North, Omar Moreno and Duane Kuiper.

"And then, at last, when every honest ballplayer who has ever played the game, at any level from Babe Ruth ball through the majors, when every coach, writer, umpire and organist who has helped to make baseball the wonderful game that it is rather than trying to destroy it with the poison of deceit, when each has been given his due, then I think we should hold our noses and make room for Joe Jackson to join the Hall of Fame."

And then — and only then — a place in the Hall of Fame should be found for Pete Rose.

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*	A website devoted to Jackson's cause is optimistic that the possible election of Rose to the Hall will open the door for Jackson.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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