In Defense of Pete Rose
Posted: Thursday, March 15, 2007 12:05 AM by Keith Olbermann
Every reporter should have a story written about him, or failing that, have about 100 stories written about a story he generated. It’s the best reminder you can get of how easily assumptions, misunderstandings, and sloppiness can creep into the coverage of almost anything, from the weather forecast to a Pope’s funeral.
Case in point: Pete Rose, who rather matter-of-factly admitted “I bet on the Reds every night” to Dan Patrick and me on ESPN Radio Wednesday afternoon. To Pete, it was a simple correction of the timeline, an amplification on his previous confessions, a trading of further detail of one sorry sin, in order to expunge another sorry sin.
That’s not the way the rest of the media saw it.
Fiction: The CBS Evening News had Armen Keteyian put together a package built around Rose’s remarks (if you listen carefully, you can hear me say “ok” as Pete talks – they edited Dan out, the bastards), which ended with Katie Couric’s pithy observation that after what he said to us, Rose’s Hall of Fame chances were now “kaput.”
Fact: Pete’s HOF chances have been pretty “kaput” for 18 years now. He certainly didn’t make them any worse, and there’s a slim chance he actually improved them. It took him forever, but he’s owned up to his transgressions and – and I’m saying this as somebody who had no sympathy for him from the time of the ban in 1989 right through to last April – I think that’s enough to merit reinstating him, provisionally.
Fiction: a Canadian website headlined this story “Rose Admits He Bet On Reds.”
Fact: Well he’s done that before, in his book in 2004 and in a memorable interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC. Last year, with Dan and me, he was downright contrite. He’s still the swaggering smartass who earned the derisive nickname “Charlie Hustle” from Whitey Ford in spring training of 1962, but he finally seems to have gotten it – he was wrong, he needed to admit it, he needed to fix himself. In the interview today he said he frankly doesn’t understand the gambling addiction he had, but he finally understands that he had it.
Fiction: a Buffalo radio station reported, at least on its website, maybe on the air itself, that Rose said “he isn’t ashamed to have bet on his team.”
Fact: Quite the contrary. Rose was saying he believed in his players, and in the strange way an addiction like compulsive gambling alters one’s perception, he felt he was expressing that conviction while betting.
He now seems plenty ashamed of the whole thing. But while he was doing this, betting on the Reds every night seemed to him like an expression of loyalty and pride.
Fiction: Sports Net New York – the Mets’ house all-sports station – referred to Rose making an “announcement” while on air to shamelessly promote himself.
Fact: Dan and I asked Rose to come on, not to promote himself, but because of something I saw in the media notes handed out by the Reds in Tampa last week. They were to stage, inside their ballpark in Cincinnati, a meet-and-greet with Rose, in advance of the opening of an exhibition at the Reds’ Hall of Fame, inside their ballpark in Cincinnati, paying tribute to “The Hit King.”
Needless to say, something like that had to have had baseball’s approval, and it seemed like quite a departure from an outright banishment so strict that when Rose simply showed up at a minor league game five seasons ago and interacted with some of the players, Baseball reprimanded the team and the players.
We wanted to know if this was some kind of precursor to baseball fully reinstating him.
He wasn’t promoting anything.
Fiction: This is being widely seen as a damning admission that his gambling was far worse than we ever thought.
Fact: It may be the other way around. It might have been slightly less awful. His admission of nightly betting came up only because, before he came on the air with us, I had repeated the standard history of his gambling while Reds’ manager: that he never bet against his own team, but that he often didn’t bet at all on their games. This, to me, was as great a transgression as the gambling itself, because it left open the prospect that he wouldn’t use his closer or would rest his key players during the games in which he had no wager. To me that was a kind of passive-aggressive game-fixing.
Rose was correcting me. Used that term. The emphasis was not “I BET on the Reds every night,” but “I bet on the Reds EVERY night.” To me, that takes a little of the sting out of the process. At least Pete Rose the manager wasn’t subservient to Pete Rose the compulsive gambler. At least the game outcomes weren’t affected because he was saving John Franco until a night he had $500 riding on the result.
Anyway, that’s the story. Obviously Dan and I recognized the significance of the remark as soon as he made it. I only wish everybody else reporting the story, second-hand, had a better grasp of its context.
[Listen to Keith & Dan's entire interview with Pete Rose here]
