Ghosts of the diamond
Can the worst stains of baseball's gambling-related past ever be cleansed?
Go the distance
DYERSVILLE — The visitors came from Chattanooga, suburban Philadelphia, and Georgia by way of West Virginia, all to the Field of Dreams, on a day perfect for a baseball game.
The day before, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred had announced that “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, seven of his teammates from the 1919 Chicago White Sox, and nine other men permanently banished from baseball were having their sentences commuted to lifetime bans.
“Finally,” said Amanda Schwartz of Dyersville in an interview Wednesday. She’s manager of the If You Build It Exhibit, a museum about the making of the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, in which Jackson is a major character. “He’s been punished long enough.”
Jackson said he was not present when his teammates agreed to throw the 1919 World Series, but he admitted he received money, then got angry when it wasn’t what was promised. He argued his performance was not that of someone trying to lose games. Schwartz points out he was the only player to hit a home run in that World Series.
Jackson was never convicted in a court of law, but Kenesaw Mountain Landis, MLB’s first commissioner, convicted him and the “Black Sox” in the court of baseball.
“I truly believe he was a farm boy from South Carolina, couldn’t read or write, he was innocent,” said Jim Summers of Snellville, Ga.
In an exhaustively researched article for the spring 2019 Baseball Research Journal, William Lamb wrote, “Ultimately, the credible evidence — and reason, too — admits but one conclusion: Joe Jackson, while hardly an instigator or a proponent of the fix, was a knowing participant in the plot to rig the 1919 World Series; his protests of innocence, although prolonged, ring hollow.”
But Tuesday’s announcement wasn’t really about Jackson.
It was about baseball’s most notorious gambler, Pete Rose, who finished serving out his lifetime ban on Sept. 30.
Ease his pain
Technically, Manfred merely is allowing Jackson, Rose and other permanently banned deceased players to be eligible for inclusion on a list for possible election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Their first chance won’t come until December 2027.
“To this day,” said USA Today, “Rose remains MLB’s all-time leader in games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), plate appearances (15,890) and hits (4,256).” The only other member of the 4,000-hit club is Ty Cobb, the man whose record he broke in 1985.
But he bet on baseball.
“Rose and [then-Commissioner Bart] Giamatti had struck a deal about the allegations that Rose had bet on baseball games, including his own team,” read coverage in the Des Moines Register on Aug. 25, 1989. “Rose’s end of it was permanent banishment from baseball — pending appeal in no less than a year — and the assurance that Giamatti would never find him formally and conclusively guilty of betting on baseball.”
“Any player … 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,” read the rule in an accompanying graphic. It’s Rule 21(d)(2), or perhaps the First Commandment of Sport: Thou shalt not bet on thine own team.
“As far as Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame goes, if he can repent, say he’s sorry, be a little remorseful, maybe cry a little, he’s got a chance,” Hall of Fame pitcher and Iowa native Bob Feller told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier on Sept. 4, 1989.
Eighteen months after Rose’s ban, the Hall of Fame said ineligible players would not be considered. It would not be until 2004 that Rose even admitted betting on baseball, but only while he was a manager. A decade after that, an ESPN report blew the lid off that qualifier by finding written corroboration that he made bets as a player.
(None of that counts other alleged unsavory activities.)
George Perkins of Pennsauken, N.J., a Philadelphia Phillies fan who was at the field Wednesday with his wife Ramona, thinks Rose should have been in the Hall a long time ago. With Rose’s death, “now it’s just a smack on the wrist,” he said.
“There are people [in the Hall] who did worse,” said Bobby Hickman of Chattanooga. His wife, Cheryl, agreed the ban was wrong.
But Summers, the visitor from Georgia, couldn’t disagree more. As a youth he and his dad would go to old Crosley Field in Cincinnati. He wasn’t a Reds fan, but that was the nearest stadium, and he saw Hank Aaron get his 3,000th hit there. Lynda Summers remembered listening to games on the radio in West Virginia; the Reds are still her family’s team.
“I’m a never-Pete kind of guy,” Jim Summers said. “Betting on games is THE cardinal sin.” He considers Commissioner Giamatti, who died days after announcing Rose’s permanent ban, a hero for sticking up for the integrity of the game.
There was one way Summers might be open to accepting Rose as a Hall of Famer, and even then for his on-field performance only: if equal treatment is given to the Black Sox, or at least Jackson.
If you build it, he will come
Rose, who served five months in federal prison for filing false income tax returns, never showed remorse nor did he shy away from the spotlight. He set up a signing booth in Cooperstown on Hall of Fame weekends. The museum portion has a helmet from 1973, a bat from 1978, and the cleats he wore in 1985 on the day he broke Cobb’s hit record. The only thing Rose didn’t get was a plaque recognizing and celebrating him for his body of work.
Cincinnati and the Reds certainly haven’t distanced themselves from Rose. He’s in the Reds Hall of Fame. There’s a statue of Rose making his classic head-first slide at Great American Ball Park, where outside the left field/third-base-line entrance is the start of Pete Rose Way. Wednesday, the day after Manfred’s announcement, the Reds had Pete Rose Night.
Maybe some ancillary benefits would trickle into Dyersville if Jackson got inducted, but it’s been a century, and the movie and present-day diamond create stories all their own. Rose himself will not benefit from Hall of Fame status, but his descendants could. So could everyone who has a baseball he signed during his decades in exile, as he haunted the sport like a specter, complete with a lily-white cap.
“Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game,” Manfred said in a statement to Rose’s lawyer. Obviously.
The day of Manfred’s announcement, The Athletic website had an Iowa-related story from a different sport: “Hunter Dekkers, who lost his NCAA eligibility for betting on his own team in college, was signed by the New Orleans Saints as an undrafted free agent, the team announced Tuesday.”
This has been updated to correct that 17 individuals total were reinstated, not 16.
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Good pick-up, Jeff, to go to the Field of Dreams for fans’ reactions right after MLB’s announcement.
"I've loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919."
--Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth to Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in "The Godfather, Part II."
Crookedness is a part of our culture we honor with a wink and a nod. Why be so subtle? C'mon, celebrate it!
If the Black Sox are now reinstated, let's put Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein, mastermind of the fix, in a "Fuhgeddaboudit!" wing at Cooperstown, sponsored by Draft Kings, an official partner of Major League Baseball. The Brain could be part of an inaugural class that could include Rose's bookie or bookies as well as Howie Spira, the known gambler and mob snitch who conspired with and was paid hush money by Yankees owner George M. Steinbrenner III in a scheme to defame then-Yankees star Dave Winfield.
Fun fact: Mr. Steinbrenner's "lifetime" ban for that incident was commuted to time served by then-acting commissioner Bud Selig, who presided over "The Steroid Era" in baseball. Different standard for owners than players, apparently. Selig, a Milwaukee car dealer who owned the Brewers, is already in Cooperstown but could easily be moved over to the "Fuhgeddaboudit!" wing.
Pete Rose got more "fame" out of NOT being in the Hall than if he'd gone in on the first ballot. Before his passing, on his website you could buy autographed "I'm Sorry I Bet on Baseball" balls for $199! For $399 you could get one autographed by Rose AND....wait for,it, wait for it...current Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred!
Fuhgeddaboudit!
In an era where presidential pardons are handed out like Tic Tac breath mints, why should baseball be any different?
Fuhgeddaboudit!
P.S. Arnold Rothstein was murdered in 1928 over $325,000 in gambling debts -- in a poker game that was apparently fixed. What goes around comes around.
And another Iowa connection: My grandmother's maternal cousin, White Sox pitcher Urban "Red" Faber of Cascade, Iowa just 15 miles east of Field of Dreams on Highway 20, was NOT part of the fix. He missed the World Series due in part to injuries and influenza resulting from his World War I service. He went on to pitch 20 years, won 20 games three years in a row from 1921-23, is one of the winningest pitchers in team history - and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1964.