A cagey Bench counsel for Plaintiff Rose and a winning Cooperstown argument
.Say whatever you want about Pete Rose (1941-2024) the person. But legends from his Cinci and Philly days, Johnny Bench and Mike Schmidt, have the clout and timing to get into Cooperstown.
(CW/TW: this post mentions of sexual violence.)
The contemporary who probably has the most clout vis-à-vis Pete Rose and the Baseball Hall of Fame waited a day to give a social media goodbye. Johnny Bench, who at this stage of his life is the party whip in the legislature, put a post on X about the death of Pete Rose until midday on Oct. 1.
The painting-all-corners post under the name of the eternal catcher for Cinci’s Big Red Machine landed around lunch hour on Oct. 1. It cast Rose in relatable terms, how he battled his entire life, making it to the Big Leagues on determination and grit. It offered numbers for the compiler crowd appended to the soft-focus local kid from Cincinnati who became a King. And he found a way to say the differences they had on Cinci’s Big Red Machine are water under the bridge.
If life is an infinite game, the true gentlemen of the sport will want to get Rose in, since they know what their honor meant to each of their family and baseball family circles. All this time, they needed the Advocate, and Rose was not it.
But Johnny Bench, who has Choctaw identity, gets the idea of being dispossessed and having to work back up. He was a contemporary of Rose. Another living legend is Rose’s cross-cornermate in Philly, Michael Jack Schmidt, who can philathropize to all fields. Schmidt can advocate, too; after he survived melanoma, he led the way to get sunblock dispensers installed around Philly’s ballpark.1
And they also think that if ever someone’s family deserved that day made possible by a man who made their lives so difficult, than it would be anyone with the last name Rose. Shaming Major League Baseball for not even understanding the consequences of aboveboarding gambling is a nice add-on.2
Keith O’Brien’s book Charlie Hustle covers the clubhouse rivalry between them.
The Bench post omits the internal question. The one about why Rose is not in the Baseball of Hall of Fame. Bench and fellow immortal Mike Schmidt are very influential there, and no doubt they have done a lot of horse trading with other candidates. They can’t say it right now.
There will be, if they so pursue, time for that. A good civil attorney controls the pace of play. The attitude needs to be in the air. The court has to think it was their idea.
In civil law, it takes more than having passion and arguments. You and I have read enough to know it is important to file in the right court jurisdiction, have some luck with which judge is assigned, and pick jurors. In court, counsel has to work the refs. They also need to be divorced from the court of public opinion during and after; but the before segment should be favorable.
(CW/TW; skip or stop here. They also need to find a way that acknowledges Rose’s grossness with teenage girls. Promising to support initiatives for sexual violence survivors, and families fleeing intimate partner violence, that might work. Just a thought. Also, anyone else bothered by the verbing American telecasts use, i.e., ‘Strike Out Domestic Violence Night?’ It does not help.)
The game (possibly) afoot, clearly, is to get Pete Rose into Cooperstown.
Set aside rules and procedures that govern players on the “permanent ineligible” list such as Rose and Joe Jackson. This is about the whoooooo and whhhhhhyyyyy of it. Who has clout to try to get Rose in, and why would they. The second who is the plaintiff. Families, fans.
Digression: Run milestones > hit milestones
There is time for a Coke stop in Emo for a stat-rant about a keystone stat. Baseball-Reference’s In Memoriam for Pete Rose leaves off his most impressive stat, the one that takes hand-eye, arms, legs, and feet. Look for what is not there.
Right. There is no mention of how many runs he scored. That should be a bigger deal, since it is impossible to win a game 0-0.
Rose is one of eight players in the 2,000-run club, all one-name-basis stars.
The others are on one-name-basis Rickey, Cobb, Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Mays, A-Rod. Longevity and lineup length played into that, but scoring that many runs requires driving yourself in by hitting home runs, or triples in the Dead Ball Era.3 Rose topped out at 16 home runs in season.
But what if there had been more hoopla around run scorers? It is possible to imagine a Countdown to 2,000 at Veterans Stadium in Philly in 1982, when Rose played first base. Scoring opportunities lost to the ’81 strike would have been the subtext.
The Rose run tally reached 1,995 by season’s end. The following spring, his 2,000th run came in a typical Mets-Phillies scorefest on April 13, 1983. Who knows, with more emphasis on run scoring, then Rose has less glory and ghosts to chase. By the end of that season, he was a first baseman who couldn’t slug .300. With more emphasis on 2,000 runs, perhaps he retires.
This was also at a time when sports broadcasting was expanding, and Rose did make good TV. That’s an alt-line. Instead…
Looking for the ones who benefit...
Induction weekends are about the personal network of the person being honoured. It is one name on a plaque, and the cause for a reunion of hall of famers who are healthy and free enough to get to Cooperstown, New York. There are always stories about offspring of Hall of Famers who end up getting married, and the loop continues.
It is a family day. Bench, who went into the Hall of Fame the year Rose was banned, and Mike Schmidt, who retired the year Rose was banned, understand the ritual. Television might make it seem all about the players on the dais, but it ripples out to all their circles, et bien d'autres encore.
It become a sweet little lie when they know what it was really like to live with that person, or how family separation causes unhealable wounds. If this has a thesis, it is that Bench, Schmidt, et al., want to set up some talk-therapy for the people harmed by Pete Rose. It’s part of a rivalry between people with one idea of what baseball represents and the others — hey there, Rob Manfred — who like that it represents endless monetization.
Motive
As noted, O’Brien published a tremendous Rose bio this spring. Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and The Last Glory Days of Baseball (Pantheon, March 26). One strong theme is that no one at Level 1 in baseball, players and coaches, was shocked that Pete Rose was afflicted with gambling use disorder. The signs were there. Meetings were held.
Oddly enough, in 1989, when Rose was banned, both Bench and Schmidt controlled the news cycle with their life-stage milestones.
In January, Bench was shoo-in elected into the Hall of Fame. He was 41, and there were two older catchers than him both playing in the majors. From then, on, though, he would be unrivalled as a Grand Old Man behind the dish. Retiring young means there’s no trace of the winddown.
Schmidt played the newscycle perfectly when he decided enough was enough in ’89. He was sub-.300 / .375 on-basing and slugging two months into the season. After so many years to media noise in Philly, he retired during a California road trip, on the Memorial Day Monday.4
The night before, the two-time reigning NBA champion Lakers had just competed a four-game sweep in a conference final. Public attention would have also shifted to the Michael Jordan Chicago-Isiah Thomas Detroit tilt in the other conference final.
That’s not meant to retcon reasons for someone else’s tough decision. Those are just outside factors that latter came to mind as favorable, and that happens to everyone. In the immediate, it is not for nothing that Schmidt made the call on the road, far away from the pot-stirring Philly media. They had to let their problems with him marinate until he could have the press conference on his terms.
Submission
Cooperstown is not a Hall of Perfect People. Major League Baseball also has much more pull over the Hall than it did decades ago. Their rush to partner with gambling firms, starting in the 20-teens, has undercut any argument about the sanctity of the game.
The author Travis Sawchik posited that the ban must stay since “(w)ith the proliferation of sports betting, deterrence is as important as ever.”5 The coauthor of a baseball book called The Only Rule Is It Has To Work mighta-wanted see that deterrence strategies do not work if the recipients have already received messaging more grounded in non-judgement.
There are no active MLB players who are old enough to have remember when Rose was banned. They learned of it through their coaches, and parents, who might as well have had a much different opinion. It might have been fueled by Rose’s ref-working in 1989, but that is the reality.
Those takes latch on to the common complaints about Commissioner Manfred. To an extent, baseball fans most happy when they are unhappy. They know it is hard to pivot on a stack of papers from the Dowd Report.
It is also early, early days of what will become a rough time for the gambling industry. Being able to place a bet is a fine way to spruce up day of sports watching. However, trouble ahead is there are a lack of opt-outs and off switches, akin to the ac
In Ontario, the mass media, bigbiz and sports have gone way beyond what it should be, though. It leans more into legal gambling than anywhere else, without an opt-out switch.6 It’s unhealthful.
A wince at seeing any athlete or entertainmer in a gambling ad is understandable. But hey, they need the money. Point is, this is about disembarking from Convenient Narratives (CN) Rail, and one’s own moralism, and look at who can re-route the Rose case. His living contemporaries don’t mind getting one over on MLB… and it’s for a good cause.
The ones who stand to benefit…
If there is going to be a push, to run a payback play on MLB, it will have to come from the hall of famers. It might involve some make-it-rights over guilt they feel since the business baseball and monetized adulation put distance.
Whoever has that has to work it out. But however takes up a Pete In Cooperstown push, getting him off the list, to a committee vote, should think of it in terms of supporting Adult Children of Divorce (and/or Narcissism).
Pete Rose had a pair of one-daughter, one-son marriages. The first names of his two spouses and fiancée all mark the time Karolyn-Carol-Kiana. All told, he had five children, including a daughter conceived while he was between marries.
At the most hopeful, if the now-grandfatherly greats want to make good, it’s to get Pete Rose into Cooperstown so his family(ies) get their day, and closure. The Rose HOF plaque is for them. They have so many lessons to offer about what it is like have a father they only knew through screens.
That is going to come around in the culture, too, one suspects. The effects from gambling on that are worse than there from any wager Pete Rose put down in August 1986.
Diamond Drivel — Triple Crown edition
In honor of Detroit’s Tarik Skubal winning a pitching Triple Crown, try to get his out pitch, the “seam-shifted wake changeup” into conversation. Just the name seems daunting.
Skubal led the MLB’s American conference in five categories: 18-win earner, 2.39 ERA (earned-run average), 2.50 FIP (fielding-independent pitching), 170 ERA+, and strikeouts. If anyone kvetches that he did not fling a 9-inning complete game, too bad, it’s the 2020s.7Atlanta’s Chris Sale won a Septuple Crown, leading the National conference in seven Standard Pitching categories (ones in the first box on the baseball-reference page). An 18-win earner with a 2.38 ERA and 225 strikeouts for the traditional PTC, plus the lowest home run allowed rate, highest strikeout rate, best ERA+ and best FIP.
From April 28 through the end of the season, the Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on-boarded .413 and slugged .588. You know what that means? Take him to arbitration again.
Oct. 1-2, 2024
Storms Corners, Ont. | On the ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Michi Saagiig, and Omámíwinini Peoples
Looking out for ginger necks, arms, and faces.
From what I have read, baseball people just thought ballplayers would restrict themselves to betting on all other sports. Those who have fallen into that know better. See, “Ontario’s online betting boom makes it hard to be a recovered gambling addict,” by Adam Pettle, May 25, 2022, MacLean’s.
Ty Cobb led his leagues in slugging percentage eight times and was a four-time triples champions. Baseball-Reference.com.
Travis Sawchik, “Pete Rose doesn't belong in the Hall. That shouldn't change,” The Score, Oct. 1, 2024.
Seee Paragraph 13 of “Two years after Ontario legalized virtual casinos, gambling addicts say the province has made it nearly impossible to quit – even when they want to,” by Brendan Kennedy and Morgan Sevareid-Bocknek, Toronto Star, Aug. 31, 2024.
Eighteen-win earner is a compromise. The first point of reference with a pitcher is their earned-run average, plus how much they lighten the load on the ‘back seven’ by keeping a healthy strikeout:base on balls ratio. Crash Davis in Bull Durham. “Throw some ground balls. They’re more democratic.”