Pete Rose: Yes, I did

Pete Rose admitted on ESPN Radio's "Dan Patrick Show" Wednesday that he bet on baseball while he was managing the Cincinnati Reds.

"I bet on my team every night. I didn't bet on my team four nights a week," Rose said.

That's his defense to allegations that he tipped gamblers to the likely outcome of games by sometimes betting on the Reds to win and sometimes not betting at all. No one has alleged, or would be likely to believe, that Rose ever bet against his team and threw a game.

Now Major League Baseball will have to decide if Pete Rose, who might be the greatest player the game has ever seen, will continue to be banned from the profession for breaking the well-known and ironclad rule against gambling on baseball.

This is a problem.

Major League Baseball doesn't allow team employees to gamble on baseball games, because if fans see a manager pull a pitcher or walk a hitter, they should always believe that decision was made in an effort to win the game, not a bet.

It would devastate the game if fans started to think a player or manager was trying to win by no more than one run, or was trying to hold the score down to stay below an over/under number.

If insiders are going to gamble on baseball, it is absolutely imperative that fans never find out about it.

And now Pete Rose has admitted it openly.

This is where you have to take your hat off to NBA Commissioner David Stern, who may have handled a similar problem so quietly and smoothly that you need X-ray vision to see what happened.

Fortunately, Superman willed his X-ray vision to America Wants to Know.

When Michael Jordan announced his first retirement from basketball, on October 6, 1993, one of the reporters at the news conference asked him if he would ever consider coming back.

Jordan responded that he would have to see "if David Stern lets me back."

Nobody had been talking about the NBA commissioner. The subject of the day was Michael Jordan's decision to retire from basketball.

Why would Michael Jordan even be thinking about David Stern at a time like that?

Lo and behold, on March 18, 1995, Michael Jordan announced that he was coming back. By coincidence, or perhaps not by coincidence, the announcement was made nine days after the Wall Street Journal published an article suggesting that cocaine had played a role in the death of Celtics star Reggie Lewis two years earlier.

A cynic might deduce that David Stern gave Michael Jordan a secret suspension for gambling, then welcomed him back in a flood of good publicity as soon as he needed one.

No such luck for the officials of Major League Baseball, now reduced to debating whether cheating with steroids is worse than gambling on baseball. The fans found out, and now the question is before the country, the Congress, and the ghosts of baseball history:

Does the game have any integrity, or not?

Watch for Commissioner Bud Selig to blame everything on Michael Jordan's minor-league stint with the White Sox. Anyone in his right mind would want this to be David Stern's problem.


Copyright 2007

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