Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (31 page)

Chapter 22

Cooperstown, 2012

W
HILE THE Hall of Famers and other important baseball people tend to spend induction weekend at Cooperstown’s sprawling Otesaga Resort Hotel, Rose has always found his own accommodations. In 2012 he and Kiana Kim and Ashton and Cassie stayed in Andrew Vilacky’s two-bedroom apartment above the Safe At Home store. Whenever they would look down out the front windows before one of Pete’s signing sessions, Main Street was already full of people crowded near the store entrance, many of them wearing Rose jerseys. “Wow!” said Cassie the first time she saw this. Trundling down the single flight of stairs a few minutes later, Rose quipped to Kim, “Can’t beat the commute, babe.”

The 133-room redbrick Otesaga opened more than 100 years ago and Hall of Famers have slept there or at its sister property, the smaller, nearby Cooper Inn, during just about every induction weekend there has ever been. You have to be an approved guest to get into the Otesaga on those days—the property’s entrances are closely guarded and inside the scene is like a convention with various groups and sponsor reps and related VIPs on hand. People gather in the large formal dining room or in the area by the enormous wooden front doors. Out back, a spectacular terrace overlooks broad, immaculate green lawns and weathered oaks and glinting Otsego Lake, the Glimmerglass. Flower-print curtains and Adam chandeliers give the guest rooms an Edith Wharton look, and most everyone agrees that based on the unexplained footsteps that patter through the narrow corridors at night, the place must be haunted.

There can be an air of formality in the lobby and main rooms of the Otesaga, but things are a lot looser downstairs at the Hawkeye Bar & Grill (no jacket required) where gaggles of Hall of Famers inevitably wind up at the end of each day. You might find Rickey Henderson holding court at a table of 12, or come upon Phillies lefty Steve Carlton standing in the doorway of the marble-topped men’s room talking about how to set up a batter for the kill. Tony Perez could walk in with one of his sons, inspiring Dave Winfield to bounce out of his armchair to say hello. The ballplayers greet one another the way old classmates do at reunions and they’re prone to teasing one another and to losing themselves in “remember-when” conversations. Baseball front office types and team owners mill around with drinks in hand and over by where the rock and roll house band plays you just never know when you might see a 13-time American League All-Star like George Brett start moving it like he means it on the dance floor.

“If Pete came through the door,” said Joe Morgan, standing near the bar and looking around the place, ”I think everyone would stop what they were doing and go over and see him.”
¹

But Rose and Kim were half a mile away, alone with the kids and not at all uncomfortable in Vilacky’s place, with its renovated master bath and hardwood floors and the island in the kitchen. “It’s a Manhattan-style apartment in Cooperstown,” says Vilacky. Along with a stainless steel refrigerator and a handsome grandfather clock, he has also put in a couple of large flat-screen televisions, which Rose naturally made extensive use of. When he’s not watching sports, Pete is the Fox News type. “The guy who invented TV? I love that guy!” Rose says.

Vilacky—lean, bright-eyed and years removed from his own tax fraud conviction—feels grateful to Pete for the happy business relationship they’ve had together in Cooperstown and also for the kindnesses that Rose has shown him, bringing Vilacky out to Vegas to stay with him in a palatial suite or taking him to a boxing match at the Mohegan Sun. “Someone like me can live like a famous millionaire,” says Vilacky. “One time we were eating dinner at the Palm at Caesars Palace when Jamie Foxx came over. The first thing Pete said was, ‘I’d like you to meet my friend Andrew and his wife Melissa.’ To Jamie Foxx!” When Pete does an event in New York or New Jersey, Vilacky is sometimes the one who comes along to make sure things go as intended.

Rose’s presence touches that Main Street apartment even when he’s not there. Two seats from the old Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, autographed by Pete, lean against one wall, and a corner of the living room has been given over to a metallic statue of Rose sliding headfirst. Near the front door hangs a T-shirt—also signed—that reads:
HEY BUD TEAR DOWN THE WALL/GET PETE OFF MAIN STREET AND INTO THE HALL
, as well as a baseball under glass. “To the great Pete Rose. Love him, hate him, you can’t ignore him” the ball says, and it’s signed, “Reggie Jackson. Mr. October.”
²

Perhaps the most interesting piece of Roseabilia in Cooperstown stands not in Vilacky’s apartment but just a few doors down, on display for the paying public at the Heroes of Baseball Wax Museum. Strange, whimsical, and, yes, a little creepy, the museum features a hodgepodge of about three dozen life-size wax figures spread among its three floors— replicas of Satchel Paige and Ted Williams, of George W. Bush throwing out a first pitch after 9/11, of Wade Boggs on the back of a police horse after winning the World Series; of characters from the movie
A League of Their Own
. Rudy Giuliani’s here and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis and a ghoulish-looking Joe DiMaggio dressed to pins and descending a staircase in front of an equally ghoulish Marilyn Monroe in furs. The wax figure of Rose bears no facial resemblance to him whatsoever but you know who it is by the old-style Reds cap and the pinstriped vest uniform number 14. The figure stands at a podium on a stage and behind it a simply drawn sign announces “National Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.” Benches have been set up in front of this scene and visitors to the museum can sit, gaze toward the podium and talk about what Pete might say up there if he ever did get the chance. More people do this than you might expect.
³

NOW THAT Cooperstown has so heavily given itself over to the memorabilia and tourism markets—now that McGown’s hardware is long gone from the corner of Pioneer and Main, and the Church & Scott pharmacy has moved out to State Highway 28 and even the town’s lone Little League field has been wiped away to make room for more visitor parking—enterprising merchants face a challenge to distinguish themselves among the glut of competing shops. Joe Cannata, a retired NYPD captain moved here in 2008 to run Shoeless Joe’s, a store now bulging with uniforms, old signs, autographed balls, photographs and other keepsakes.

In 2012, partly because of his shop’s proximity to the Hall of Fame– it’s about a Texas leaguer away—and partly because of his background in justice and partly because of his increasing indignation that steroid users are being considered for Cooperstown induction, Cannata established a kind of public antishrine in a small, old landmarked building that stands in the weedy lot behind his store. He calls it the Hall of Shame. Admission is free and items are primarily to look at and consider, but not to buy. Cannata encourages his Shoeless Joe’s customers to go ’round and take a look. “Sammy Sosa is back there,” he’ll sometimes say. When people express surprise (
Sosa? Here? Today?
), Cannata insists, yes. What visitors in fact find is a grinning, life-size cardboard cutout of Sosa in his Cubs uniform. “I told you he was back there,” Cannata will say. “He’s fake. Just like his records.”

The Hall of Shame pays sarcastic homage to those players who, in Cannata’s view (and in the views of millions of others), cheated the game or, more relevantly, cheated the fans. Most conspicuous are the players linked to performance enhancing drugs—Mark McGwire’s and Barry Bonds’s rookie baseball cards are framed on the wall, for example, as is a photo of Rafael Palmeiro at the 2005 Congressional hearings on steroid use in baseball. (Palmeiro famously wagged his index finger emphatically during his angry denial that he had ever done such drugs and then a few months later—
D’oh!
—tested positive.) A copy of the Mitchell Report, the 2007 investigation that connected dozens of ballplayers to performance enhancing drugs, rests in a binder, available for visitors to thumb through.
⁴

Cannata also features players of other disrepute, including those connected to the 1985 cocaine trials such as Tim Raines, the former Expos All-Star who carried vials of cocaine in the back pocket of his uniform during games, out of fear, he explained, that they might be found if he left them in his locker. To be sure that he did not break a vial, Raines added, he usually slid headfirst. “That one gets me most of all,” says Cannata. “Talk about drugs having an impact on the game! This guy is getting support on the Hall of Fame ballot”—through the class of 2013, Raines, with his 808 career steals, 1,571 runs scored and .385 on base percentage has received at least 22% of the vote in each of his six years of eligibility— “and yet Pete Rose isn’t even on there?”

Not surprisingly, Rose appears in Cannata’s Hall of Shame as well, although he along with former outfielder Jose Canseco, whose 2005 whistle-blowing book
Juiced
revealed the names of numerous steroid cheats, is presented in a different light, alongside the portion of the museum that Cannata has devoted to “True Kings” like Hank Aaron and Roger Maris, baseball’s most prominent home-run record holders before performance enhancing drugs came along. Cannata sees Rose and Canseco as having done, on balance, more good than harm for baseball. When Kiana Kim visited the Hall of Shame during induction weekend of ’12—for a
Hits & Mrs.
scene that never aired—Cannata pointed out a framed, classic photo of Rose scuffling with Bud Harrelson on the field in 1973. “Oh, I’ve seen that picture a million times,” Kim said, although never, she added, “in a setting like this.”
⁵

Rose’s Hall of Fame worthiness has come under renewed discussion with the emergence of steroids in the game and into public awareness, and comparisons sharpened when Roger Clemens and Bonds—both among the most accomplished players in history—appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time in 2012, eligible for the class of ’13. Neither received anything close to the needed number of votes (they finished eighth and ninth, respectively, in the balloting), and for the first time in 17 years the baseball writers did not elect anyone at all to the Hall of Fame. Other steroid-linked players such as Palmeiro and McGwire have appeared on the ballot several times and also not come close to election. Sosa, also on the ballot for the first time for the class of 2013 and officially eighth alltime with 609 home runs, received a vote on less than 13% of the ballots. Still, all of those players have had a fair chance; Bonds and Clemens may yet get in.

Steroids were never an option for Rose—“It’s too late for me,” he told a Reds trainer as the drug began to proliferate in the mid-1980s—and whatever the impact of the widespread amphetamine use in baseball that Rose participated in, those stimulants did not grossly transform player production, wreak havoc on the record book and distort the day-to-day product on the field. Steroids have. Rose, who is often asked his views on steroid users, has adopted varying attitudes. At times, even as recently as 2013, he has referred to Alex Rodriguez as his favorite player (he has also had A-Rod programmed as a “favorite” contact in his mobile phone) and has suggested that players such as Bonds and Clemens should indeed be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

But Rose has also cast sharp aspersions, saying he could only imagine what men such as Babe Ruth and Roger Maris would think to know that “guys came along and cheated their way past those records.” When in 2013 new information surfaced about a lab in Florida that allegedly provided performance enhancing drugs to Rodriguez and numerous other active players, Rose implied that the punishments—mostly 50-game bans, aside from A-Rod’s—were not nearly enough. “I was a first offender too when I lied to baseball and I’ve been suspended 24 years,” he told
The Huffington Post
. “And I did nothing to dicker with the integrity of the game of baseball.” When asked to weigh the sin of his betting against that of ingesting steroids he added: “To all the young kids out there I’d say don’t do either one…but if you do the one that I didn’t do, you have a good chance of hurting your body in the long run.”

At the same time that baseball has, over the past decade, adopted an increasingly strong stance against performance-enhancing drugs, its resistance to its teams having an affiliation with gambling interests has softened. The Yankees installed the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar just above Monument Park at their new stadium. (Though of course there’s no gambling in the bar, the Mohegan Sun is a prominent casino in Connecticut two hours northeast of Yankee Stadium.) The Tigers invite guests to their MotorCity Casino Hotel Champions Club at Comerica Park. The Braves, the Dodgers and the Brewers feature casino presences along with several other teams—including, yes, the Reds, who have prominent ads for Cincinnati’s downtown Horseshoe Casino on the outfield wall and in the stands. When the Mets opened Citi Field in 2009 they did so with Harrah’s on board as a “signature partner” and with its Caesars’ Club restaurant as a core attraction. (Harrah’s, remember, runs a large sports book, taking in millions of dollars in baseball bets each year.) One “fan experience” promotion consists of a package in which a bus leaves postgame from Citi Field headed to Caesars’ Atlantic City; fans also get a $10 credit for the slot machines in the deal. Signage at Citi Field advertises
lasvegas.com
.

The clear and enormous danger of Rose’s baseball gambling lies less in its own crude execution and more in its implications. “The Pete Rose case represents the larger issue of gambling’s prevalence in America,” says Fay Vincent. “It is always out there and it is a real threat to professional sports, which tells you why a commissioner has to keep such a hard line against it.” The crux, as ever: Gambling can lead a player (or a manager, or a referee) to intentionally influence the outcome of a game in order to benefit a wager. A player might try to lose. And while fans will continue to pay to watch games played by athletes engorged by drugs, folks are not likely to stand for games that are not on the level. Those are for the WWE crowd.