“Former Tiger P Dutch Leonard wrote to Harry Heilmann that he had turned over letters written to him by Joe Wood and Ty Cobb to American League president Ban Johnson, implicating Wood and Cobb in betting on a Tiger-Cleveland game played in Detroit, September 25, 1919. He charged that Cobb and Speaker conspired to let Detroit win to help them gain 3rd-place money.”
As an historical aside, what the hell was “3rd-place money”???
I thought the basis of that old charge was that someone in that bunch allegedly had big money bet on the game. Never knew you got bucks for coming in third.
I wrote that really badly, Guin. Believe me; if Babe Ruth wasn’t in the Hall of Fame for some reason it’s the ONLY thing baseball fans would talk about. Ruth was better than Pete Rose and Joe Jackson combined. Babe Ruth’s level of greatness was the baseball equivalent of Wayne Gretzky… if Wayne Gretzky did everything he did AND then switched to playing goalie for another five or six years and was one of the best goalies in the league.
It was an eight team league at the time, pseuditron. They didn’t expand to 10 until they added the Angels and Senators 2.0 in 1961.
Anybody see Wonderland with Val Kilmer as a pathetic, junkie, lying John Holmes? I was reminded of that performance while watching Pete being interviewed.
Pete’s been lying so long he probably doesn’t what the truth is anymore. He may really believe what he saying.
“My own opinion as to whether or not Joe Jackson should be put in the Hall of Fame is that of course he should; it is only a matter of priorities. I think there are some other equally great players who should go in first, like Billy Williams, Herman Long, Minnie Minoso, and Elroy Face [James then lists players in other categories (Negro Leaguers, still-living stars of the 1940s and 1950s, off the field people, minor leaguers, various contemporary mediocrities, concluding with Omar Moreno and Duane Kuiper, both of whose talents James was known for despising)] And then, at last, when every honest ballplayer who has ever played the game…when each has been given his due, then I think we should hold our noses and make room for Joe Jackson to join the Hall of Fame.” The increasingly comical parodic catalogue goes on for two-thirds of a page in the original.
There is a very good, practical reason why even betting on ones own team is as bad as betting against it: The players and managers all know each other, and the schedule is published before the season starts. Is it so hard to imagine Rose serving as a conduit for other peoples’ money? Rose could have met Whitey Herzog over a beer in May during a series and said “See this game you guys have with Montreal in July? It’d be worth a lot of money if they won…” They could even agree that if the teams were in the race the deal would be called off. But as far as the bookies and their records are concerned, it’s Rose betting on a third-party game he has nothing to do with. And what if it’s the Cards playing the Reds that day? Again, if Rose is placing the bet, with some verbal-only agreement with someone on the other team, that’s obviously very bad even though he might claim that he’s “only betting on his own team to win”.
Now, I’m not saying that happened. In fact, it almost certainly didn’t given that Rose was betting practically every day on practically every game. And my invoking of Whitey Herzog was for my brother, the Mets fan. But any type of betting is rightly and loudly disallowed, with such strong penalties because of situations like this.
If he only bets for the Reds to win what about when he doesn’t bet on a Reds game. Whoa!!! Say all his bookies. “Pete is not betting on his team tonight. What does he know? Why does he think that?” So if after a few times they start to notice that when Pete does not bet, the Reds loose 80-90%(totally made up numbers here) of the time. That is something really good to know, if you are betting baseball. It is inside info that you can use to make money. Now Pete says he never managed based on how he was betting. He never looked at the schedule knew who he was playing tomorrow and knew that if so and so played that night we will have a way better chance of winning. So Barry Larkin gets tonight off and he will be in the lineup tomorrow.
deadeyesdad, if Pete Rose said that the sun was setting in the West I would ask a second person. He lied to the entire nation for over a decade about his betting, and when he said, in his second autobiography, that he had never bet on his own team, that claim was repudiated by another source within 2 days, if memory serves. He now claims (IIRC, and I might not RC) that he did bet on his team, but always to win.
In short, I would not trust anything Pete Rose said because, to be quite frank, he has shown on numerous occasions that he is a liar.
Actually, I’ve never said anything about the specific harms his betting caused. I do appreciate everyone’s kind words tho, even pss for stopping me from channeling too much Bill James.
To be honest I haven’t done a detailed study of Rose’s gambling patterns so I don’t know how he structured his baseball gambling. I don’t think it matters - the number of potential harms involved is staggering.
One thing that rarely gets mentioned anymore, although it was a big deal at the time, is that Rose really sucked at sports gambling. He lost more than he won. Gambling on baseball is insanely risky anyway, but Rose was blowing big, big money on college basketball, football, horses, you name it. There was a joke in Montreal when Rose played for the Expos that if two ants were walking across the clubhouse floor, Pete would have five hundred bucks on one of them to make it to the other side first. When the NCAA tourney came around he was horking up ten thousand a day. He was in debt, a lot of debt, to a lot of bookies. According to Dowd, Rose would ring up humongo-debts with one bookie, and then when the bookie stopped taking his bets he’d just go to another. You would assume a professional athlete and spokesperson would have money coming out of his ears, but Rose was betting tens of thousands a WEEK.
Now, ask yourself; do you really want pro athletes in trouble with organized crime because they rang up $200,000 they couldn’t pay back in gambling debts? Whaddya think the next step is?
But any type of betting is rightly and loudly disallowed, with such strong penalties because of situations like this.