Pete Rose said he bet ON the Reds. Every night.

The alternate title: Pete Rose liked Mario Soto

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2798498

Still doesn't make what he did right.

 

I bet he bets against them every night now.

 

He also continued to put a banjo-hitting, slow-as-molasses, defensively-worthless first baseman in the lineup game after game after game, because the dude was chasing some kind of all-time hits record or something.

FWIW, betting on baseball -- for or against your own team -- has always been an automatic lifetime ban from the sport. That's been true since 1877.

 

One of the most pathetic things I've seen recently was Pete sitting at a card table outside a memorabilia store at the Forum Shops at Caesars last year. He was charging $75 minimum for an autograph and there were no takers.

 

Poor Pete. He's now become one of the most pathologically fucked up people on the planet.

He knows this argument resonates with dumb people -- hey, as long as he bet on his team to WIN -- so he breaks that out. The poor bastard is just pathetic.

 

I listened to this interview as well.

Pathetic.

A close friend of my old man's, with extensive professional experience from Rose's playing days, told my dad that with Pete's last book, there was "a lie on every page."

The man's delusional.

You never know if/when he's telling the truth, or even trying to.

Keep him out of the Hall of Fame forever. He's still baseball's hit king. That's gonna have to be enough.

 

But he confessed.
That's what St. Bart wanted.

 

I think he wanted him to confess then.

Not a decade later.

Public opinion is funny--people who fuck up can get verbally crucified in the moment, but then generally work their back toward good graces over time. The human nature in all of us--we all make mistakes, right?

But, lying/dishonesty seems to carry a more dislikable burden. Especially so in a case where the fraud was carried out for so long and then pulled back like Lucy with the football.

The court of public opinion will offer no sympathy for this devil. Pete is buried. And he keeps shovelling more dirt on himself.

 

Of course, St. Bart was an incompetent, union-busting colluding dilettante who conspired in, and defended publicly, two years of GM's "throwing" their real jobs as assuredly as Chick Gandil ever threw a game, a strategy that ended up costing baseball $263 million and a decade of bad labor blood. But Rose did real damage.

 

Anyone get Paul Giamatti's reaction?

 

Ok, if Anderson Cooper came out, that'd be a bigger surprise than this.

 

No bigger phony every occupied the Commissioner's office. Quite a feat considering that exalted group.