It took 15 years of denials for Pete Rose to finally admit that he bet on baseball. But when he did so in 2004, Rose insisted that he only placed bets on baseball games as a manager and not as a player.
Well, on Monday, an ESPN Outside The Lines exclusive report presented evidence that Rose bet on baseball games as a player, too, from March through July of the 1986 season. Interesting—and suspicious timing—of a report to surface, considering Rose was looking forward to his sit-down meeting with new Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and was looking forward to participating, in some kind of aspect, in the All-Star Game in Cincinnati on July 14.
Documents obtained from a notebook seized from the home of former Rose associate, Michael Bertollini, go well past the 1989 Down report that led to Rose's lifetime ban. According to OTL, the notebook was seized in October 1989, two months after Rose was banned and it remained stored under a court-ordered seal for 26 years at the National Archives' New York office, with the office having declined requests to release it to the public.
Upon uncovering their findings, OTL sat down with Dowd, who pretty much wrote off any lingering chances of Rose being reinstated to baseball and inducted into the Hall of Fame. He also said this evidence was the missing link in tying together Rose's bets with mob-based bookies.
"This does it. This closes the door," Dowd, the former federal prosecutor who led MLB's investigation, told OTL. "We knew that [Bertolini] recorded the bets, and that he bet himself, but we never had his records. We tried to get them. He refused to give them to us. This is the final piece of the puzzle on a New York betting operation with organized crime. And, of course, [Rose] betting while he was a player."
Rose released the following statement to OTL through his attorney: "Since we submitted the application earlier this year, we committed to MLB that we would not comment on specific matters relating to reinstatement. I need to maintain that. To be sure, I'm eager to sit down with [MLB commissioner Rob] Manfred to address my entire history—the good and the bad—and my long personal journey since baseball. That meeting likely will come sometime after the All-Star break. Therefore at this point, it's not appropriate to comment on any specifics."
The documents show that Rose bet on games as a player-manager from March through July 1986, but don't show any evidence that he bet against his own team, the Cincinnati Reds. The hidden notebook shows that Rose bet on at least one MLB team on 30 different days, although every entry isn't legible. The findings via the notebook also show that mosts of the bets were for about $2,000 and even included a $5,500 wager on the Boston Celtics. One week in March 1986 had Rose losing $25,500 in sports bets.
Dowd added to OTL that this notebook's findings don't bode well for Rose nor the MLB.
"The implications for baseball are terrible," Dowd said. [The mob] had a mortgage on Pete while he was a player and manager."
Again, though, how does this report surface less than a month away from Rose's tentative participation in the MLB All-Star Game in Cincinnati? Something tells us, there's even more to this story.
Rose remains the MLB's all-time hits leader.
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