Pete Rose: ‘No comparison’ between steroids, greenies in Major League Baseball

Among topics former Cincinnati Reds great Pete Rose discussed earlier this week with Joe, Lo & Dibs on 95.7 The Game in San Francisco was drug use in baseball. And the Hit King insists that “greenies” - the amphetamines many players took during Rose’s career - did not have anywhere close to the impact that steroids did more recently.

“They’ve been treated that way because they’re linked to steroids. ... I’m gonna be honest with you: (Mark) McGwire and (Sammy) Sosa saved the game,” Rose told the radio show. “The game was headed downhill and that had that home run derby. ... That was fun to watch. That was a lot of fun to watch. ... The guys that are linked to drugs - just like the guys that are linked to gambling - aren’t gonna get no votes for the Hall of Fame. I think they belong there. ... Steroids is a lot better than greenies. ... A greenie is nothing more than a diet pill. It’s a diet pill. A greenie is something that’ll curb your appetite. It’s not gonna make you stronger. It’s not gonna make you faster. It’s not gonna make you quicker like steroids. ... There is no comparison. ... (Diet pills) didn’t affect my play. Do you understand what I’m saying? I mean, so it’s no big deal. When you have to go to a doctor and get a diet pill, I mean that’s not gonna help you hit a baseball further or anything like that. But you go to a doctor and get steroids ... I don’t know a damn thing about steroids, and I never had any guys on my team take steroids when I was a manager from ‘84 to ‘89. And certainly Joe Morgan didn’t take steroids, and Tony Perez didn’t, and Johnny Bench didn’t - neither did George Foster. Those guys were just good hitters and big guys that could hit the ball out of the ballpark. But guys today - you see these athletes today - they’re monsters! They’re all big. ... These kids are bigger today. ... It’s amazing how big these athletes are today and how fragile they are. That’s another thing. I used to always tell people ... when you walk in the clubhouse, it says, ‘If you play today, you get paid. And if you don’t play today, you don’t get paid.’ How many of them would take days off? None. ... I think the greatest thing in the world for players ... is a multi-year contract. It gives us security for our families, right? But the worst thing for you and I as fans is a multi-year contract. Because players don’t have to play. They can take two days off a week.”

Pete Rose had bats corked in ‘84, former Expos groundskeeper says

“A former groundskeeper for the Montreal Expos recently told the Montreal Gazette that Rose routinely had an Olympic Stadium staffer cork his bats in 1984. Rose played most of the 1984 season for the Expos before he was traded back to his original club, the Cincinnati Reds, that August.

Joe Jammer, then an Expos groundskeeper and now a musician in London, told the Gazette in a telephone interview, “Pete Rose would have his bats corked in the visitors’ clubhouse at Olympic Stadium. I found out he was corking bats.

“Pete was too smart to deal with Expos equipment manager John Silverman [to cork his bats in the Expos’ clubhouse]. So Bryan Greenberg, who worked in the visitors’ clubhouse, did it. He took me into a room, a door to the left, and underneath tarps there was this machine.””

The harmless practical joke that changed baseball

On Oct. 2, 1983, the Boston Red Sox, their fans and the baseball world said goodbye to Carl Yastrzemski. There was a whole massive production at Fenway Park for his final game, with an hour-long pregame ceremony, the retirement of his No. 8 jersey and a letter, read aloud to the crowd, from President Ronald Reagan. For a team that hadn’t reached a World Series in eight years, and hadn’t won one in 65, it was the biggest Red Sox story imaginable.

But that night, the Boston sports talk radio show “The Sports Huddle” on WHDH wasn’t talking about Carl Yastrzemski. It was talking about a relatively unknown baseball lifer named Vern Rapp. And that little four-hour show was about to change baseball history.

The 1983 Red Sox were not a good baseball team, 78-84 on the season, and over the season’s last month, and for most of the season really, the only story worth talking about was Yaz’s retirement. It reached such a critical mass that even people who loved Yaz—which was everyone in Boston—had begun to tire of talking about it. So, Bruce Cornblatt, then a young producer of “The Sports Huddle,” a weekly sports call-in show (and now a producer at MLB Network), thought it would be funny to gently mock all the fanfare by doing a tribute to someone else, someone far less celebrated, on the day of Yaz’s last game.

“We wanted to pay tribute to the most remote person we could,” Cornblatt told me. “We thought that might be funny for a little while.”

So, what do you suppose happens if this little radio prank hadn’t been pulled?

Today in Baseball History: The beginning of the end for Pete Rose

In the spring of 1989, Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth was a lame duck. His successor, National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti, was unanimously elected to succeed him the previous September and was poised to take office on April 1. Most lame ducks like Ueberroth do very little of note, but just before stepping out of the spotlight, Ueberroth dropped a bomb: On March 20, 1989 he announced that his office was conducting a “full inquiry into serious allegations” about Cincinnati Reds manager and all-time baseball hit king, Pete Rose.

The announcement — which provided no other details — took the public by surprise, but as is the case with almost anything baseball does, Ueberroth was reacting to bad press. In this case it was a detailed investigative report from Sports Illustrated about Rose’s associations with convicted felons, his alleged huge betting losses and his questionable handling of money he received from memorabilia sales and autograph signings. A few days later Sports Illustrated reported that Ueberroth had received information that Rose may have bet on baseball games. Including Reds games.

Ueberroth hired the attorney John Dowd as special counsel to investigate. Dowd’s report was submitted to Giamatti in May and was made public on June 27. It was voluminous, including eight volumes of exhibits, which included bank and telephone records, betting records, expert reports, and transcripts of interviews with Rose and other witnesses. It was also damning. It’s principal findings, from the introductory summary of the Dowd Report:

“As detailed more extensively herein, Pete Rose has denied under oath ever betting on Major League Baseball or associating with anyone who bet on Major League Baseball. However, the investigation has developed information to the contrary. the testimony and the documentary evidence gathered in the course of the investigation demonstrated that Pete Rose bet on baseball, and in particular, on games of the Cincinnati Reds Baseball Club during the 1985, 1986, and 1987 seasons . . . the accumulated testimony of witnesses, together with the documentary evidence and telephone records reveal extensive betting activity by Pete Rose in connection with professional baseball and, in particular, Cincinnati Reds games, during the 1985, 1986, and 1987 baseball seasons.”

The story of a scoundrel’s downfall.

No, You Made It Awkward: On Steroid-Era Players and the Hall of Fame

Back in January, in a Facebook group devoted to the Effectively Wild podcast, one post noted how uncomfortable it would be if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The poster discussed how the day in Cooperstown would be filled with awkward speeches, loud anti-PED rhetoric, and claims the Hall would be debased by their presence. But awkwardness is not an excuse. If the Pro Football Hall of Fame can enshrine Ray Lewis without a hitch, baseball can do something similar.

Baseball’s history is littered with greats who, if they were elected to the Hall of Fame today, would produce equally uncomfortable weekends, speeches and sentiments. Baseball, like America, tends to sanitize its history and mark acts of evil as “unfortunate.” In the social media age, some of the following players would have made Sunday in Cooperstown just as awkward.

So, do we buy these arguments, and why or why not, as the case may be?

Trump backs Pete Rose reinstatement in wake of Astros sign-stealing scandal

Of course, he does.