By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Having been born on the Continent and raised there and in Great Britain, I am not by birth, neither by experience nor inclination steeped in baseball as many natural born Americans. Upon coming to the United States many decades ago, I was told by someone I esteemed to be knowledgeable and honest that to really understand America and Americans, one had to understand baseball. Accordingly, I made a study of the game. This was in the day of those such as Ted Williams, Whitey Ford, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax and, later, a young kid named Pete Rose. I grew to have an affection for the game, even if aspects of it are excruciatingly slow sometimes, and I did, in fact, learn something about America and Americans in general from seeing how the sport is played…
Pete Rose, for those of you old enough now to remember him, embodied a certain element of Americanism, the hard charging, can-do attitude, going all out with intensity, nerve and verve. He was fun to watch and he was always going, running as fast as he could down to first base, even when the routine grounder he had put into play was going to result in a sure out. Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, the fielder would misplay the ball or bobble it or make an errant throw and Pete Rose would be rewarded with being declared safe at first. He had so much worked this into his play that he became know as “Charlie Hustle,” which always bothered me a little, because it seemed more logical for people to call him “Pete Hustle,” but the point is, he did not dally about…
Sometimes, he took chances, trying to stretch what for anyone else would be a single into a double, or a double into a triple. Sometimes he failed. Usually when he gambled like that, though, he would win. Along the way, he had a fabulous career. He was a key member of several World Series teams, including three that won the World Championship. He got closer to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak than anyone ever did. He won three batting average titles. And he broke Ty Cobb’s record for the most hits by any major league baseball player, ever…
The same intensity that drove him to play so hard and take chances on the base paths and his wanting to continuously feel the thrill of winning resulted in him gambling, betting. It’s hard to say exactly what the truth is, but the story is that at first he made wagers on simple games of chance, card games and then the outcomes of college and professional sporting events. One of the stories that went around back in the 1980s was that he had bet on basketball games. As soon as the baseball commissioner caught wind of all of that, he stepped in and Pete Rose, who was still managing the Cincinnati Reds, was suspended in 1989. It was, and has continued to be, a drawn out and ugly affair. Pete’s story has changed. He initially denied betting at all. Then he admitted to gambling, but absolutely denied ever having bet on baseball games. Later still, he admitted to betting on baseball, but said he had never bet on games in which the Reds played…
In short order, he was banned from baseball for life after an investigation by John Dowd, a lawyer retained by Major League Baseball, found Pete Rose had bet on the Reds to win from 1985-87 while he was a player and manager. Dowd made his finding without actually marshalling the evidence that had led him to that conclusion…
Finally, in 2004, Pete Rose himself admitted in his autobiography he had bet on Reds games, but had always betted upon them to win…
This all comes up now because, after decades of debate about whether Pete Rose should be allowed into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there is a report going around that a notebook has been placed under seal in the Office of National Archives in New York which sheds light on this matter and whether Pete Rose’s still pending application for reinstatement with Major League Baseball will ever be granted. The notebook in question is one that was in the possession of Pete Rose’s close associate, Michael Bertolini, which was seized by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in October 1989. The notebook is said to contain betting records from March to July 1986…
On one level, it is hard to be judgmental about gambling, even though, I think, the Bible counsels against it. I, and most of my readers live in a state where the state itself sells lottery tickets, which is a version of the numbers racket that was formerly run by the mob, to benefit public schools. There are casinos run by Indian Tribes and privateers, in many places in California. I myself cannot resist the challenge of the baccarat table, and I say without any degree of shame, that I am an excellent player. So, I cannot condemn Pete Rose for gambling…
On yet another level, I wonder what all the fuss is about. People gamble for different reasons, I suppose, but the two main ones are for the thrill and to make money. I would draw an analogy to playing the stock market, which is very much like gambling, in fact, is gambling. People who are involved in corporate America, ones who are employed by major corporations, themselves play the stock market. Pete Rose, we now know, bet on the Reds to win. I am assuming, given his competitive nature, that he did not and never would have bet on the Reds to lose, at least while he was playing for them and managing them. Would the Ford Motor Company suspend one of its executives or one of its engineers or designers for buying Ford stock? Wouldn’t that be like betting on Ford to win? And wouldn’t ownership of that stock give the executive or the designer or the engineer an incentive to do a really good job? So, what’s wrong with that? Now, if the Ford employee was buying stock in General Motors or Toyota or Chrysler, that would have been like Pete Rose betting on the Dodgers or the Braves or the Cubs when they were playing the Reds…
On the level that counted, however, I understand that professional athletes cannot engage in gambling or cavort with gamblers or bookies or anyone of that sort. The issue is less that an athlete or manager would put themselves in the position of placing a bet on their opponents but more about the concern that after a string of losses by which the athlete ends up owing more money than he might reasonably pay, he would then be put in the position of having to throw a game or otherwise underperform to satisfy the holder of his losing betting slips. Never mind that an athlete performing at the level of a Pete Rose would be paid so much money he would be immune to that kind of pressure. The line must be drawn somewhere, and to prevent the possibility that some mob goons might break the leg or bust the kneecap of some quarterback or power forward or shortstop or goalie, there can be no fraternization, no sharing a cab, no sharing a table at the bistro, no making bets and no frequenting gaming houses, at all between professional athletes and anyone in the gaming industry…
This is a shame, because it is undeniable, statistically and competitively, that Pete Rose was one of the greatest baseball players ever…
While we are on the subject of people throwing a game, it appears that California prison and law enforcement officials are finally coming to the point where they a will have to recognize what everyone has known for decades – the jailors and prison guards we taxpayers in California have paid billions of dollars to over the years have been double dealing by smuggling drugs into our prisons…
In recent months the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has laid out $8 million on drug-detecting scanners and new breeds of drug-sniffing dogs to target people visiting prisoners. And they have stepped up strip searches on visitors suspected of carrying drugs. But that is just window dressing…
Relatively early in his tenure as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger sought to institute reforms in California’s prison system, which included reducing crowding and improving conditions that might lead toward rehabilitation and a reduction in recidivism, greater accountability on the part of the state employees running the prisons, introducing result-oriented criteria into the corrections system, along with reducing personnel costs so that money could be diverted to programs aimed at reducing crime. The 30,000-strong California Correctional Peace Officers Association would have none of that. They saw such reforms as a threat to their way of life. That way of life could be defined in this way: California prison guards are easily the best-paid guards in the nation. While the median salary of prison guards nationwide is in the high $30,000 to low $40,000 range, the base pay for a prison guard in California is $73,728. With the addition of overtime, a significant number of California prison guards earn in excess of $100,000 annually. Beyond their generous salaries and benefits, prison guards in California are eligible to retire at the age of 50 and receive a very comfortable pension…
When Arnold Schwarzenegger sought to reform this broken system, he was met with the opposition of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which at one point credibly threatened to gather signatures of more than 1 million registered voters needed to qualify a measure to recall Schwarzenegger from office. Ultimately, the Governator backed down…
In recent days, it has been reported that drugs – illicit drugs – are rampant in our prison system. This has been an open secret for years, of course. What was striking about these recent press reports was that they laid out the problem in the starkest of terms and in a way that will not allow the California Department of Corrections – or the current governor or the legislature – to ignore it. Since 2006, more than 150 California inmates have died of drug overdoses behind prison walls. Add to that the rather gruesome statistic that 69 inmates in California prisons in 2013 alone died from hepatitis infections brought on by the use of shared syringes. Contrast this with other states: In the last decade California has averaged over eight drug- or alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 inmates each year. Only Maryland has a higher rate, at 17 drug or alcohol related deaths per 100,000 inmates per year. The states of Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Texas each averaged one death a year per 100,000 inmates from 2001-2012, according to available national figures…
Stepping up the searches and technical means of monitoring the visitors at our state prisons is a nice gesture, but, seriously, does anyone truly believe this will make a significant dent in the problem? We are talking about massive quantities of drugs available on the inside. I am told it is as easy, or easier, to get heroin inside the prison system than it is to find it on the streets outside. The injection of heroin requires syringes and needles. These are widely available in our prisons as is heroin, methamphetamine, to a lesser extent cocaine, illicit pharmaceutical drugs and opiate derivatives and marijuana. These substances are available for just about any prisoner who wants to avail himself of them and in sufficient quantity and with such consistency for those addicted to them to ward off the symptoms of withdrawal. Are we to believe this quantity of contraband has come into, and is still coming into, the prisons by means of visitors? The only way that could be is if the visitors were permitted to openly deliver it. That does not appear to be the case. Marijuana is pungent to high heaven. How does it make its way through the prison gauntlet without detection? If visitors are sneaking it into the prisons past the guards in the quantities reported, that is an indication that the guards are not corrupt but incompetent…
Well, let us have the Department of Corrections employ these new fangled devices such as ion scanners and imagers and let them bring in even more drug-sniffing canines. Let us give it a decent trial period – six months or a year or 18 months or two years – and let us see how much of the drug flow we cut off. But if – or rather when – subjecting visitors to stepped up searches fails to decrease to any significant degree the prison drug problem, let us move on to draw the next logical inference: Many prison guards are very similar to Pete Rose. Just as he was not content to be a major leaguer and play in a stadium with 40,000 or 50,000 adoring fans at his elbow but had to jazz his life up by betting on the very game he was playing in or managing, a significant number of our prison guards are not satisfied with their $73,728 per year minimum salary and having been entrusted with the important job of overseeing society’s miscreants in a compassionate way that might rehabilitate them but feel they must augment their take-home pay and alter the rehabilitation system by smuggling drugs in to the inmates. I am not saying that all prison guards engage in this activity. Clearly, however, some do and they are doing so in sufficient numbers that it is a terrible social problem that is taking its toll on our state and the humanity of our prison system. And, it would seem, many of those guards not engaged, or directly engaged, in this smuggling activity, have to know what is happening and are somehow just looking the other way when it occurs…
This problem will not cure itself and it will not go away until we as a statewide community are willing to stand up to the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, and deal with the drug smuggling criminals among its ranks at least as harshly as Major League Baseball has dealt with Pete Rose…