by David Fleitz

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dlfleitz@wcnet.org

Ghosts in the Gallery at Cooperstown: Sixteen Little-Known Members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, by David Fleitz, is available now from McFarland.  Call 1-800-253-2187 for details.

You knew that Pete Rose bet on baseball. For 14 years he denied it, and he even produced a previous biography, with respected writer Roger Kahn, in which he denied it.

However, if you read the Dowd Report and are relatively sane, you figured that Pete would give up the charade and confess some day.

Now, with the publication of Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars, from Rodale Press, the Cincinnati fans have finally received the confession that they all knew, deep down, would come eventually.

People in Cincinnati didn't merely love Pete Rose. They looooooved Pete Rose. In 1984, on the weekend that Pete returned to Cincinnati as playing manager of his hometown team, I went to a Reds game at Riverfront Stadium. The fans cheered Pete's every move, and hundreds of them - literally hundreds - wore roses pinned to their clothing to welcome the returning hero. The Queen City flower shops did a brisk business in roses that weekend. Four years later, when Pete pushed umpire Dave Pallone during an argument and earned a 30-day suspension, the fans in Cincinnati filled the radio airwaves with songs and poems praising their favorite player and manager. One station played "Give Pete a Chance," with new words to the familiar John Lennon tune, dozens of times a day.

Pete wasn't much of a manager - he never got the Reds into the playoffs, while Lou Piniella won the 1990 World Series with the same team - but the Riverfront Stadium fans didn't mind. He was Pete Rose, and he was one of them.

They believed him, and now Pete admits that he lied to them. It's easy to say that Pete should have made this confession 14 years and three commissioners of baseball ago, but at least he finally did it.

The most powerful part of the book is Pete's recounting of his years as a baseball gambler, which he partially blames on attention-deficit disorder and partly on his own arrogance. "I bet on baseball and have to take responsibility for my actions," says Rose. "So let me start by saying this: I would rather die than lose a baseball game. I hate to lose. There is no temptation on the planet Earth that could ever get me to fix a game - none - end of story. Second, I never gambled for money. I gambled for the 'action high,' which I got from putting big bucks on the line in an effort to win . . ." It appears that when Pete retired from playing after the 1986 season, he cast about for something that would excite him as much as playing ball and setting records. Managing the Reds did not do the trick, so he started betting on the game.

The book, sad to say, is atrociously written and edited. The 1970 National League batting champ was Rico Carty, not "Rico Cardi", and it would have been impossible for Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente to be on an All-Star team in the mid-1970s, since Mays was retired and Clemente was dead by then. Rodale Press should have hired a SABR member to fact-check the manuscript before publication. Also, I'm sure that Pete is proud of his daughter Fawn as the first member of the Rose clan to earn a four-year degree, but why did he and his co-author misspell the name of the college?

Pete's co-author, Rick Hill, is not a writer by trade. He is identified in the book jacket as an actor and director with some TV writing credits, and it shows in his style. The narrative sometimes reads like a sitcom script, complete with lame jokes (there are no Jews in prison, says Pete, because "they ate all the lox") and questionable assertions (Pete's six-year-old daughter asks why people sing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' when they're already there). I don't see a six-year-old asking that. I also don't know what part of Pete's brain produced the description of fellow disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson as "the Hester Prynne of baseball". Since when does Pete Rose spout literary references?

And the book uses lots of exclamation points! Really! It does!

However, if you want a dose of unvarnished Pete, this is the book for you. He's sorry for what he did, but he won't grovel. "I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way," he said. "... So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let's move on." Maybe it's not enough, but it's all he's able to give.

My verdict? Let him into the Hall of Fame, but not back into baseball.  And if you want to get a glimpse of the inner workings of Pete Rose's mind, read the book.