Fay Vincent was Major League Baseball’s deputy commissioner in 1989 when Bart Giamatti banned Pete Rose for life. Rose died at 83 on Monday. The Athletic reached Vincent, now 86, at home Monday night to discuss Rose’s legacy, and whether Vincent’s views on Rose had changed over time.
Giamatti died less than two weeks after he handed down Rose’s exile, and Vincent took over as MLB’s chief executive until 1992 when he was replaced by Bud Selig. Both Selig and his successor, Rob Manfred, have maintained MLB’s ban on Rose.
Manfred in 2022 said he continued to believe the question of whether Rose should be in the Hall of Fame was not for MLB to decide, but the Hall.
Questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
I apologize if this is the first you’re hearing, but are you aware that Pete Rose has passed away?
I didn’t know that. That’s a sad reality, I’m sorry to hear that.
I’m sorry to deliver the news. I wonder if we could briefly revisit him?
I think he was devoted to baseball in the sense of the game, and his effort was certainly intense. He had a series of problems relating to his standards for conduct. He made some mistakes as he came along, and by the time I got to know him and Bart and I dealt with him in the betting issue, it was really too late. I mean, he had formed his attitude and his character and I’m afraid that he really thought that money was so important and he was betting a lot and he lost a lot and I think the corruption problem in his life was a serious one.
Do you think baseball’s now embrace of gambling should change any perspective on him, or even the Hall of Fame? Does that alter anything about his historical position?
Well, I don’t know whether it should. It certainly has. My guess is that his death, in a way, makes the whole issue of his position in the Hall of Fame — and the position of other people who are great players and got involved with steroids and other things — it makes those cases somewhat easier. Because he had that awful capability of making the issue personal and it got to be, “Is the attitude on gambling and sports directed at Pete Rose?” Should he be allowed in the Hall of Fame to sort of make up for the fact that gambling is now widespread and very popular, and therefore getting too bent out of shape about it is no longer appropriate?
It’s a little bit like the whole problem of drinking and smoking. You know, when we came along as young people, drinking and smoking had some sort of moral connotation, and gambling always had a moral connotation. Now it doesn’t. It’s legal now, where it used to be illegal in this country, and I think that makes a big difference.
Do I think he belongs in the Hall of Fame? I don’t think anybody who participates in corruption of the game as he did belongs in the Hall of Fame. I think there should be a moral dimension to honors. Otherwise we’re going to have to have the ceremony in prison yards, because we’ll have to have the prisoner come out of his cell to be honored in the prison yard. I don’t think that’s a good thing.
Do you think he was ever fully truthful, in the book or at any point, do you think he ever fully came clean?
I think you have to distinguish his view of the facts as they occurred. I don’t know that he was ultimately ever totally truthful. But it’s not so much the facts as he always wanted to find excuses. The real excuse was that he always needed money, he always had problems exceeding his income, and he cheated on taxes. People forget he served time in a federal prison for tax fraud, which means he didn’t pay his taxes on income that he got.
So I think that he may have thought he was telling the truth about what he did. I don’t think he ever thought he did anything particularly wrong. “After all, almost everybody cheats,” he would say, and cheating is just another form of competition. And he was able to do some cheating, and he got away with it for a while, and then he didn’t.
Toward the end, when he explained what he did, he always thought that, because he never bet against his own team, that excused what he was doing. And yet he knew, and I knew and Bart knew that when you don’t bet every day, you don’t bet a pitcher on your team that you don’t think is particularly good, or good any longer — as he had a bunch of pitchers on his team that he wouldn’t support — he just didn’t bet when some of them pitched.
Do you think he will eventually make the Hall of Fame? Separate from the question of whether he should, do you think now that his death will open the door?
I think it’s going to make it easier. I think there will be a form of honor for somebody like Rose, and probably somebody like (Barry) Bonds and maybe (Alex Rodriguez). And all these guys are different, because each one involves a little bit different problem, a little different personal latitude. Bart and I used to talk, and we always believed that (if) Pete Rose had come forward and said, “Look, you got me. I did it. It’s a terrible thing I did, I’m sorry, I breached the baseball laws, I was doing something that was illegal and I was wrong. But I want to help baseball, I want to get back into baseball, I want to get into the Hall of Fame. I’m going to come clean, I’m going to help you with young people, I’m going to explain why betting on baseball is a bad idea, corruption is stupid.” I think if he’d done that, he would have been in the Hall of Fame a long time ago.
But instead, he played a very hard game, and I think that was because he really thought that playing it straight, telling the truth, would cost him money, and he was desperate to make a lot of money. He thought that if he could get in the Hall of Fame, that would make his autograph a lot more valuable. It would make him a more attractive speaker. It would get him a lot of income. And I think he was probably right about that. I think eventually baseball will figure out a way to honor people within limits, in a separate category. So it would be sort of a tarnished honor, but it will be a form of honor recognizing some of his achievements and not overlooking a number of his detriments.
Over the years your position, certainly publicly, has been very consistent. And I wonder, did you ever waffle? Your view on Pete, have you ever gone back and forth on it or has it really been steady the whole time?
I’d like to think I’m steady, because I’m a lawyer, I care about obeying the law. When he was doing things, they were against the law of baseball, but even more importantly, they were against the law of the land. It was illegal to bet on sporting activities, and I helped as commissioner to get that law passed. I think it was 1990 or ’91, and I believed in that law. And I think gambling, I believe, is very bad for sports.
I don’t think gambling in this country on sports is going to survive, because I think the corruption element — and we’ve seen it already — is going to grow. There’s so much money, and the gambling people are overplaying their hand. They’re running ads during the broadcast of games. They’re having the ads read by very beloved announcers, touting the gambling operations and explaining that the ad wants people to bet on baseball.
I think that the corruption element that is brought into baseball and sports is a really negative one. And I think the dollars involved are going to become enormous, and we’re going to have corruption in college basketball, almost certainly. We’re going to have it in college sports beyond basketball. And as all that unfolds, it’s going to take a while. I’m certainly not going to be around when it changes. But there’ll be a time down the road when the country is going to say, “We have to clean it up, it’s just too messy.”
Would Bart Giamatti have said everything you just said, more or less?
I think yes. If anything, the difference between us: He thought that Rose had done very bad things, immoral things, forget the law. They were wrong because they were an attack on, an insult to, his beloved baseball. So though Rose claimed that he loved baseball and he cared about it, Bart would dismiss that, and say “he couldn’t possibly have loved baseball, because think of what he’s done.” He’s an example now of somebody for whom money came ahead of the lovely wins and losses of baseball. And Bart was not interested in money. He was not a man of commerce. He was an academic, a professor at Yale, and then a president of Yale. He was a romantic moralist, and I was a pretty hard-and-fast law-and-order legalist.
We agreed on everything major. We agreed on emphasis. And you know, he would say maybe I was playing the black notes and he was playing the white notes, or vice versa. But they all made music, and the music was the same, but the key was a little different. The music was written in different keys by him and me.
When was the last time you, if at all, had any contact with Rose? Was there ever any point of contact subsequent to his banishment?
No. I never spoke to him. I dealt with his lawyer when his banishment was occurring. I wrote the agreement between baseball and him. I handled the negotiation with his lawyer and Bart, John Dowd was very much involved, the guy who prosecuted the case for baseball. But Dowd and I did all the legal stuff, and Bart handled the press conference and the explanation of why this was an important moment. And there was no difference in anything important between Bart and me. There were significant differences in the way we approached problems because of our different backgrounds.
Is there anything you want to say about Pete that we didn’t get to?
I’d like to know whether, sort of at the last moment, Pete would have said quietly to a confessor or somebody, “I made a mess of things. I’m really sorry. I wasn’t smart enough to avoid all this.” It was a life that didn’t end as Pete had hoped it would, and in a way, that’s a real tragedy, because it didn’t have to be that way. But he kept making very bad mistakes. And after he got caught, there were a whole bunch of things that he might have done that Bart and I talked about that he never did. I’ve always wondered whether ultimately, he wouldn’t figure out that the biggest problem was his continuing pattern of making bad judgments.
(Top photo: Phil Huber / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
