When Commissioner Rob Manfred announced last week that he was removing the names of Pete Rose and 15 others from Major League Baseball’s “permanent ineligible list,” my thoughts immediately went to longtime John’s Island resident Fay Vincent, who died on Feb. 1.
I wondered how Vincent, who occupied Manfred’s once-revered office from 1989 to 1992, would have reacted to the news that Rose – baseball’s recently deceased all-time hits leader – might finally receive Hall of Fame consideration despite having been banned from the game for nearly 36 years for gambling.
I wasn’t alone.
“Can you imagine what Fay would say?” said Vincent’s former neighbor, Mark Mulvoy, the retired Sports Illustrated editor and publisher who has been spending winters at John’s Island for more than 30 years.
It was a rhetorical question.
We both knew Vincent had remained steadfast in his belief Rose’s troubles were of his own making – and that the life sentence imposed in August 1989 by his predecessor, Commissioner Bart Giamatti, was not in any way unjust.
An exhaustive, take-no-prisoners MLB investigation found that Rose had committed the game’s mortal sin: As the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he bet on baseball.
“Rose denied it for a long time,” Mulvoy said during our 20-minute phone call, “but the evidence was overwhelming.”
That’s why Rose ultimately signed an agreement largely authored and negotiated by Vincent, then Giamatti’s deputy, and accepted the permanent ban.
Over the next 14 years, Rose would criticize the deal he made, complain that he was double-crossed by Giamatti – who died of a heart attack only eight days after the matter was settled – and fiercely deny that he gambled on baseball games.
It wasn’t until Rose wrote his 2004 memoir, “My Prison Without Bars,” that he ultimately confessed, admitting that he bet not only on baseball, but also on Reds games when he was the team’s manager in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Neither Vincent nor Mulvoy, though, ever doubted Rose’s guilt.
It was Mulvoy, then SI’s managing editor, who summoned the nationally distributed magazine’s manpower, money and other resources to launch an extensive investigation into Rose’s gambling.
“I have no idea what it cost us, but in those days we had an abundance of resources,” Mulvoy recalled, adding that he assigned an editor and multiple investigative reporters to the project, which he called a “no-brainer,” given the early information the magazine had received.
One of SI’s reporters, in fact, was Martin Dardis, a former Dade County State Attorney’s Office chief investigator who in 1972 provided documents that helped the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein connect President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign to the Watergate burglary.
“We had a great team,” Mulvoy said. “We started with a few leads, followed up by finding sources, and then found other sources to verify what we were told. We did everything we could to confirm our information, and we didn’t print anything that didn’t go through our lawyers.”
“Nobody sued us for anything on our Pete Rose reporting,” he added.
Mulvoy, now 83, said SI’s team was so on target in its pursuit of the story that MLB investigators working for former U.S. Justice Department attorney John Dowd, who was hired as special counsel to the commissioner, would be seen “following our people around.”
The magazine’s efforts resulted in a series of stories, with photographs of Rose adorning the front pages of SI’s editions on April 3, 1989, and July 3, 1989.
The latter cover highlighted a damning segment of Dowd’s under-oath interview with former bookmaker Ron Peters, who testified Rose bet on the Reds while managing the team.
“There was a compulsiveness to what Pete Rose did,” Mulvoy said, echoing the words Vincent repeated in numerous interviews in the years since MLB team owners pushed him out because he refused to engage in tactics to break the players union.
This past November, Vincent spoke to The Athletic in what would be his final in-depth interview regarding Rose, the 1963 National League Rookie of the Year, 1973 National League Most Valuable Player and 17-time All-Star who amassed a record 4,256 hits while playing 500 games at each of five different positions.
Much of what Vincent said during the interview, conducted in the wake of Rose’s Sept. 30 death, was remarkably consistent with what he said during our many conversations about the iconic player’s tragic – but self-inflicted – downfall.
Among the topics discussed was Rose’s pursuit of money and struggle with debt, which is why he was always hawking his autograph at baseball-card shows and other sports-memorabilia events around the country.
“He had a series of problems relating to his standards for conduct,” Vincent told The Athletic. “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.
“He had formed his attitude and his character, and I’m afraid that he really thought that money was so important,” he added. “He was betting a lot and he lost a lot, and I think the corruption problem in his life was a serious one.”
Vincent went on to say: “He was constantly trying to figure out ways to beat a series of obstacles he could never overcome.”
Though Rose contended that he never bet against the Reds – despite such suspicions, no tangible evidence has been made public – Vincent never embraced the argument as a mitigating factor.
“When you bet on your team to win and you don’t bet every day, you’re sending a message,” Vincent told me on numerous occasions. “You’re telling other gamblers when they should and shouldn’t bet. You’re still inviting the potential for corruption.”
For that reason, along with a mea culpa that came years too late and only when it became profitable, Vincent didn’t agree with sports-media types and fans who said Rose, based on his Cooperstown-worthy credentials as a player, deserves the baseball immortality offered by the Hall of Fame, despite his misdeeds as a manager.
Vincent long believed eligibility for the game’s highest honor should include a moral component, and he told The Athletic, “I don’t think anybody who participates in corruption of the game, as he did, belongs in the Hall of Fame.”
Mulvoy agreed with Vincent’s opinion that Rose could have greatly enhanced his chances of being reinstated by baseball years ago – certainly, while he was still alive – by immediately owning up to his crime.
All Rose needed to do was tell Giamatti: “You got me. I know what I did was wrong. I hurt baseball, and I’m sincerely sorry. I’ll accept whatever punishment you think is fair, but I want to make things right. What can I do?”
Instead, Rose clung tenaciously to his lie, giving Giamatti, Vincent and his successor as commissioner, Bud Selig, no real choice.
“Fay and I would talk about it,” Mulvoy said, adding that they would meet for lunch, which was always topped off by ice cream for dessert. “Fay believed in integrity, and he was very worried about the impact of gambling, especially in baseball.”
Both men saw the arrival of legal sports betting, now permitted in 39 states and the District of Columbia, as a genuine and growing threat to the credibility of games.
In the U.S. last year, nearly $150 billion was wagered on sports, generating an industry-record $13.7 billion in revenue – a 25-percent increase over 2023. You can’t watch a televised major league team-sport event without seeing bet-now messages pertaining to almost all aspects of the games.
MLB now has an official bookmaker: FanDuel.
Rose’s legion of supporters often cited the obvious hypocrisy as MLB’s Rule 21 still prohibits league personnel – including players, managers and umpires – from betting on baseball.
“You don’t think there are athletes out there with sports-betting accounts?” Mulvoy said. “It’s dominating the culture.”
Now that he’s eligible, Rose is sure to get serious consideration from a 16-member Classic Baseball Era committee, which evaluates the Hall of Fame candidacy of players whose greatest contributions were before 1980.
The committee isn’t scheduled to meet again until December 2027, and Rose will need to get at least 12 votes to win induction.
The same goes for “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and seven other members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox – all of them banned from playing professional baseball by MLB’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for fixing that year’s World Series.
Jackson, who had a .356 career batting average and died in 1951, remains one of baseball most recognizable names, in part for his depiction by actor Ray Liotta in the 1989 hit movie, “Field of Dreams.”
Manfred ruled on May 13 that punishment of banned players and other baseball personnel ends upon their deaths, when they no longer posed any threat to the integrity of the game.
Mulvoy, who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in November 2023 as a journalist, said he was disappointed by Manfred’s decision, adding that it has considerably diminished his love for baseball.
“It’s not just baseball,” said Mulvoy, who retired nearly 30 years ago. “It clouds the way I view sports. There’s no integrity left. You’ve got legal sports betting everywhere. And at the college level, you’ve got players negotiating deals, kids transferring every year …”
He paused for a moment, then continued: “These are not our times. The journalism you and I know is history, especially when it comes to covering sports. Every team in every league has its own website. There’s nobody to call out wrongdoing, no one there to be the conscience.
“That’s what we tried to do at Sports Illustrated.”
That’s what Vincent did in his much-too-brief term as baseball’s eighth and last true commissioner.
But that’s history.
Manfred’s decision to clear Rose’s path to the Hall of Fame is another reminder that sports today is a whole new ball game.
