TAKING NOTE

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Last weekend, for the first time in 35 years, the NFL suspended a player for betting on NFL games. CB Josh Shaw of the Arizona Cardinals won’t be eligible to petition for reinstatement until Feb. 15, 2021.

This got us thinking about another player who was caught betting on his sport . . . Pete Rose. The big difference is Shaw, unlike Rose, will be able to petition to get back in the game. Rose was never offered that luxury but rather was banned from baseball, and his inevitable induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, for life.

Maybe now, after 30 years (Rose was banned in August 1989), MLB will consider lifting his ban and letting the all-time hits leader into the hall that should have a wing named after him.

Please enjoy Jim Murray’s 1991 column headlined “Baseball Is Erasing History” about Rose’s many accomplishments that will go unrecognized in Cooperstown.

——

January 13, 1991, SPORTS

Copyright 1991/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY

JIM MURRAY

Baseball Is Erasing History

  Pete Rose never got 4,256 hits. Pete Rose never got 746 doubles. Pete Rose never played in 3,562 big league baseball games. Pete Rose never played in six World Series, seven playoffs.

 Pete Rose never slid head first into home plate, scattering the catcher and the ball as he went. Pete Rose never ran out a base on balls.

  There’s no such person. Pete Rose never existed. He is a non-person. He is like one of those Soviet despots they expunge from the history books.

 Pete Rose never paced a dugout with that funny little gap-toothed grin, waving his Popeye arms and explaining with gestures and rolling slides in the dirt exactly how the game should be played.

  Pete Rose never played the game for 24 years with the little boy’s zeal and wonder until, if you closed your eyes, you could picture him with his cap on sideways, knickers falling down to his ankles and dragging a taped ball and busted bat behind him, looking for all the world like something that fell off Norman Rockwell’s easel.

  Must have been some other guy. Because Pete Rose ceased to exist on Thursday. He was erased from society by a group of judges they must have found in Salem.

 What are they trying to tell us? There was no Charlie Hustle? There was no swaggering, pixieish No. 14 who for two decades filled notebooks and headlines and seemed to epitomize all that was fine and right with the grand old game?

  There was no guy who spoke up for baseball and promoted it all he could, who never hid in the trainer’s room or ducked out a side door in defeat, who never just took the money and ran?

  There was no guy who, when the World Series in Boston was rained out four days out of five, came dutifully to a news conference to keep the scribes in print and the Series, which was to become one of the greatest ever played, alive?

  There was no such guy as the Reds’ third baseman in that Series who turned to a base runner from the other team and said, “Ain’t this great? Ain’t this fun?”

  Pete Rose was a figment of our imagination? He was a cartoon character like Yogi Bear?

  We’re supposed to forget he was ever real? We’re supposed to expunge all his records? Banish him to a corner of the sports world inhabited only by the Black Sox of 1919 and one or two other non-persons in the game?

 Get outta here! What for? Because he had a gambling addiction? Because he couldn’t pass a bookie parlor or a 9-5 shot or the overs-and-unders on the Bears’ games without wagering a few bob?

  What about the guys who had other addictions? The crowd that got caught in the cocaine busts in Pittsburgh? Hey, Babe Ruth had an addiction, too. He liked rye whiskey. And that was as illegal as cocaine in his time.

  I wish we could get some of those judges who voted to take Pete out of circulation to sit in on rape trails once in a while. I wish they could serve on some of those appellate court benches where they throw a serial killer’s conviction out because the cop interrogating him forgot to call him “sir” or didn’t have a warrant to take his knife away from him.

  I wish I could figure out why guys who kill eight nurses in five states get people holding candle vigils outside their prison cells while Pete Rose gets the book thrown at him.

  Do you want to stand there and tell me Pete Rose wasn’t good for baseball? Lord, he was baseball. He’s a menace to the game? Gimme a break!

  I’m a law-and-order man myself. I’ve been known to deplore the fact that society has lost its capacity for indignation, has shrunk from punishing its criminals.

  And I completely understand that you hold the highly successful to a different set of standards than the less privileged. You want to kick a president out for hushing up a robbery, that’s OK with me.

  But hey! Pete Rose didn’t go to Harvard. Pete Rose never took prelaw. Stop and think about it, Pete made a living in an industry where it’s not only all right to steal, it’s expected of you.

  Pete never discussed Stendhal. Pete never went to the opera. You don’t take Pete to Buckingham Palace. Pete played baseball for a living. It was probably that or mow lawns.

 A lot of people have sympathy for Shoeless Joe Jackson. He was even the hero of a movie, for cryin’ out loud!

  But wait a minute! Shoeless Joe Jackson was a crook. He was an accessory before the fact. He was part of a conspiracy to throw the World Series, no less. That’s major league trifling with the faith of a nation. Whether he threw the Series or not is beside the point. He agreed to do it. His silence made him a co-conspirator.

 If Pete threw ball games, why don’t they tell us about it? Why don’t they prove it? Ax murderers get a better day in court than he did.

  He couldn’t have thrown any World Series. His team won three of the six he appeared in.

  Oh, he cheated on his income tax? He didn’t declare some income he earned?

  Noooo! Who could believe a person would do that? Try to pay as little as they could to the government?

  He didn’t fill ballparks for all those years. He didn’t have the dirtiest uniform in the National League. He didn’t wisecrack around the batting cage each spring: “I’ll tell you three things gonna happen this summer — the grass gonna get green, the sun’s gonna get hot and Pete Rose is gonna get 200 hits.” He’d like to tell you: “I may not be the best hitter on this club, but I’m the best white hitter!”

 But he never did those things. They never happened. He never happened. Ty Cobb’s the only guy in history who ever got more than 4,000 hits. They’re going to take Pete Rose away.

  I don’t know about you, but I’m going to miss him.

-——

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation? 

  The Jim Murray Memorial Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1999 to perpetuate the Jim Murray legacy, and his love for and dedication to his extraordinary career in journalism. Since 1999, JMMF has granted 104 $5,000 scholarships to outstanding journalism students. Success of the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation’s efforts depends heavily on the contributions from generous individuals, organizations, corporations, and volunteers who align themselves with the mission and values of the JMMF.

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

——

A dozen years ago, Linda McCoy-Murray compiled a book of Jim Murray’s columns on female athletes (1961-1998). While the book is idle waiting for an interested publisher, the JMMF thinks this is an appropriate year to get the book on the shelves, i.e., Jim Murray’s 100^th birthday, 1919-2019.  

Our mission is to empower women of all ages to succeed and prosper — in and out of sports — while entertaining the reader with Jim Murray’s wit and hyperbole.  An excellent teaching tool for Women’s Studies.

Proceeds from book sales will benefit the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization providing sports journalism scholarships at universities across the country.

Today (Nov. 25) would have been Joe DiMaggio’s 105th birthday. In honor of Joltin’ Joe’s birthday, we bring you not only a Jim Murray column from Sept. 1, 1968, but also an excerpt from Jim Murray’s autobiography about the first time he met DiMaggio.

JIM MURRAY: Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe

Excerpt from JIM MURRAY: An Autobiography (Pages 19, 21-22)

   “I was, as it happened, the cinema correspondent for Time magazine at the time. This was a highly prized assignment in the company that was about as movie-struck as a high school sorority. You couldn’t walk the corridors of Time, Inc., at the time without tripping over 10 people who were sure they were going to be the next great film directors.

   “My job was to keep the cinema section apprised of the movements of the film industry and to pick out three or four cover stories a year — that is, pick a movie star, hopefully female, to put on the magazine’s cover and break up the monotony of the series of grim-visaged secretaries of state and military men who ordinarily glowered off its page and sold precious few copies on the newsstands. . . .

   “I pitched a story on Marilyn to the Magazine. They agreed. The studio saw a Time magazine story as an entrée to a bigger, picture story in the big-brother Life magazine, one of the most highly prized publicity plugs a film or film star could get.

   “My assignment was to do a story on her and explore her as a cover possibility later on. I took her to dinner on the Sunset Strip, to one of those mob-owned restaurants — Alan Dale, I believe, ran it — along the boulevard, after picking her up at her residential hotel on Olympic Boulevard.

   “As we dined and talked, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a famous former athlete come into the restaurant by a side door. He was escorted to a private dining area by the owner and a screen was placed around the table.

   “I knew the great Joe DiMaggio when I saw him and, later in the evening, when Marilyn leaned over and breathed, “Do you mind if you don’t take me home but I go home with a friend of mine?” I was ready. “Only if you introduce me to Joe DiMaggio first!”

——

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1968, SPORTS

Copyright 1968/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY

JIM MURRAY

DiMag Shuns Sainthood, Becomes Mortal Again

  It was the sportswriter Bob Broeg who first surveyed Joe DiMaggio in the chorus-girl livery of Charley Finley’s Athletics — white shoes, green sleeves, gold stripes, white hat — and allowed dryly, “Seeing Joe in that is like seeing Santa Claus in a purple bikini.”

  The writer Charlie Einstein suggested the team be re-christened “Charley’s Aunts.” Another columnist suggested they dust off the old line, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” and apply it to Joe in the Oakland locker room. The implication was, Joe was playing the piano downstairs in the waterfront dance hall.

  He was even the subject of the leering Simon and Garfunkel lyrics for “The Graduate” mockingly linked with the infamous Mrs. Robinson. “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio/A nation turns its lonely eyes to you/Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!” And, later, “Jolting Joe has left and gone away/Hey!Hey!Hey!”

  For the baseball purist, this is like stoning a saint, painting black eyes on the Mona Lisa, putting cigarette ads over the Sistine Chapel, wrapping fish in a Vermeer. Like catching a statue in the park smoking or the Queen Mother playing darts in a pub in Soho.

  I don’t suppose anybody ever played the game of baseball with the pure grace and style of Joseph Paul DiMaggio. He excelled at the game with the kind of bored, disdainful perfection of a fencing master beset by clods, almost as if he were good in spite of himself. “He was like a dowager distributing baskets to the poor,” the late Tom Meany once told me. “He never looked like he was even SWEATING.”

  He was aristocracy on and off the field. He not only never got gravy on his tie, he never even got dirt on his uniform. They wrote songs about Joe DiMaggio for real in those days — not the sneering type but the genuine flag-wavers. He was an idol of the day of the magnitude of Charles Lindbergh — aloof, godlike. He never caught fly balls like a guy falling through a skylight. He was THERE when the ball came down. He stood at the plate as easily and naturally as a guy watching a sunset. Historians swear he went five years once without hitting anything but a line drive. Some of his hits went through the infield but many went through the infielders. Joe DiMaggio played baseball the way a fish swims, a bird flies or a lion bites. If anybody seemed suited to his environment it was J.P. DiMaggio.

  And yet Joe DiMaggio had ulcers. Joe DiMaggio got gray before he was 35. The pressure he never let anyone see would have broken windows for miles around if he ever let it out. He would get the bends if he left the locker room too early, if he didn’t adjust to different pressures on his way back to the street or Toots Shor’s.

  All New York expected of him was an annual Triple Crown, a pennant, world’s championship, impeccable behaviour on and off the field. He was a captive of his genius like all geniuses — the gift of God had a “Return in 60 days if not satisfied” clause.

  Joe left Baseball like a guy getting a parole. No one ever yelled “Ya, bum, ya!” at Joe DiMaggio. That was the trouble. He was untouchable, a holy man. As a result, he couldn’t wait to leave and he fled to where he could be “Hey, you” or “You’re away, you hacker” or even “Mr. DiMaggio.”

  Baseball dismissed him as “too aloof.” They took loudmouthed banjo hitters for managers, sweet-talking salesmen for the front office. They left Joe in his plaster cast with pigeons perched on his shoulders.

  Joe DiMaggio came to a personal decision this year. The statue left the pedestal, the portrait climbed down from the frame. He put the halo on backwards. He is sick of being an institution, the prisoner of his reputation.

  Charley O. Finley asked him to join the Oakland A’s and all baseball protested. Finley is a brawling, shoot-from-the-hip type of front office competitor, the kind of guy who realizes even the Emperor goes to the bathroom. And then there were, of course — ugh! — THOSE UNIFORMS! Joe DiMaggio would NEVER climb into one of those!

  Well, Joe fooled everybody with a nice neat bunt along the third-base line. He accepted Finley’s offer and, instead of climbing into the kind of uniform you can put a carnation in every day, he put on Finley’s circus suit and started to teach kids how to bat. Joe resigned as saint. And, if Simon and Garfunkel really want to find him, they might try Anaheim Stadium today or the opening of the World Series regional roundups next season. That just might be Joe carrying the lineup up to home plate if you can make him out through the glare of that suit.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation? 

  The Jim Murray Memorial Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1999 to perpetuate the Jim Murray legacy, and his love for and dedication to his extraordinary career in journalism. Since 1999, JMMF has granted 104 $5,000 scholarships to outstanding journalism students. Success of the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation’s efforts depends heavily on the contributions from generous individuals, organizations, corporations, and volunteers who align themselves with the mission and values of the JMMF.

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

——

A dozen years ago, Linda McCoy-Murray compiled a book of Jim Murray’s columns on female athletes (1961-1998). While the book is idle waiting for an interested publisher, the JMMF thinks this is an appropriate year to get the book on the shelves, i.e., Jim Murray’s 100^th birthday, 1919-2019.  

Our mission is to empower women of all ages to succeed and prosper — in and out of sports — while entertaining the reader with Jim Murray’s wit and hyperbole.  An excellent teaching tool for Women’s Studies.

Proceeds from book sales will benefit the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization providing sports journalism scholarships at universities across the country.