by Tim Wendel
Although Harper spent the game becoming part punching bag, part hockey goalie, part hit-and-run victim, he later said he was never really hurt on any of the key plays in Game Four. “Maybe it’s the adrenaline of playing in a game like this,” he said. “But I never saw stars. Not on any of them.”
Ray Fosse, Rick Dempsey, Buster Posey, and Buck Martinez are a few of the catchers who have been seriously injured in collisions at home plate over the years. In Martinez’s case he suffered a broken ankle and somehow hung in there long enough to make not just one but two putouts. It happened on July 9, 1985, with the Toronto Blue Jays visiting Seattle. With the Mariners’ Phil Bradley on second base, Gorman Thomas singled to right field. In a violent collision at home, Bradley was out as he ran over Martinez, breaking the catcher’s ankle.
As the play continued, Thomas rambled for third base. Despite being unable to stand up, as the broken ankle was incapable of bearing any weight, Martinez attempted to throw Thomas out. For his trouble he saw his errant throw sail into left field, where Blue Jays outfielder George Bell retrieved it. Now, a real teammate would have perhaps hung on to the ball or thrown it to somebody else. But with Thomas now heading for the plate, Bell decided to peg it home. Thanks for nothing, right? Martinez somehow caught the ball while still sitting down, and finally somebody showed some heart or simple common sense as Thomas didn’t slide into his friend. (He and Martinez had been teammates in Milwaukee.)
That meant the Blue Jays catcher could tag his old buddy for the final out of the inning—to boos from some in the crowd—and then be removed from the field on a stretcher. Martinez went on to be the team’s broadcaster and, for a brief time, the Blue Jays’ manager. He also wrote a couple of books, including Worst to First, about Toronto capturing its first division title in 1985.
“Sometimes playing catcher means putting yourself out there,” he said. “Then you’re praying something terrible doesn’t happen.”
In Game Four of the 1991 Series Harper’s teammates were left to marvel at their catcher’s courage and lousy luck. “He’s going to be sore tomorrow,” Kirby Puckett said. “I guarantee you.”
“We hit straight on,” Harper said of his first collision with Smith. “We pretty much hit shoulder to shoulder. He got me pretty good.”
Somehow the Twins’ catcher held on to the ball—jumping to his feet and gripping it in his bare hand.
“How did I hang on to the ball?” Harper later said. “I still don’t really know. It’s being in the moment, I guess.”
Tim McCarver, a former big-league catcher, told his television audience, “That was as about a tough a collision as you’ll see in a baseball game.”
On the play Pendleton moved to third base, and with Ron Gant coming to the plate, the Twins had no choice but to bring their infield in, trying again to cut off the go-ahead run. When Gant walked, the Braves had two men on with one out—a situation that put Harper back in the spotlight again.
Morris bounced an 0–1 pitch to David Justice and Pendleton headed for home, looking to score. In hindsight the ball didn’t bounce far enough from the plate for Pendleton to take this kind of chance. Harper scrambled after the ball, and with Pendleton coming down the line, he dove to the opposite side of home plate, tagging out the Braves’ base runner. Knowing he had made a mistake, Pendleton walked to the Braves’ dugout, muttering to himself.
Harper, a guy who several ballclubs deemed didn’t catch all that well, had made a pair of defensive gems in the same inning. Drafted by the Angels in 1977, Harper performed exceptionally in the minor leagues, hitting .293 at Quad Cities and .315 in El Paso. Inexplicably, after he hit .350 with 122 RBI at Salt Lake City, the Angels traded him to Pittsburgh, which already had established catchers in Tony Peña and Steve Nicosia. With no room on the roster, Harper tried unsuccessfully to play first base and the outfield. When that didn’t work out, Harper began a magical mystery tour of the majors, seeking a job. By the time he reached Minnesota, Harper was a bona fide journeyman after failing to catch on with St. Louis, Detroit, and Oakland. “He lost a lot of his career to other people’s stupidity,” statistician Bill James later wrote. “He was slow, didn’t have real power, didn’t walk and didn’t throw well, but he could hit .300 in his sleep.”
Growing up in southern California, Harper had also played football in high school, and he remembered being tackled “a lot”—nothing on the gridiron compared to the pounding he would take in Game Four, though.
They say playing catcher gives one “God’s view” of the game of baseball. Everything plays out in front of you, and nobody is more involved in the action. Being front and center can come with a price. Not only are there the balls in the dirt, bouncing off all parts of your body, a catcher also needs to become part shrink, part confidant in calling the pitches for a staff that invariably comes with individuals of various temperaments and personalities. Then, to top it all off, you’re a target. A guy who’s supposed to stand in there no matter what, even if the other guy, the base runner who just barreled into you, will often be the one the crowd cheers after the play at the plate.
“A catcher must want to catch,” Hall of Famer Bill Dickey once said. “He must make up his mind that it isn’t the terrible job it is painted, and that he isn’t going to say every day, ‘Why, oh why with so many other positions in baseball did I take up this one?’”
Harper had long ago made his pact with this devil. He didn’t care about the price of playing behind the plate as long as he could win a place on a major-league roster. “By the time I got to the Twins I was satisfied if I could just be a backup catcher,” he said. “I had almost given up being an everyday player. So to have a chance to catch, to be in the everyday lineup in the World Series, I knew how precious that was by that point in my career.”
Other players acknowledge, perhaps begrudgingly, what a catcher goes through on a daily basis. “I knew that Brian was strong because I played with him in St. Louis,” Lonnie Smith said. “I found how strong he was that night, in that game.”
But there are always a few who will take advantage of the situation, twist the meaning of old school and hard ball to their own advantage. In part that’s why some old-timers don’t think much of Pete Rose. In the 1970 All-Star Game, in what many consider an exhibition, or a “friendly,” to use soccer terminology, the Reds’ star plowed into catcher Ray Fosse in a play similar to the Smith-Harper collision. The media hailed Rose for scoring the game’s deciding run. Fosse, who played for the in-state rival Cleveland Indians, was never the same player after fracturing his shoulder. “I knew I was hurt, but didn’t know to what extent,” Fosse said decades later. “I don’t care if someone is a hundred and fifty pounds or three hundred pounds—if they are coming full blast at you while you are standing still and they hit you, you are going to feel it. There was no fake about it.”
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A few seasons after I joined Baseball Weekly I wrote that it was time to allow Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Although Rose had gambled on baseball, we should let bygones be bygones. After all, he had just served five months in prison for income tax evasion in January 1991. Rose had suffered enough, I wrote. In the days after that column I heard from several Hall of Famers. Pretty much they told me I was dead wrong and didn’t know what I was talking about. Several urged me to have an audience with John Dowd, the one who had investigated Rose’s activities for Major League Baseball.
Back then Dowd’s office window overlooked New Hampshire Avenue, just off Dupont Circle in a high-rent section of Washington, DC. The man who busted Rose was waiting for me that morning. Moments after shaking hands he handed me a 225-page report—the boiled-down version of the Rose investigation.
“The actual report is up here,” he said, pointing to the top shelf of his bookcase. “What you have there is the summary. I must have sent out at least five thousand copies of this over the years, trying to set people stra
ight.”
Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, the mill city that produced boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler, Dowd brought a similar combative style to the courtroom. “It’s all crap, and crap goes nowhere” was how he once characterized a rival’s case against a recent client. To Dowd, law was a full-contact game. Although such an approach didn’t make many friends, his peers did admire how much evidence he could assemble effectively in a hurry.
Early in 1989 Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and his number-two man, Fay Vincent, met at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington. For months it had been rumored that Rose was deeply involved with gamblers in the Midwest and New York City. Rose had already appeared before Peter Ueberroth, the previous commissioner, to discuss such accusations and whispers. In that meeting Rose flatly denied that he had bet on baseball or that he had any problems at all with any bookies. Ueberroth may have doubted Rose’s claims of innocence, but with only months left in his tenure the ongoing commissioner didn’t appear eager for a full-scale investigation. That left it to Giamatti, the former president of Yale University and a distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature, to pick up the pieces and decide what to do about Peter Edward Rose.
At the Hay-Adams Giamatti asked Vincent whether he knew somebody who could get to the bottom of this Rose mess and do it in a hurry. Vincent suggested Dowd.
The two of them had first met during a trial years earlier in Richmond. While initially put off by Dowd’s take-no-prisoners approach, Vincent came away convinced that Dowd would do anything and everything to ferret out the truth. From the Hay-Adams Giamatti phoned Dowd at his home in suburban Virginia. The next morning, backed up by a dozen other investigators, including Kevin Hallinan, Major League Baseball’s director of security, Dowd was on his way to Cincinnati to begin the Rose inquiry.
Dowd grew up a big baseball fan. He, like Giamatti, followed the Boston Red Sox as a boy. Even though Dowd knew Rose only from afar, he liked what he saw. “The impression in my mind was a guy who didn’t have natural ability but was Charlie Hustle,” Dowd recalled. “I admire people like that. There are people a lot smarter than me out there, but I can outwork anybody.”
And once his plane landed in Cincinnati, that’s what Dowd proceeded to do: outhustle the Hit King. Within weeks Dowd and his investigative team had assembled an impressive stack of circumstantial evidence. Dowd participated in every interview. Key witnesses, such as Paul Janszen and Ronald Peters, were interviewed a minimum of three times each. Rose himself was interviewed over two days at a nuns’ convent in Dayton, Ohio. Through it all Dowd allowed Rose and his lawyers to see every bit of evidence against Charlie Hustle. “That was Bart’s doing,” Dowd said of the former commissioner. “The idea was not to grill [Rose] but to let him see all the evidence and let him have a chance to answer. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done in my life.
“I told [Rose] everything. That was the brilliance of Bart’s plan. We had no secrets. We weren’t going to play a normal detective-prosecutor kind of game. The way we did it took away any complaint of unfairness.”
Giamatti’s hope was that sooner or later the amount and detail of the evidence against him would overwhelm Rose and he would throw himself upon the commissioner’s mercy. “We wanted him to come to Jesus,” Dowd said. “[Then] we could have worked with him.”
If Rose had come forward, Dowd later said, Giamatti “would have sat him down for two to five years.” After that Rose could have returned to baseball. Today he would be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, with his bronze plaque hanging with the game’s other immortals.
Looking back upon the investigation Dowd recalled only one incident in which Rose appeared ready to acknowledge his widespread and deep gambling involvement. The two-day session at the convent took place in the nuns’ cafeteria. First, Dowd revealed to Rose that the investigation knew about the huge sums he was putting down on games, especially baseball games.
“We’re talking about two, three, four thousand a game,” said Dowd, who cut his teeth busting racketeers. That led to the $500,000 Rose owed to bookies in New York. “The wise guys in New York owned him,” Dowd added. “Essentially what you had was the manager of the [Cincinnati] Reds indebted.”
Handwriting experts and a wealth of phone records supported this assertion. Calls were made to the same numbers, to the same bookies, before home or away games involving the Reds. It was at this point that Dowd remembered Rose “turning a little green.” Still, the Hit King refused to admit at the time that he had done anything wrong or had a gambling problem. Dowd pushed Rose’s attorneys to let him talk with Rose alone.
“We would have taken a walk on the beach or in the woods, some kind of private meeting,” Dowd recalled. “I would have said to Pete, ‘We’ve got you. We’ve got you cold. Look, why don’t you just come in?’ All Pete had to do was say, ‘Help me.’”
But Rose’s representatives nixed a private meeting with Dowd or any other member of the investigative team.
In May 1989 Dowd delivered his 225-page report, with more than two thousand pages of transcribed interviews and supporting exhibits, to Giamatti. The commissioner read over it three times in one day. Except for the questionable use of a semicolon, he told Dowd it was perfect. The report cost $3 million to produce. Over roughly the same time period Rose spent nearly $2 million on attorneys. This high-priced game of legal chicken soon backed both sides into their respective corners. Rose still refused to admit that he had a problem with big-stakes gambling. Giamatti, armed with Dowd’s exhaustive report, had no choice but to play hardball with the all-time hits leader. Since 1919, when the “Black Sox” conspired to throw the World Series, betting on baseball has been the game’s worst and most feared sin, a mistake that can harm the very integrity of the game.
In August 1989 the two sides began settlement talks. It was agreed that Rose would be placed on the ineligible list. His suspension would be called permanent, but he could apply for reinstatement after one year. Rose’s attorneys were able to insert a key sentence in the five-page report. “Nothing in this agreement shall be deemed either an admission or a denial by Peter Edward Rose of the allegation that he bet on any major league baseball game,” it read.
Dowd, who was present at that final meeting, emphasized that even though Giamatti allowed such language to be in the settlement papers, the commissioner told Rose and his attorneys that, if asked, he would acknowledge that Rose had gambled on baseball. Sure enough, the first question at the news conference that followed was, “Did Rose bet on baseball?”
Giamatti began, “In the absence of a hearing and therefore in the absence of evidence to the contrary . . . ” He paused, before continuing, “I am confronted by the factual record of Mr. Dowd. On the basis of that, yes, I have concluded he bet on baseball.”
Afterward, back in Giamatti’s office, Dowd recalled the phone “ringing off the hook. Ballplayers were calling in from all over the country, telling Bart that he did the right thing.”
Eight days after that news conference at the New York Hilton, Giamatti died of a heart attack. He was succeeded by Vincent, who would be forced from the commissionership by the owners a year after the 1991 World Series—an event that set the stage for the pending labor war.
With Giamatti dead, Vincent soon to be shown the door by the owners, it was left to Dowd to give the counterpoint to Rose’s ongoing campaign to be reinstated. To this day Dowd considers the Rose situation to be a tragedy of major proportions. “He had several openings,” Dowd said. “Even when Fay became commissioner, he still could have walked in there and said, ‘I’ve got a terrible, terrible habit. By God, I’ve gambled on the Reds.’ I think baseball would have acted very positively. But every year we are treated to what I call the PR wave. He goes on radio and television, and then I go back on radio and television and pull out my old reports.”
In 1990 Rose pled guilty to two counts of filing false tax returns. He was released early the next year and performed one thousand hours of community servi
ce in the Cincinnati inner-city schools. Also in 1991, the board of directors for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, barred Rose from appearing on the Hall’s ballot. Still, he received forty-one write-in votes. Six years later Rose applied for reinstatement, but it wouldn’t be until 2002 that he admitted his gambling activities to Commissioner Bud Selig.
Since then some former ballplayers, including old teammates, decided Rose had suffered enough. “I think if you’re going to allow guys with PEDs on the ballot,” former teammate and Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan told USA Today, “then we have to allow him to be on the ballot. . . . I think they have to take a second look at Pete now that this has come out.”
In September 2013 Rose was allowed to join with the starting lineup of the Cincinnati Reds’ back-to-back champions in 1975–1976 for the unveiling of a bronze sculpture of Morgan.
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Growing up in central New York, Mark Lemke collected baseball cards, with his favorites being of Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench, and Pete Rose. For the longest time those cards appeared to be as close as the utility infielder would ever come to being in the major leagues. A twenty-seventh-round draft pick by the Atlanta Braves in 1983, Lemke spent five-plus seasons in the minor leagues. Listed generously at five-foot-ten, 167 pounds, the switch-hitting infielder was often sent down in spring training. Although such demotions grated on him, Lemke played on, even if his teams were a long way away from the parent club in Atlanta.