Too little, too late, too lame
David Steele
Saturday, January 10, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Of all the people who have been slapped in the face by Pete Rose, this week and over the past 14 years, Dennis Eckersley and Paul Molitor are at the front of the line. Molitor hinted at why it turned out that way, on the day he and Eck were voted into the Hall of Fame, a moment of glory that ended up playing Ray Fosse to the Rose story that needlessly bulldozed it.

Asked that day about Rose's too-little, too-late, too-lame mea culpa, Molitor said, "To be contrite, you first have to acknowledge that what you did was wrong, but I'm not sure that Pete has done that.''

Molitor should know about acknowledging wrongdoing and being contrite. Marijuana and cocaine nearly derailed his career before it got started. He figured it out quickly and quit, reportedly cold turkey.

Eckersley couldn't take the step to quit drinking until his family made him realize what he vaguely knew: that he had a big problem. He went into a rehab clinic, came out clean, was soon afterward traded to the A's and the rest, literally, is history.

If Rose's book, and his public comments over the years, are any indication, he believes Molitor and Eckersley to be far greater villains than he is. "If I had been an alcoholic or a drug addict, baseball would have suspended me for six weeks and paid for my rehabilitation . . . (but) baseball had no fancy rehab for gamblers like they do for drug addicts,'' he says in his book.

Forget for a moment the blatant dishonesty and insincerity of that comment. It seems that it never crossed Rose's mind, then or now, that he, Eckersley and Molitor were in, if not the same boat, pretty similar ones.

In Rose's defense, though, what's known about gambling issues is a fraction compared to what's understood about the ones at which he scoffs. "We're where alcohol research was 20 years ago,'' said Christine Reilly, executive director of the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, part of Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions.

While declining to discuss Rose personally for ethical reasons, Reilly did say Friday that with the increase in research and knowledge, the definitions, criteria and treatment for gambling problems evolve constantly. What's becoming known is something that has been known about alcohol and drug addiction for years: Gambling issues can be intertwined with any number of other psychological or personality disorders.

In Rose's case, says New York-based psychologist Richard Lust- berg, that disorder is a "narcissist personality.'' Lustberg (who did not mind speaking about Rose and who wrote at length about him a year ago on his Web site, www.psychologyofsports.com) sees Rose's shameless theft of Eckersley's and Molitor's spotlight as "endemic to his personality. The symptoms come out at times like this.''

Discussing gambling in terms of an illness is viewed as skeptically now as discussing alcohol and drugs as an illness was years ago. "With gambling,'' Reilly said, "most people thought it was just a moral issue.''

That's largely where people see Rose now. On the other hand, plenty share his view that gambling is a victimless crime, that it's trivial compared to substance abuse, and that, as he said in his book, "the punishment (for betting on baseball) didn't fit the crime.''

"That's typical -- 'I didn't kill anyone, I didn't shoot up drugs, so what, it's no big deal,' '' Lustberg said. "But that's being subjective. Objectively, he broke the law, and when you break the law, you get punished . . . People like Pete Rose tend to want to impose their own penalty; he has become the jury, the judge, the prosecutor, all of it.''

Even if Rose isn't necessarily an addict, it's safe to say he has a problem. That problem has led to this one: He's shut out of something that means more to him than anything in life. And he's been unable to do what he needs to do to make things right with baseball; instead, he's pretty much done the opposite. Whether he's stubborn, sick or somewhere in between, the consequences for him are the same.

Eckersley and Molitor figured out, at differing stages of their careers, that their problems could cost them something dear to them, their baseball lives. They managed to fix those problems, whether by their strength or someone else's or some other factor. Tuesday's vote was the payoff, regardless of how Rose eclipsed the moment.

If Rose figures this out, the apologies might become sincere, the growing distrust by the public and baseball might diminish -- and he might get where he desperately wants to be.

Eckersley and Molitor are there already. In so many ways besides the 4, 256 obvious ones, they deserve to be there more than Rose does.