Pete Rose: a real corker?

Better or worse than gambling on baseball?

Pete Rose regularly had his bats corked in a side room at Olympic Stadium while playing for the Expos in 1984.
That damning allegation came from Joe Jammer, who was a groundskeeper with the Expos for 11 seasons.

“Pete Rose would have his bats corked in the visitors’ clubhouse at Olympic Stadium,” Jammer said in a phone interview from London, England, where he is now a club-playing musician. “I found out he was corking bats.

Corking bats isn’t permitted under MLB rules, which say modifying a bat with foreign substances and using it in play is illegal and subject to ejection and further punishment. A corked bat is one that has been altered and made lighter by drilling a tube into the middle or the end of the thick portion of the barrel. The wood is then replaced by a lighter substance, such as cork or rubber balls. The conventional wisdom is that the lighter weight helps increase bat speed and, as a consequence, the distance a ball is hit.

“Pete was too smart to deal with Expos equipment manager John Silverman (to cork his bats in the Expos’ clubhouse). So Bryan Greenberg, who worked in the visitors’ clubhouse, did it,” Jammer said. “He took me into a room, a door to the left, and underneath tarps there was this machine.”

Jammer recalled that he asked Greenberg: “What’s that machine for?”

Jammer said Greenberg replied: “That’s a machine for corking Pete Rose’s bats.”

When Jammer told Greenberg he wanted to take a bat with him, Greenberg wouldn’t allow him to.

“The guy (Greenberg) was saying Rose had been corking his bat for 20 years,” Jammer said. “The guy said that nobody checks him because he’s a singles hitter.”

When reached by phone Thursday in Jupiter, Fla., where he has been employed for the last 10 years by Lojo Sports Marketing, a coy Greenberg said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss any role he might have played in corking Rose’s bats.

“I really can’t answer those questions. I really can’t talk about it,” Greenberg said.

When Greenberg was told that two people this reporter talked with said he corked Rose’s bats, he replied, “They can say whatever they want.”​

Pete Rose alleged to have used a corked bat while playing for Expos | Montreal Gazette

For 20 years? Holy shit, if true.

 

Gambling, adultery, cheating, etc etc. The only thing Pete Rose ever successfully gave up was the Hall of Fame.

 

It’s all hearsay unless an authenticated bat turns up with a bottle of Pinot Noir inside it.

 

Worse than all the above.

 

For five years, Pete Rose lived with Tommy Gioiosa, who later went to prison for dealing steroids.

One of the main purposes for steroids is to improve recovery time for aging athletes.

 

Hairy. Eww.

 

Pete Rose really is an irredeemable piece of crap. I really wouldn't put anything past him.

 

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Not as bad - I'd give it a 30-day suspension without pay for a first offense, a full year for a second, and a lifetime ban for a third, though I assume this would have to be negotiated with the union. Cheating in an effort to win should be punished strongly enough to discourage it, but gambling calls into question whether players are trying to win, which is even more serious.

 

Give his total hits record an asterisk. That would really piss him off.

 

Best thing that ever happened to Pete Rose was being banned from the Hall. Now we talk about him every month instead of once a year.

 

Ding ding. Mike Schmidt was 10 times the player Rose was, and gets talked about 1/10th as much.

 

Fuck Mike Schmidt. He kept Santo out of the Hall until after his death.