Pete Rose has been banned from baseball since it was discovered that he gambled on games while he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, but insisted that he never bet on games during his playing career.
However, according to Outside The Lines, they have documents proving that Rose did in fact bet on games while he was a player-manager for the Reds in 1986:
The documents are copies of pages from a notebook seized from the home of former Rose associate Michael Bertolini during a raid by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in October 1989, nearly two months after Rose was declared permanently ineligible by Major League Baseball. Their authenticity has been verified by two people who took part in the raid, which was part of a mail fraud investigation and unrelated to gambling. For 26 years, the notebook has remained under court-ordered seal and is currently stored in the National Archives' New York office, where officials have declined requests to release it publicly.
"This does it. This closes the door," said John Dowd, the former federal prosecutor who led MLB's investigation. "We knew that [Bertolini] recorded the bets, and that he bet himself, but we never had his records. We tried to get them. He refused to give them to us. This is the final piece of the puzzle on a New York betting operation with organized crime. And, of course, [Rose] betting while he was a player."
The documents have no evidence that Rose, bet against his team in 1986 or threw any games, but they do provide a snapshot of how extensive Rose's betting life was:
• In the time covered in the notebook, from March through July, Rose bet on at least one MLB team on 30 different days. It's impossible to count the exact number of times he bet on baseball games because not every day's entries are legible.
• But on 21 of the days it's clear he bet on baseball, he gambled on the Reds, including on games in which he played.
• Most bets, regardless of sport, were about $2,000. The largest single bet was $5,500 on the Boston Celtics, a bet he lost.
• Rose bet heavily on college and professional basketball, losing $15,400 on one day in March. That came during his worst week of the four-month span, when he lost $25,500.
"Bertolini nails down the connection to organized crime on Long Island and New York. And that is a very powerful problem," Dowd said. "[Ohio bookie] Ron Peters is a golf pro, so he's got other occupations. But the boys in New York are about breaking arms and knees. The implications for baseball are terrible. [The mob] had a mortgage on Pete while he was a player and manager."
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