By Tom Siebert
During the months-long coronavirus pandemic, sports-starved area residents were among the millions of Americans who satisfied their cravings by tuning into “The Last Dance,” the ten-part ESPN documentary on the Chicago Bulls’ run to their sixth NBA championship during the 1997-98 season.
But even now with COVID-19-delayed professional basketball and hockey playoffs underway, and a truncated baseball season in full swing, some local legal minds recently tackled one of the most controversial debates in sports history.
Several community leaders, who also happen to be passionate major-league baseball fans, staged a mock trial to determine if MLB’s all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, should be inducted into the Hall of Fame, despite his lifetime ban from the game for gambling as manager of the Cincinnati Reds.
The three-act play was held in July at the historic Naper Settlement and a film of the proceedings was premiered last night at the Aurora Tap House.
Many of the local stars in “The Trial of Pete Rose” were on hand at the mostly social-distanced tavern, including former Naperville City Council member David Wentz, a lawyer in real life who opened the “trial” with one of the longest sentences since the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”
“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I represent every baseball fan across the nation to express the frustration that for the past thirty years, one of the greatest players to ever play the game has thus far been denied the opportunity to redeem himself and take his place back in the game as one of the greatest ambassadors of our national pastime.”
Current council member Kevin Coyne, also an attorney and representing major league baseball, hit back: “Mr. Wentz paints a unique picture in order to revise history. I stand before you today to defend the memory and legacy and future of our nation’s pastime.”
Presiding over the proceedings was DuPage County Judge James F. McCluskey, while former county board chairperson Janice Anderson was the forewoman of the six-member jury.
She explained that the verdict had to be unanimous and that was why the baseball great, who led the Reds to two winning World Series in 1975 and 1976, and also won one MLB championship with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980, was a loser in this local court of public opinion.
“We all believed in redemption but we also felt that there should be consequences for people’s actions,” she said. “We had to ask what would it mean for future generations if we said that cheating was okay.”
The hits king was portrayed by Naperville City Council member John Krummen, while Dave Sinker, an alumnus of Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe and owner of Aurora’s Comedy Shrine, played the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, who died eight days after banishing Rose from the game on Aug. 24, 1989.
Mr. Rose, also known as “Charlie Hustle” and admired during his 24-year career by fans, fellow players and the press, holds the lifetime record for most hits, 4,265, in addition to several other MLB records.
For fifteen years, he denied gambling from 1985-86, and specifically on his Reds in 1987. But the legend of the baseball diamond publicly admitted to most of the wagering allegations in 2004.
The local event was produced by Vizo Arts of Aurora and Fox River Country TV, and promoted awareness of the Salvation Army.
The talented team is planning to stage a production based on the so-called Black Sox Scandal, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were banned from baseball for allegedly accepting gambling money prior to playing in the 1919 World Series, which the team lost, ironically, to Cincinnati.
The scandal prompted then-baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis to implement Rule 21, stating, “Any player, umpire, or club, or league official, or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.”
The players who put on “The Trial of Pete Rose” are betting their next at-bat will be another hit.
