"THE RULES WERE YOU GUYS WEREN'T GONNA FACT CHECK!" - 10.2.24

forty eight years ago. Ford, of course never said that it was chevy Chase portraying Ford on Saturday Night Live on September eighteenth, nineteen seventy six. But when JD. Vance did that last night, it was my understanding that there would be no fact checking. That wasn't chevy Chase, that wasn't bowhen Yang or anybody else portraying Vance. It was Vance himself. And it's how he managed to lose a debate in which Tim Walls came out of the gate so nervous that for a while I was having a

little first debate. PTSD. Vance also lost this debate because when asked about whether he would be the final voice in the room approving an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran, the first question of the debate, the most topical question of the debate, he somehow managed to say, never mind the Middle East. I'll get to that in a moment. But first, my name is James D. Bowman. No, I'm Jimmy Hamill, No, I'm J. D. Bantz. Well, whoever the hell I am. I'm here to sell you some Amway products.

was wearing eyeliner again. And my god, it is polite to address by name the person asking you a question, but Dvance did it so often and so phonally that if you had Vance saying well Nora or yes Margaret on your drinking bingo card, you are still unconscious. For the first ten fifteen minutes the debate was a time or maybe Vance was ahead. This was largely because for that span it was entirely not a vice presidential debate. It was a second presidential debate, but by proxy. Don't

get me wrong, Walls managed to do it too. He took a dozen bites out of Trump. He pivoted on the Iran question to how many Trump advisors insist Trump should never be let near a crisis like this one Again, he threw Vance's anti Trump quote against him. He said, a nearly eighty year old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment. He quoted Trump's failure in Iran. He quoted Trump's dismissal of injuries to US servicemen in Iran as headaches, a comment

that Trump made just hours earlier. Walls referenced Trump and tweets referenced how climate change will give you more beachfront property according to Trump. He scored by noting the bribes Trump took from oil executives at Mari Lago, he scored with Mexico paying for the wall, and especially with Trump sinking the bipartisan border deal. Walls reminded the audience that Vance and Trump had said, scientists don't know what they're

talking about, Economists don't know what they're talking about. Authorities don't know what they're talking about. And Vance took debate and insisted Trump believes in common sense, not experts. The problem is that as smooth as Walls was, what he was trying to defend ultimately was still Trump, and it was putting lipstick on it. It was so much Vance defending Trump, so much Vance attacking Harris. It was exhausting.

At one point, as Vance literally referred to our borders are kamala Harris, he pointed at Tim Walls, I hate to tell you, Senator, that's not Kamala Harris. But the longer that debate went on and the more topics were addressed and in greater depth, the more Walls warmed to the process, and I think the more the audience warmed to him when it stopped being a proxy fight and started being about Vance and Walls. Vance didn't have anybody

to talk about anymore. Vance complained about fact checking, Walls quoted the Bible about what we do for the least among us, and then he offered my pro tip for the day, My pro tip for the day. As well as those things resonated. Walls did miss several opportunities to bury Vance on the subject of Springfield, Ohio, including a moment when Vance insisted millions of illegal immigrants were taking

over homes in Springfield, Ohio. Instead, he laid Vance skate on that, just as certainly Walls danced and effectively, I might add around the conflict between where he was and where he has said or implied he was during the Tiedenman Square uprising in China in nineteen eighty nine. Vance could have crushed him then. Instead, for some reason, he

changed topics to something he had memorized. What Vance and the Republicans will say was their victory in this debate, and it will resonate because it's not entirely untrue, is that Vance's primary job was to sane wash Trump for people who are not paying attention or who are only getting the sanitized versions of Trump. In the New York times, Vance seemed perhaps wrong, but definitely reasonable. Frankly, Vance did not seem likely to stab you, only to pick your pocket.

Noting that CBS News largely steered out of its ethical skid, and while this was not the best of the debates, it was twice as good as CNN's disaster. There is one last point to both of their credits. Unlike Trump in every debate he's ever done, they got two issues, they got two guns, They got to January sixth, Vance

was wrong about all these things. But when Vance said the only thing that Trump did wrong was that the Russians bought five hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads promoting Trump, walls picking his jaw off the floor, answered January sixth was not Facebook ads, and he managed to add of Mike Pence's refusal to overthrow the election on Trump's behalf. That's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage.

of the debate, quote, I have high expectations about J. D. Waltz. Well, I was still trying to figure out if she meant JD. Vance or Tim Walls or an entirely different other person whose last name is Waltz, like in the last Waltz. Kelly and Cohn Job came right back and said, quote, the mainstream media and other Democrats did a really stupid thing with J. D. Waltz. They tried to drown him

out in the first days after Trump picked him. So there you have it, your twenty twenty four Republican ticket per Kelly and Conway, Trump and J.

beyond the original guard rails also failed. Back to the subject of fact checking, This was yesterday morning from Brian Stelter, one of the last two or three media news critics left alive. As the industry shrinks like a collapsing star. He and the others are supposed to be calling out cowardice in journalism. Instead, he turned the shrug emoji into written form, and he needed sixty four words to do it.

Quoting facts unchecked. CBS News executives are signaling that Nora O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan will not fact check flagrantly false claims made on stage. Well, that's a filthy, flagrant falsehood. The moderators will give the candidates the opportunity to fact check each other in real time. CBS Senior Vice president Claudia Milne told The New York Times, repeating what I wrote last month. Moderators are damned if they fact check,

and damned if they don't. No, they aren't. No, they aren't doing your job as a journalist describing reality to your readers or viewers or newsletter recipients telling the truth, calling a lie a lie up up and down down, and then being threatened or abused for doing it. That is not the same as serving as nothing more than the debate timekeeper and the person who says we'll be right back, and as a result, jeopardizing freedom of the press and democracy itself. That is not damned if you do,

and damned if you don't. It's just plain old damned. Meanwhile, back at the Looney Ranch, oh nothing, it's just Trump, who's actually responsible by commission and omission for the deaths of more than one million Americans because it is literally insane mishandling of COVID. It's just Trump accusing the vice president of murder and misidentifying the victim and conflating the victim and the perpetrator.

he can do to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy. Please learn it. By the beginning of the new week, Trump continued yesterday to pretend he did something to alleviate post Helene distress in the South. There were actually stories reading he was first to visit the damage in person, and to note that he launched a gofund me that had raised more than one million dollars.

Left out of each of these stories, though, the reality that he claims to be a multi billionaire. He rages when contradicted on this point, and he never stops boasting about how much money he has, and instead of going to George Jordan, North Carolina or anywhere else and giving away just some of his own money. He launched a go fund me to give away other people's money and take credit for it. Oh and guess what the gofund me.

He didn't donate to it either. As to the origin of some of Trump's billions, hundreds of millions, some millions, surprising news from Senate Democrats, they did something about the

egypt bribe scandal. The majority on the Judiciary Committee has now written to the watchdog the DOJ, the Inspector General, asking him to investigate whether Trump appointees quote interfered with and ultimately blocked the criminal probe into the findings of our intelligence agencies that the Egyptian government gave or sought to give Trump ten million dollars to boost his White House campaign eight years ago. This is good, boys, but

you know you can also hold hearings. And one more Trump note, A group called the Crooked and Obscene Project has unveiled a giant marionette version of Dementia J. Trump. It will begin its tour of the United States on Apex Harbor Lane in Las Vegas. It is there right now, darkening the sky. They say he's naked, made out of rebar covered with foam and weighs approximately six thousand pounds eight that's a marionette. Based on that description, that sounds

like him. And because I want you to be able to enjoy my unique, weird, unearthly position on the fringes of this next story as much frankly as I am, CNN reports. The latest in the RFK Junior Olivia Newsy story is she has sued her former fiance, Ryan Lizza of Politico, and in the filing, she says that the source of the leaks that got her suspended by New York Magazine for an undisclosed personal relationship with the pervioust

of the Kennedys was Ryan of Politico. CNN quotes Livy in the suit filed this week as claiming that Liza quote explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career and reputation, a threat he has since carried out. CNN flesh this out a bit,

you should excuse the expression. Quoting its report, Newsy said she believes Liza began his alleged harassment at the beginning of July as a way to black mail her back into a relationship with him and punish her when she wouldn't acquiesce. She said. By the next month, Liza had stolen a personal electronic device from her was hacking her devices,

then anonymously shopping information about her to the media. Some of the information may have been doctored to hurt her more, Newsy alleged, and she believes Liza impersonated an anonymous campaign operative to give a political campaign information that would hurt her further. According to the court recads, Newsy was granted a temporary no contact order against Liza. The judge also signed off CNN reports on her request to have police accompany her when she attempts to get her possessions back

from Liza. The couple had lived together within the last year. The court filing said, they are going to be cops. Did you say, I'm sorry, I have to go and I have to run to make sure I've got enough popcorn for the rest of this I will add only this detail to that headline, and the headline would be Newsy Doozy. Court gets up in Liza's Bizza over rfk's Riz.

When Olivia and I lived together in New York and she still worked for The Daily Beast, she frequently trapped to DC on stories, and whenever she came back, she'd give me a big hug and say she was sorry for taking me for granted, because there was this creepy guy who stalked her every time she went to Washington. Do you know him? She'd ask? His name is Ryan? Liza shrug emoji? Also of interest here, Well, nothing, nothing

compared to that obviously. Still, Pete Rose died Monday. People seem to think he's not in the Baseball Hall of Fame because he gambled on baseball while a player and while a manager, and while a player manager. Actually, they were just about to get beyond that, what with all

the betting in baseball now seven years ago. They were about to let him in when that whole other thing came up, the whole other thing everybody has forgotten about, and almost no but he has mentioned since Pete Rose died the other thing where he admitted in the court documents that in the seventies, when he was married to his first wife, he also had a mistress and the mistress was fifteen years old. That's next. This is countdown.

in Baseball's Hall of Fame. You may recall in nineteen eighty nine he'd been banned from baseball, and in twenty seventeen Pete Rose sued the investigator whose work led up to that banishment, and in discovery up popped this sworn deposition from a woman who, to quote the Hollywood Reporter, alleges that Rose had a relationship with her for several years, beginning before she turned sixteen. Rose acknowledged in court documents that he had sex with the woman, but thought she

was sixteen at the time. When you admit to sex with a child, and your defense was, I thought she was sixteen. You'd done That's why he's not in the Hall of Fame and will never be in the Hall of fame. All this in depth in things I promised not to tell coming up first, there are still more new idiots to talk about. A rollicking addition of the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects better some meon's who constitute today's worst persons in

the world. And this is why Tony Kornheiser, formerly of The Washington Post, is the announcer today the bronze worse the WNBA Players Association Terry Carmichael Jackson President. One player poked another player in the eye during a game. A reporter from USA Today asked the poker politely and specifically if it was deliberate or an accident. The player, to her credit, did not get angry, did not go all snark, but said hurting another player would never be part of

her game. She was just reaching for the ball. The player and the reporter were both pros about it. There were no angry words, there were no complaints. But the injured player who got the finger in the eye was the rookie who put the WNBA on the map this year.

Caitlin Clark, and the reporter was Christine Brennan, a fierce advocate for women's sports, such a veteran that when she joined The Washington Post alongside Tony Kornheiser, she had to respond not just accusations, but assumptions that she had gotten the job because she was sleeping with a Washington TV sportscaster and for reasons yet to be explained. The WNBA Players Association decided to respond to the extreme professionalism of Chris Brennan and the player who is such a pro

I'm leaving her name out of this. Responded to this by slandering Christine Brennan, quoting a message on behalf of the one hundred and forty four that would be the players in the union to unprofessional members of the media like Christine Brennan, you are not fooling anyone. That so called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic,

and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind your tenure instead of demonstrating the cornerstones of journalism, ethic like integrity, objectivity, and a fundamental commitment to truth. You have chosen to be indecent and downright insincere. You have abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued

to you. This is the statement of the Players Union, and you certainly are not entitled to any interviews with the members of this union or any other athlete in sport. Those credentials mean that you can ask anything, but they also mean that you know the difference between what you should and should not. We see you. Our relationship with the media is a delicate one, and we will continue to strengthen because the media is essential in growing the game. No one knows that better than we do. But the

players are entitled to better. They are entitled to professionalism. We call on USA Today Network to review its principles of ethical conduct for newsrooms and address what we believe is a violation of several core principles, including seeking and reporting the truth. USA Today's Sports should explain why a reporter with Klee bias and ulterior motives was assigned to cover the league. We also urged the league to review its policies and take measures to prevent such issues protecting

the integrity of the game at its players. Terry Carmichael Jackson, Executive Director WNBPA, Yes, congratulations, we may have reached actual equality in sports where the women athletes and their organizations can be as big a set of jerks and idiots

and morons as male athletes. Perhaps we've even gone past equality to women being in the lead in these areas because they just trashed a woman who a mere thirty years ago was being thrown out of sports locker rooms because she was a woman, a woman who is one of the people, without whom the only professional opportunities for American women basketball stars in this country. The only opportunities would not be in this country. They would be in

Russia still, or Europe or the Canary Islands. The WNBA and its Players Association must immediately apologize to Christine Brennan and WNBAPA President Terry Carmichael Jackson must resign or be fired. She just made an asshole out of herself and every one of her players. She's just set back her sport and the gains it has made in the last few years. If this is how the WNBPA is going to treat

its most loyal most honored reporters. Frankly, all news organizations should boycott the WNBA, not even report the goddamn scores, and networks like ESPN that Carrie WNBA games should refuse

to do so until the apology is made. The WNBA is, by doing a press release like this, fabricating an environment unsafe for media with exactly the same kind of deliberate targeting of reporters done by the likes of Donald fing Trump, and its history tells us that when a player's union attacks the media, its next target will be the fans it doesn't like. In other words, you and I are next.

Chris Brennan might be on the Mount Rushmore of the builders of women's sports in this country, Terry Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the WNBPA, is a bully and a lawyer the runner up Leon, as Trump has called him. I'd love to know what's wrong with Elon Musk based on those profiles. My guest is he stoned. Look, he's a fascist, he's a nut job, he's unstable, and as somebody noted, all the spy movies of the sixties revolve around a crazy billionaire who has the rockets and all

the communications systems and decides to take over the world. No, I expect you to die. Mister bond Elmo's latest problem is though, as he tries to take over the world, he's making an extraordinary number of really stupid mistakes. He has now posted one of these, right winger, I'm recording this in my car idiot videos, and he wrote with it, as this video describes, Trump supports women's rights far more

than Kabala. The video shows a young woman with dead eyes and badly dyed hair who rambles on about how Kamala Harris has already been president? Is that true? Did I miss something? Am I coming out of a coma? Was she president already? She wasn't okay? And that Trump quote was already president? How many rights did you lose? I don't mean to tell you your business, ladies, not after that opening part of this segment, but a lot of them. Actually,

a lot of rights have already been lost. The narrator is clearly unaware of the repeal of Roe v. Wade or the Trump planned to institute abortion bands wherever he can and punish the states where he can't. Leon put this out without really listening to it. Didn't he because Zempics but the worst our winner, Rob Schneider, idiot formerly on Saturday Night Live, and apparently he was funny during the audition. The basketball great to Kembe Mutumbo has died

after a long and terrible fight against brain cancer. And Rob Schneider, who has gone over there to the fascist Nicket night world where they'll all pretend your career isn't over provided you support Trump, decided he had to say something about it. Schneider posted a video of the late beloved hoopstar mister Matumbo doing a video from Christmas of twenty twenty one, urging people to get the COVID shot so they could all get together, and he wrote above

it rest in peace. I'm sure this is just another coincidence, but I took a pass on the JAB and I'm not going to let anyone I know and who will listen get it either. Well, there's this much to say about Rob Schneider. The one advantage he has is he never has to face the prospect of what Kembe Mtumbo had to face in brain cancer. Rob as they say,

no pain, no gain, but no brain, no pain. Schneider two days worst person in the Land to the number one story on the countdown, and as promised yesterday, some thoughts on the passing of Pete Rose, and I wanted to take extra time to think about it because my thoughts about Pete Rose are all over the map, and through the history of my life, they are even further

all over the map. For twenty years I campaigned against Pete Rose being in Baseball's Hall of Fame, and just after I had an epiphany that said, no, I think he should be in. Just after that came the scandal that proved that he had had an ongoing sexual relationship with an underage girl, and the Hall of Fame question

became academic. I will say that this issue of Pete Rose and gambling, and Pete Rose and the all time hit record in baseball, the man who made more base hits than anybody else, the man who round out every ground ball and every flyball and every walk. The Pete Rose story really is summarized by the first thought I had when the news was announced Monday evening that he had died sometime during the day Monday. My thought was, what did he have a bet down on that Mets

Braves game and it killed him? I knew Pete Rose enough to know that he would have appreciated that joke. He would not have appreciated the fact that he had died without being put into the Baseball Hall of Fame, because he said many times that he thought they were waiting for him to die before they would put him in. I don't know if he ever will go in. That issue of the underage well, what it was child rape will never go away. But that's why he's not in

the Hall of Fame. I believe everything was turning for Pete Rose twy ten to twenty fifteen. He had gotten back into baseball. He was a commentator on Fox Sports, and particularly given the nature of Fox Sports and the nature of the decline in baseball commentary, especially on the national level, he was doing very well. And then came the story in twenty seventeen, and he had not been

heard from since. It's ironic that baseball and gambling are now in bed together so frequently, so visibly, so positively, that what Pete Rose did while he managed and before that played for the Cincinnati Reds is seen almost as a series of misdemeanors. It's a little bit more than that. Pete Rose and let me explain this as briefly and

not intricately as possible. Pete Rose gambled on some Cincinnati Reds baseball games while he was the manager of the team and in fact player and manager of the team, but he did not gamble on other Cincinnati Reds games. He was the first one to point out, even after all of the dirt about the gambling came out, that he never bet against his own team. That's the cardinal sin in sports. If you bet against your own team, why then you may have gone out there and tried

to lose, in which case you are done. That's the whole premise of the nineteen nineteen World Series and the eight great players led by Shuelas Joe Jackson, who were never permitted to play again once their confessions and their trial ended the year after the nineteen nineteen World Series. Did That's not what Pete Rose was accused of, But in a way he did the passive aggressive version of that.

Because if you are the manager of a baseball team and you are placing bat that's in thousands of dollars in amounts on some of the games. What about the games you chose not to bet on? Did you manage them differently, And after all, it is the manager who decides which pitcher is starting the game, which pitcher is coming in in the sixth inning, the game is five

to two, your team is losing. Are you using your best relief pitcher in the seventh inning because you have a bet on the game, or are you saving him till tomorrow when you will have a bet on the game. That was the crux for me of why I could never support Pete Rose going into Baseball's Hall of Fame.

As much as my experience with him personally was similar to what most people's was, he was very charming, he was very likable, and certainly you could talk about the nuances, subtleties and history of the game with Pete Rose as you could with few other players. He didn't just know everybody from his own era. He knew everybody who'd ever played Major League baseball, at least seemingly. He knew the details of the life of Ty Cobb, the man who

he supplanted as the all time leader in hits. He knew about nineteenth century players, he knew about the original Cincinnati Red Stockings of eighteen sixty nine, and he was always fascinating and particularly if you were willing to pay him. He was always good for an anecdote and autograph a piece of memorabilia, which I'll circle back to in a moment, because when I was a teenager, I knew something was wrong with Pete Rose because of that issue of memorabilia.

The other reason my mind changed on whether or not Rose should go to the Hall of Fame was, of course, the advent of the ped scandal, the performance enhancing drugs for steroids, and then the next wave of human growth hormone, and then what I presume has been going on behind the surface in baseball for a while, whatever came next. Unfortunately, those fans who, after too long painful no these guys are clean scandals has serious doubts that all these guys are clean. How can we ever be sure?

I'm standing outside the Angels spring training facility, in Palm Springs, California, doing a live shot for my television station in Los Angeles from the parking lot of the library across the street, and there's the sports illustrated with his picture on it. The entirety of that year, from March of nineteen eighty nine through August twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine was what's

the latest in the Pete Rose scan. Finally, in August it seemed to have stalled, although there was clear evidence that they were trying to get rid of Pete Rose, and that he might be suspended or banished or fired as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, or something else would happen, or he would be indicted for tax evasion or a thousand rumors swirled. Finally, I had a couple of weeks of vacation coming to me, and I went back to

New York. I was to leave for Los Angeles and return to my job, I believe on a Friday morning, Thursday afternoon, the story broke that Pete Rose was going to be suspended or banished by the Commissioner of Baseball,

Bart Jimatti, actor Paul Jamatti's father. The next day, well, my flight was leaving the next day, so I postponed that and I went to that news conference, and I have never seen anything quite like the performance of Commissioner Jamatti, who was a baseball purist and believed in justice, and believed in fair play, and believed more than those things, he believed in baseball, and he was justice in baseball.

And he managed to end Pete Rose's baseball career, whether Pete Rose knew that's what he was signing in the document that he signed or not. And I was in the crowd by sheer happenstance, sharing a crew with a reporter from Channel two in New York, using Channel two in New York's equipment for my report for Channel two in Los Angeles, and I remember thinking as I watched Bart Jimmatti in front of us, taking no questions but making a speech. And he was the former president of Yale.

He could make a hell of a speech. And you know what his son can do, Bart Jimotti standing there, and I remember saying to the cameraman from the New York station, I have never heard or seen anybody more alive than the Commissioner of Baseball at this moment. He died one week later on vacation a chainsmoker, and he collapsed of a heart attack. One week later, one Friday, Pete Rose is being banned, and the end of that saga, as Jamati said that day, the story of mister Rose

is now over. Then a week later, Jamati's life was extraordinary juxtaposition, very very sobering thing for a thirty year old sportscaster to contemplate. In any event, My next face to face experience with Pete Rose came in Cooperstown in the year two thousand and nine. I was up there with the broadcaster Tony Kubeck, who was going into the

Baseball Hall of Fame and his family. I had been their favorite newscaster and a favorite sportscaster, and Tony Kubeck had been a favorite sportscaster of mine when he did the Baseball Game of the Week. And somehow Tony Kubeck's son invited me to be an honorary member of the family for the Hall of Fame week. And I went up there and luxuriated in this town and upstate New York, full of Victorian houses and what smelled like snow already coming, and it was July. Had a great time, had a blast,

and there was Pete Rose. So I talked to him, and Pete Rose told me off the record that he was going to he had had a preliminary meeting with the Commissioner of Baseball about what he had to do to be reinstated, and that he'd come back as a special instructor. There'd be all sorts of limits as to what he could and couldn't do, but that once they had tried this out ten years before, he had been banned, but he had been named to the Baseball All Century

Team for the twentieth Century. And even though he could not work in baseball and any players who associated with him were subject to being fined or punished or warned, Baseball was somehow able to bring him onto the field at the World Series and at the All Star Game and present him as a member of the All Century Team. This was a little discordant, a little critical, and yet it was the first step in the rehabilitation of Pete Rose.

Somewhere after the ped scandals broke and I said, well, you know what, this is comparatively nothing what Rose did compared to what these guys did. And then Baseball began to accept the idea of gambling to perform its own gambling adjacent services like Fantasy League Baseball run by Baseball, providing the stats an edge ever closer to having an official wagering sponsor of each team, which it does now.

As that moment came, it became clear that Pete Rose was going to get back into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and not because he had improved at all, not because he had admitted that he had gambled on baseball, because he did that rather quickly, because he could sign baseball's for money. As long as he wrote I'm sorry, I bet on baseball, he could get an extra twenty dollars. There's the old joke about the rare to Pete Rose items is the Pete Rose unautographed baseball in any event,

I believe. In twenty fourteen, Bob Lee and I did a special about Pete Rose and his reinstatement and whether or not it should happen. And it included an interview with Pete Rose, and he was exceptional and frank, and you could not listen to that and say, no, there's no way I can let him back in. I had already come out after years of arguing this, arguing against my old partner Dan Patrick, who insisted Rose should be in the Hall of Fame, arguing like we argued about

nothing else. I now suddenly jumped to the pro Pete Rose side, And in a couple of years after that, I'm doing an ESPN special about the reinstatement of Pete Rose, and I say to him, I'm convinced. I don't think what you did was right. I think it does not require an eternal ban. I think they should put you back in, but no, you can't manage it again. And then came the story about the girl. I don't know that he'll ever go in, but do not, as this subject comes back to the forefront in the wake of

his sudden passing on Monday afternoon. Do not think that he has been shunted aside because of the gambling. He was shunted aside because of the gambling that was coming to an end. He had been welcomed back, at least to the degree that Baseball, which could have been very easily said to Fox, No, you can't put him on the baseball broadcasts, you can't put him on the studio shows. You can't have him from center field during your World

Series telecast before and after the games themselves. You can't do that. They could have easily said that. They never did until that last scandal broke, and I don't know if he ever recovers from that. And of course it is tragic. It is somehow a tragic story, the way a Shakespearean play is a tragic story, because the contrasts between the good Pete Rose and the bad Pete Rose looks so stark until you realize that it's the same guy,

and these are two aspects of the same guy. This competitiveness that led him with good but not exceptional talents to a mass more hits than anybody else in baseball history, that led him to will a couple of teams into the postseason, that allowed him to change from starting as a second baseman, then becoming an outfielder, then becoming a third baseman, then becoming a first baseman, each time to improve the team that he was playing on. That will was the same will that said I'm going to be

the greatest gambler of all time. The old joke was Mickey Mantle told this story that his nickname Charlie Hustle, which he embraced, was from an incident in a spring training game where Mantle and Whitey Ford, his Yankee teammate, were seated on the bench during the Cincinnati Reds New York Yankees spring training game in March of perhaps nineteen sixty three, and somebody hit a titanic home run far

into the right field stands. I mean a five hundred foot home run that would have cleared the fence fifty or sixty feet above the top of the outfield fence, and they in their minds Mantle recalled Rose leaping above the fence and coming only, you know, forty three feet short of catching the home run. The problem is Pete Rose was the second baseman then he did not play the outfield in spring training or anywhere else until nineteen sixty six or sixty seven. And the Charlie Hustle nickname

we know predates that. But the Charlie Hustle image is that exactly false. Hustle, as the Saturday Night Live character played by Gary Garrett Morris pointed out, Charlie Hustle, you bet an ironic thing because that happened before we knew about the gambling. So the Mantles story where he got that nickname from is probably conflated with an actual event in a World Series game, which is Saint Louis Cardinals outfielder named Mike Shannon tried to catch Mantle's home run

that won Game three. I believe it was in the nineteen sixty four World Series, landed in the upper deck, and if you look carefully on the film, Mike Shannon, perhaps two hundred feet below where the home run landed, is leaping in hopes of catching the ball, which he could not have caught even if he had been one

hundred and ninety feet tall. I believe Mantle conflated Shannon and Pete Rose, so that Charlie Hustle thing was more likely a Cincinnati Reds New York Yankees exhibition game in which Pete Rose must have gotten a walk as a rookie is an unknown rookie who have played the year before in the lowest minor league rungs, and he ran to first base, and Whitey Ford turned to Mickey Mann and said get a load to Charlie Hussell, and Rose took that and made money off of it. Pete Rose

was not a contradiction. He was one guy. He was going to beat you. Unfortunately, like so many people for whom that is a mantra. There are no rules. Ultimately, they may stop themselves from doing illegal things for fear of getting caught, or they may not stop themselves from doing illegal things for fear of getting caught. Pete Rose got caught. As a last note, I promised you that I had found out about the Pete Rose scandals without knowing what they could have been about. I knew there

was something wrong in my late teens. I was one of the first of the baseball card collectors as a kid, and so I was at all the primordial baseball card conventions we called them in those days, and the traffic was almost all in cards and to some degree autographs and photos, but generally publicly accessible stuff magazines, score cards, yearbooks, the stuff anybody could buy. Just these were the ones that people hadn't thrown out, except there was a small

market in game worn baseball uniforms. They were prized beyond words. I don't know that there were more than one hundred of them in private hands in nineteen say seventy six, And then suddenly everywhere you turned, at the card conventions of nineteen seventy seven, there was a Pete Rose jersey available. Every dealer in the New York Show in the spring of nineteen seventy seven seemed to have an autographed, game worn,

authentic Pete Rose game used uniform. It made no sense, and throughout his career, dating back to his rookie year, which was at that point fourteen years earlier, made no sense. Well. Of course, what was happening was Pete Rose was in financial trouble, and we figured that out pretty quickly that the only possible source for these uniforms was Pete Rose.

In the past, baseball uniforms had leaked out through charity events, through teams selling extra uniforms from equipment managers, stealing them and then selling them into the hobby. But Pete Roses, we're so voluminous that they could have only come from one source, Pete Rose. He did it for the money. He would take his uniform off and take it home and wear a different one the next day. There were

hundreds upon hundreds of Game Warren Pete Rose uniforms. There may have been some point in the late seventies where there were more Pete Rose Game Warn uniforms than all the Game Warn uniforms of all the other players in baseball history combined, so we knew in the hobby Pete needs the money. The joke was this, and it is the joke that I think, also in addition to the one I already made, Pete Rose might have enjoyed. I don't remember if I told him about it or not.

The joke was that the collector goes up to the dealer in uniforms sometime in the late seventies or early eighties and says, I'd like to buy a Pete Rose Game Warren uniform and the dealer says great, Cincinnati, Philadelphia or Montreal. And the collector is a little surprised that he has these options Cincinnati flannel or double knit flannel, full sleeve pinstripe or nineteen sixty three to sixty six best style, the full sleeve pinstripe, Please okay? Home or away?

And the guy is now totally flamixed and says, uh home, and the dealer says one other question for you, Yes, what size would you like? I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. We're now back to five episodes a week, posting nightly just after midnight Eastern once again there is a Monday countdown. Please send this podcast to somebody who does not yet know

that they need to be listening to it. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown Arrange, produced and performed most of the music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. The music was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,

Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Oldriman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today is my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else, as always, is pretty much my fault. So that's countdown

for today. Four weeks and six days until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the one three hundred and sixty sixth day since convicted felon drooling Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if we have to to keep him from doing it again while we still again. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bull Upton says, the news requires Until then,

I'm Keith Olbrimman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.