Baseball legend and all-time hits leader Pete Rose, has been accused of using corked bats by a man who worked as a groundskeeper in Montreal in 1984.
“Pete Rose would have his bats corked in the visitors’ clubhouse at Olympic Stadium,” former groundskeeper Joe Jammer told the Montreal Gazette. “I found out he was corking bats.”
Corked bats are illegal in Major League Baseball. One of the advantages of corked bats are that they make the bat lighter, which in turn allows hitters to achieve better bat speed.
“Pete was too smart to deal with Expos equipment manager John Silverman (to have him cork the bats in the Expos clubhouse). So Bryan Greenberg, who worked in the visitors’ clubhouse, did it,” Jammer told the Gazette via CBS. “He took me into a room, a door to the left, and underneath tarps there was this machine.
“…The guy (Greenberg) was saying Rose had been corking his bat for 20 years. The guy said that nobody checks him because he’s a singles hitter.”
The Gazette reached out to Greenberg for comment, but he refused to say anything beyond saying he couldn’t talk about it.
“I really can’t answer those questions. I really can’t talk about it,” Greenberg said.
Rose is most frequently remembered as a Cincinnati Red, but he did play the better part of a season for the Expos in 1984, prior to being traded to the Reds. Rose was handed a lifetime ban from baseball in 1989 for betting on games while playing and as a manager.
Rose accumulated 4,256 hits over a 24-year career.
Rose continues his fight for reinstatement to this day.
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