BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Also, in our look back, CNN's 20 years, today, Pete Rose, the hit king, and his banishment from Major League Baseball.</s>BART GIAMATTI, BASEBALL COMMISSIONER: The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode.</s>VINCE CELLINI, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Pete Rose agreed and signed a lifetime ban from baseball as a conclusion to the whole investigation into whether or not he actually bet on baseball. And the bigger question: whether he bet on the Cincinnati Reds, or against the Cincinnati Reds, as manager of that team?</s>GIAMATTI: Yes, I HAVE concluded that he bet on baseball.</s>PETE ROSE: Regardless of what the commissioner said today, I did not bet on baseball.</s>CELLINI: It all remains fairly vague, but what Rose got caught up in was the fact that gambling in baseball is long, has long been the cardinal sin. You cannot bet in baseball, tracing back to the 1919 World Series, where the Chicago White Sox threw the series to gamblers. But the ironic part is that Pete Rose has more hits than any other man who ever lived and played in Major League Baseball. He has artifacts in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is -- his name is synonymous with the game. As a decade has gone by, and Pete Rose is still away from baseball, while other people who have committed drug smuggling and have been drug users and have been generally pretty horrible people are allowed back into baseball, Rose is still on the outside looking in.
CNN 20: Pete Rose Suspended from Baseball, August 24, 1989