“He’s a pain in the ass, but the greatest two-strike hitter in the game,” said Lee.

And Toobin recalled being floored by Rose’s skill as a child.

“Pete Rose may have a lifetime .300 batting average, but it seemed like when we watched he had about a .700 average,” Toobin said.

But Cochran’s argument included more than hagiography for the superhuman batter.

Central to the argument for the defense was Cochran’s insistence that the 1990 agreement between Rose and then-Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti had only barred Rose from Hall of Fame consideration for a single year, though prohibiting him from playing, managing or otherwise being involved in major league games for all eternity.

Cochran charged that the current rule, under which Rose and the others on baseball’s permanent ineligibility list are also permanently banned from the Hall, had been instituted by a spiteful new Commissioner after the fact specifically to block Rose.

Dershowitz, however, said the 1991 rule change was merely a formality, citing the case of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, a renowned Chicago player placed on the ineligible list after throwing the 1919 World Series in cooperation with bookies. Dershowitz said—and his witnesses agreed—that “Shoeless” Joe might easily have made the Hall of Fame had not his place on the ineligible list been interpreted for decades as a disqualification.

And Dershowitz put definitional quibbles aside to look at the specifics of Rose’s case, coaxing his witnesses to go beyond numerous avowals of gambling as baseball’s ultimate taboo. He supplemented such philosophical arguments with a repeated reliance on the findings of the Dowd Report—a voluminous 1989 work documenting in great detail the results of an official Major League Baseball investigation into Rose’s gambling.

Rattling the Sabermetrician

At least one Cochran witness, though, had no time for the Dowd Report and its supposed evidence.

Bill James—the chief proponent of sabermetrics, a school of baseball thought based on refined statistical analysis and stubborn opposition to anything as clumsy as common sense taking its place—authored a scathing rebuke to the Dowd Report shortly after its publication, claiming to expose it as a sham. James repeated those claims yesterday.

But in return he faced the sudden wrath of Dershowitz, who hounded James with factual inconsistencies and inaccuracies he said he had found in the book, calling it “a serious mistake.”

The previously cool Dershowitz appeared on the point of losing his temper while cross-examining James, approaching him closely and waving his finger while shouting such sentences as “You made it up!” and “You’re wrong—admit it!”

Though James did seem to grow flustered at the time, he collected himself before making his reply.

“I’m certain I have made mistakes,” James said. “I do not believe this is one of them.”