That life sentence Pete Rose got from baseball for gambling?
It doesn’t just go away now that the Cincinnati Reds great and all-time baseball icon died Monday at age 83 in Las Vegas of natural causes. The Hall of Fame welcome wagon isn’t suddenly showing up at his family’s doorstep anytime soon.
That’s because contrary to widespread assumptions and even a few media reports, Rose’s 1989 ban for gambling on baseball was not a ‘lifetime’ ban. It was a permanent ban.
He was put on baseball’s ‘permanently ineligible’ list, along with the likes of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the seven other Chicago White Sox players MLB determined to have thrown the 1919 World Series.
And that’s not even why he’s ineligible for the Hall of Fame. At least not directly.
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As commissioner Rob Manfred has been quick to point out in recent years when asked about Rose, MLB has no say in who’s eligible to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame is a separate institution, established in 1936 (60 years after the National League was founded, 35 after the American League). It makes its own eligibility rules, which it did in 1991 on this subject, specifically to address Rose.
The Hall made him ineligible in a separate move as he approached what otherwise would have been his first year on the ballot. The board determined anyone on MLB’s permanently ineligible list will, in turn, be ineligible for Hall of Fame consideration. The board has upheld that decision with subsequent votes.
That’s a step it did not take for Jackson or the other banned White Sox players when the Hall opened the process for its inaugural class 15 years after those players were banned. Jackson received a few scattered votes but never came close to being elected.
In the first year of the Hall’s ban, Rose received 41 write-in votes, which were thrown out and not counted.
“Ultimately, the board has continued to look at this numerous times over 35 years and continues to believe that the rule put in place is the right one for the Hall of Fame,” said Josh Rawitch, Hall of Fame president. “And for those who have not been reinstated from the permanently ineligible list, they shouldn’t be eligible for our ballots.”
As long as that rule remains, it will be up to Manfred or his successor(s) to make a path for the posthumous induction of baseball’s Hit King.
“All I can tell you for sure is that I’m not going to go to bed every night in the near future and say a prayer that I hope I go in the Hall of Fame,” Rose told the Enquirer this season during his final sit-down interview before his death. “This may sound cocky – I am cocky, by the way – but I know what kind of player I was. I know what kind of records I got. My fans know what kind of player I was.
‘And if it’s OK for (fans) to put me in the Hall of Fame, I don’t need a bunch of guys on a committee somewhere.’
