We won’t go so far as to call this a dark day for baseball. Enough folks are already doing that work.
No, call it a dismal day for baseball. A stupid day for baseball. A grim relitigating of old business that the game would’ve been best served to leave in the dustbin alongside its many indignities.
Pete Rose is off Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list, and who knew that you could speed run to Cooperstown merely by kicking the bucket, no matter how felonious, how detrimental to the game you were when you were upright and breathing?
No, this decision by commissioner Rob Manfred smacks of executive branch overreach mixed with a dash of CEO malpractice. Manfred’s tenure – which will ultimately run about 15 years once he steps aside – was already a mixed bag, but dude was on a little bit of a roll there, for a minute.
The pitch clock has worked out great. Finessing the game out of cable television and into the streaming era is more painful than a rock in his loafers, but he’s kept the game in the hands of consumers even as the business model wobbles.
Yet Manfred’s legacy won’t, for many fans, extend much further than being known as the man who breathed life into a pariah in most markets, all while creating the perception that he was dog-walked by a president whose approval ratings are historically negative.
As he does, Manfred grabbed his lawyer’s quill and eloquently laid out the reasons for the posthumous Rose reinstatement, noting that no damage could be done beyond the grave, making the mildly plausible case that A. Bartlett Giamatti’s Rose banishment wasn’t the act of a commissioner but rather a legal maneuvering to head off potential litigation.
It all sounds a bit like another, lengthier memo Manfred issued, in the wake of the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal emerging and Manfred doling out punishment in January 2020.
Back then, Manfred went out of his way to clear Astros owner Jim Crane any wrongdoing in the affair. This time, it’s making the case nobody was asking for – that Rose get back in the game, posthumously. Conclusions to reach and cases to make to get there.
And how well did Manfred’s Astros rulings go over with the public?
Yet it’s not just ‘optics’ that matter here. It’s the decades of Manfred’s office insisting that gambling on baseball was the worst thing a player, a manager, an MLB employee could do, that it unspooled any thread of integrity the game had.
It was a worthy stand to take.
It may mollify the most diehard Rose stans – a legion that includes the president – who could overlook his uncontested allegations of statutory rape, his felony tax conviction and his shameless self-promotion and parrying of responsibility in gambling on baseball to insist their guy should be in the game. Should be in the Hall of Fame.
And now could be in the Hall of Fame.
The Rose absolutists have been handed ammunition by MLB over the years with the league’s warm embrace of gambling. That agita should probably be directed toward the Supreme Court, whose 2018 ruling greased the skids for this burgeoning national crisis of sports gambling, though the four major sports leagues could certainly tamp down their no-sweat parlay enthusiasm a bit.
MLB had no control over widespread legalization of sports betting. It had 100% control of the Rose situation, and its stonewalling of any reinstatement efforts was, in many ways, honorable.
Now, two months after President Donald Trump promised pardons of Rose and urged he be sent to Cooperstown, nearly four decades of establishing a moral high ground was sacrificed.
And MLB has also ensured that, like a zombie emerging from a crypt, the Rose discourse will never die. In two years, a committee will determine if he should be on a ballot, and if so, 16 men and women will vote on Rose’s candidacy. If 12 of them say yes, Rose is a Hall of Famer.
It is old business that was seemingly settled long ago, now dredged up in the ugliest fashion. We can already see the chyrons on the sports talk shoutfests. Rose will always generate interest. It’s just not the kind of attention baseball should want.
In the interim, games will be played and ballplayers will gamble on their apps – though hopefully not on baseball! – and the industry will move onward.
But it’s hard to deny that the game’s integrity took a massive step backward, and unnecessarily ripped open an old wound.
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