Pete Rose really wanted to be a baseball Hall of Famer, and on the field he was one. But for nearly 40 years after he tallied the last of his record 4,256 hits, his habits off the field prevented him from claiming a Cooperstown plaque. As it turns out, one of the ways his campaign went wrong was in living that long. He couldn’t get what he wanted until he was gone.
Rose died last September, and thus he couldn’t and didn’t do anything this week to atone for his sins, sports-related or otherwise. Even so, on Tuesday his sentence was commuted by commissioner Rob Manfred, who reinstated Rose from MLB’s permanently ineligible list—which, per Hall of Fame policy (which renders players on MLB’s permanently ineligible list equally ineligible for the hall), makes him newly fit for induction. The lifting of baseball’s ban on Rose spurred a referendum on him around the game, and the results of the straw poll were largely pro-Pete. Former players and active managers mostly praised him. A dozen Hall of Famers hemmed and hawed or wholeheartedly endorsed his admission to their ranks. Prominent sports media members cosigned his candidacy. The Reds went ahead with a conveniently timed “Pete Rose Night” tribute.
None of which is especially surprising, considering the support Rose received in life—but all of which is misguided, given that a press release couldn’t correct the behavior and recalcitrance that got Rose banned from baseball in the first place. Manfred’s decision made bestowing the game’s greatest honor on Rose possible, but it’s no more sensible than before. Rose’s status has changed, but his history hasn’t. He’s reinstated, not rehabilitated.
In retrospect, Rose’s change in Hall of Fame fortunes was written in the immediate reactions (or nonreactions) to his death. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, then the president and vice president, didn’t release statements; Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the soon-to-be POTUS and VP, did. Vance, at least, was a senator from Ohio, home of Rose’s Reds. Trump seemingly just has a soft spot for fellow felons, perhaps especially if they’re also old white men. “Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Do it now, before his funeral!”
The wheels of injustice didn’t turn that fast, but it didn’t take too much longer for Trump—who had previously stumped for Rose on Twitter in 2014 and 2020—to get his way. Manfred didn’t release a statement about Rose’s death last year—a rarity for the commissioner when a prominent player passes. But he more than made up for that silence this week, when he released a loud pronouncement.
Two aspects of Manfred’s mandate deserve scrutiny: the grounds for it, and the apparent impetus for it.
Most pertinent to his status vis-à-vis MLB, Rose violated Rule 21, a number that belies the primacy of the statute that governs gambling on games. Though Manfred’s ruling was prompted by and clearly crafted around Rose, it wasn’t specific to him: It reclassified 17 men, most of them associated with the 1919 Black Sox scandal. (By far the most famous, Rose aside, is Shoeless Joe Jackson, who has his own boosters thanks largely to a surface reading of his World Series stats, his own distortions of his sworn testimony, and decades of myth-making by others.) As MLB’s press release read, “Commissioner Manfred has concluded that MLB’s policy shall be that permanent ineligibility ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual.”
In a letter to Rose’s attorney, who had petitioned for Rose’s reinstatement in January after Rose’s daughter met with Manfred in December, Manfred laid out his justification:
In my view, a determination must be made regarding how the phrase “permanently ineligible” should be interpreted in light of the purposes and policies behind Rule 21, which are to: (1) protect the game from individuals who pose a risk to the integrity of the sport by prohibiting the participation of such individuals; and (2) create a deterrent effect that reduces the likelihood of future violations by others. In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.
Whether it’s accurate to call a ban that expires upon a person’s expiration “permanent” is as much a metaphysical question as a semantic one, so let’s set that aside. Manfred has a point that the MLB banhammer’s primary purpose has been preventing problematic people from working in or maintaining financial ties to baseball. He’s also, of course, correct that dead men place no bets on baseball, and perhaps it is unlikely that a living one would be willing to chance a lifetime ban but would be scared straight by the prospect of an even longer-lasting stain. I’d argue, though, that while Rose and the Black Sox can no longer threaten the integrity of the game, their continued bans could bolster it, by reinforcing the stigma surrounding gambling by players.
Manfred is right that there’s nothing hypocritical about banning betting by players while encouraging betting by fans: Those are distinct populations with disparate capacities to affect the outcomes of games, and it’s fine for lines to be drawn differently for participants than for spectators. Still, even though the penalties for athletes are suitably steep, players are subject to the same pervasive marketing as fans—and some of them are bound to be susceptible to it. In an environment where insiders and outsiders alike are inundated with easy opportunities to part with their money—and, for a player, potentially their career—it would behoove MLB not to potentially lower the guardrails by broadcasting this status update for previously permabanned players.
Plus, what’s the downside of preserving someone’s “ineligible” listing after death, provided no new evidence has cleared their name? Why make this determination now, half a century after the last surviving Black Sox player died?
There’s really only one potential problem with posthumous ineligibility: It puts the league, and its commissioner, in the crosshairs of people who believe that certain players shouldn’t be banned. By “certain players,” I mostly mean Rose. And by “people,” I mostly mean one, particularly powerful person: Trump.
Previous petitions on behalf of deceased players haven’t spurred a policy change. In 2015, the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum appealed to Manfred on behalf of—well, take a wild guess. Manfred replied then that it “would not be appropriate for me to reopen this matter,” because “it is not possible now, over 95 years since those events took place and were considered by Commissioner Landis, to be certain enough of the truth to overrule Commissioner Landis’ determinations.” He didn’t say, “I’m reinstating Jackson because he’s no longer alive, and this way everyone who watched Eight Men Out and thought it was a documentary will leave me alone.”
So what’s different a decade later? Manfred’s announcement this week said it was “incumbent upon the Office of the Commissioner to reach a policy decision on this unprecedented issue in the modern era as Mr. Rose is the first person banned after the tenure of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to die while still on the ineligible list.” Which, frankly, looks a lot like a fig leaf for the real reason. Rose may have been the first person banned in more modern times to die while on the list, but that doesn’t make it more incumbent upon Manfred to take action when he hadn't taken that action for the list’s longer-term members. In fact, Manfred didn’t have to take any action; his predecessor, Bud Selig, simply declined to rule on a previous application for Rose’s reinstatement. But in April, Manfred said, “I’m not going to give this the pocket veto.”
Maybe Manfred’s thinking has sincerely evolved since 2015. In fairness to the commissioner, there have been some signs of that. In 2016, MLB’s official historian, John Thorn, wrote that although “the baseball public has come to believe that MLB enforces its verdicts on players even after their death,” MLB “derives no practical benefit from maintaining deceased players on an ineligible list.” In a 2019 op-ed for The New York Times, Thorn asserted that “Major League Baseball removes players from the ineligible list when they die.” And in early 2020, ESPN reported that this was, in effect, the unstated law of the league, concluding, “Baseball insiders said Manfred did not necessarily agree with Thorn's view, but an MLB source told ESPN this week that Major League Baseball does agree with it—and has for some time—but chose not to make it public.”
This week’s press release noted that the status of players who die after being declared permanently ineligible “has never been formally addressed,” so I asked an MLB spokesperson whether the league’s present position is, in fact, a new policy, or only a formalization of an existing policy. Answer: “The Commissioner met with Pete Rose’s daughter last December, and they specifically asked for us to define the approach to deceased individuals who were on the ineligible list when they passed, as they wished for him to reach the Hall of Fame one day. So today we formalized what had been our belief.”
That reply raises a new question: If this has been the unspoken policy for some time, why did the league decide to formalize and publicize it now?
Maybe Manfred just decided that he had to get it off his chest: that the secrecy was weighing on him, that he had to share it with the world, and that Rose’s daughter had given him the opening he was waiting for. Consider this, though. Manfred’s ruminations on the latest Rose request were first reported on March 1, which just so happened to be the day after Trump—fresh off of berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—lambasted MLB for its treatment of Rose and vowed, “Over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose.”
Trump hasn’t signed such a pardon. Nor is it clear what he intended to pardon Rose for; Rose spent time in prison for filing false tax returns, but Trump’s post was about baseball betting, which wasn’t a crime. Trump probably meant that he wanted Rose removed from the ineligible list. And while he’s nothing if not eager to test the limits of presidential power via executive orders—I’d like to have seen the judiciary weigh in on this one—applying pressure to Manfred may have worked just as well.
Manfred met with Trump at the White House in mid-April, and Manfred later acknowledged that the two had discussed Rose, though he declined to divulge details. And now—not long after MLB removed mentions of diversity from its website, watered down the language in its Jackie Robinson Day press release, and stayed silent when an article about Robinson was temporarily removed from the Department of Defense website—Rose’s procedural path to Cooperstown is clear. That timing could be a complete coincidence. Or maybe Manfred just wanted to do a favor for his old golf buddy—or, in his capacity as commissioner, made the calculation that seeking Trump’s favor, or avoiding his ire, would be in the best interests of baseball. It seems suggestive that Manfred reportedly called Trump on Tuesday in the Middle East to tell him the news. Shockingly, Trump hasn’t posted to take credit, maybe because he’s been busy accepting foreign gifts of questionable legality.
In the grand scheme of things, Rose’s reinstatement is small beans. Such is the flood of pardons and promotions for formerly disgraced or disregarded figures these days that we don’t have to look hard for a recent example of a much more meaningful one. On the same day that Manfred announced Rose’s removal from the ineligible list, Trump himself unexpectedly announced the removal of all sanctions on Syria, which the U.S. government has designated a state sponsor of terrorism since 1979 (Rose’s first year with a team other than the Reds).
Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was within the last decade aligned with Al Qaeda and ISIS. Nonetheless, Trump ended the sanctions at the behest of autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and authoritarian Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom American intelligence agencies concluded is responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” Trump said. Sajjan Gohel, international security director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, told NBC News, “We’re living in a very unusual world where suddenly people who professed hatred of the West and in particular the United States are now being accepted as potential allies and partners.”
In that world, where former(?) terrorists, insurrectionists, and corrupt people profit because a twice-impeached felon found liable for sexual abuse was reelected president, it’s hard to get too worked up about someone with Trumpian baggage being in the Baseball Hall of Fame. (In fairness to Rose, Congress hasn’t impeached him even once.) It is pretty tiring, though, to be continually reminded that in every arena, from politics to sports, bad behavior of all kinds is not only no longer disqualifying for advancement, but potentially a prerequisite. Add Pete to the pile of once-disreputable people who prove that personal lobbying works, and that flattery will get you everywhere.
It’s still far from a given that Rose—who has been well represented in the baseball museum in Cooperstown—will be fitted for a plaque. Barring any other unanticipated policy changes, Rose could be considered for induction by the Classic Baseball Era Committee in December 2027. Assuming he’s added to the eight-person ballot, he’d have to be named by at least 12 of 16 voters to get in. If the Baseball Hall of Fame, like the Pro Football Hall of Fame, had no “character clause,” then Rose could steal his home there without sliding. But for better or for worse, the baseball hall has non-statistical standards. Depending on the composition of the electorate, which consists of Hall of Famers, baseball executives, and “veteran media members,” Rose’s induction could be a nonstarter or a cinch.
I was born about six weeks after Rose was removed from the Reds’ 40-man roster in 1986, which ended his playing career, so my memories of Rose are all from his self-defeating, downtrodden days. In my obit for Rose, which laid out his triumphs and transgressions, I noted that people who saw Rose play—or people who played with him—are much more likely to venerate him than those who came along later. There’s nothing wrong with cherishing the charge Rose supplied as a player, and many of his most prominent teammates, from Mike Schmidt to George Foster, have spoken about that this week. But I’ll offer some insight from one of his least prominent teammates: John Poff. Poff, who had cups of coffee with Rose’s Phillies in 1979 and the Brewers in 1980, is not the typical former major leaguer: He’s a poet, a teacher, and, by baby boomer baseball player standards, quite progressive. Earlier this year, I asked Poff for his recollections of Rose. The 72-year-old, who knew Pete “pretty well” from two spring trainings and a month in the majors and described himself as “his caddy” in the spring of ’79, told me:
The Phillies had this lineup of really good players who had been told by everyone how good they were and were, frankly, from my point of view, really full of themselves. Pete came over from the Big Red Machine, older superstars with Hall of Fame credentials, and yet he was like a breath of fresh air. No pretensions. I was surprised how much I liked him as a teammate. He was the most natural superstar with young and/or marginal players I ever met. And then the way he played. Always remembered Ted Simmons saying the key to playing in the big leagues was to reach a high level of motivation and stay there. Pete took that further than anyone. His focus on each at-bat, each pitch was remarkable. I've said I still think Mike Schmidt is the greatest third baseman ever, but Pete was the most talented player I ever saw, and his talent was his attitude.
His attitude toward baseball, that is. “But then there were the demons,” Poff said, adding, “He really did enjoy just talking about the game and I think he tried to be honest talking to reporters about it. But the gambling, the womanizing, even the amphetamines, all taken together, made his life kind of a lie. … Same thing, I guess, about gambling—just could not cop to it, as we used to say. What I always thought was so stupid about it was the old-time scandals would have been for money, when ballplayers didn't really make much. From the ’70s on it was the worst financial move a guy could make. Pete needed therapy, or something.”
In 1989, not long after agreeing to his ban from baseball, Rose said he’d sought treatment for a gambling addiction. Even decades later, though, he’d failed to reform or repent, which played a part in Manfred’s rejection of a previous appeal for Rose’s reinstatement, in 2015. In his verdict that December, Manfred wrote:
It is not at all clear to me that Mr. Rose has a grasp of the scope of his violations of Rule 21. He claims not to remember significant misconduct detailed in the Dowd Report and corroborated by Michael Bertolini’s betting notebook. … Mr. Rose’s public and private comments, including his initial admission in 2004, provide me with little confidence that he has a mature understanding of his wrongful conduct, that he has accepted full responsibility for it, or that he understands the damage he has caused.
Manfred added that Rose had “never seriously sought treatment” for the ADHD or ODD Rose said he had in his 2004 book, and observed that Rose hadn’t avoided the “conduct or associations” that had led to his placement on the permanently ineligible list. “In short,” the commissioner concluded, “Mr. Rose has not presented credible evidence of a reconfigured life either by an honest acceptance by him of his wrongdoing, so clearly established by the Dowd Report, or by a rigorous, self-aware and sustained program of avoidance by him of all the circumstances that led to his permanent ineligibility in 1989. Absent such credible evidence, allowing him to work in the game presents an unacceptable risk of a future violation by him of Rule 21, and thus to the integrity of our sport.”
In other words, even a few decades after the betting on baseball that landed him on the list, Rose was still seen as a threat to the sport. And that Manfred ruling arrived before it was widely known that Rose’s sexual history may have been much more reprehensible than his lack of adherence to Rule 21. In the 1970s, a woman said that Rose had committed statutory rape by having a sexual relationship with her when she was under 16, the age of consent in Ohio. Her sworn statement surfaced during a defamation lawsuit launched by Rose after John Dowd, who had served as special counsel in MLB’s investigation of Rose’s gambling, suggested in 2015 that this sort of illicit liaison was routine for Rose. Rose, who was in his mid-30s, married, and a father of two during the period in question, defended himself by saying that he’d thought the girl was 16.
Asked about these matters at a 2022 celebration of the Phillies’ 1980 championship team, Rose said, “Who cares what happened 50 years ago?” and (to a female reporter), “It was 55 years ago, babe.” Ironically, Rose is easier to celebrate now that he’s gone. It was riskier to fete him when he was on hand to remind his admirers who he was as a man, not as a talismanic monument to hits and hustle.
In the abstract, it’s defensible for Manfred to punt on how history regards Rose; Rose’s death does already render him “ineligible” in most practical terms. It’s the hall, after all, not the league, that decided that Rose would be barred from induction. (The hall handed down that judgment in 1991, precluding the possibility that the baseball writers would elect Rose when he was due to be on the BBWAA ballot that year.) But Manfred knew what the result of his ruling might be, and the response so far suggests that resisting Rose’s return to the game’s good graces may be a losing battle. Just because the hall—or the Reds, or players, or writers—can honor Rose doesn’t mean they should. Shoeless Joe wasn’t banned as a candidate for Cooperstown, but the voters roundly rejected him. Maybe in two years, the members of that Cooperstown committee will see Rose for what he was: an overqualified player, but—as long as the Hall purports to consider character—a woefully underqualified person. But now that one major roadblock has been removed … well, I wouldn’t bet on it.
