Pete Rose, 25 years later

Why does Manfred need to "curry favor"? He was just elected by unanimous vote.

 

once again, for what its worth, what Rose did should bar him from baseball, but not the Hall of Fame as a player, if he's deemed worthy. He is a Hall of Fame player, even the jackass HOF voters could see that.

 

It's called the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Did you miss that?


Why are the voters the jackasses when it was Rose who violated the one fundamental rule of the game since 1877?? Who held the gun to Rose's head?

 

Rose agreed to the lifetime ban with the understanding he could apply for reinstatement in one year. Giamatti said at the time that Rose needed to "reconfigure his life" and it's possible had Giamatti lived, they would have worked out something.

Then, there's the rumor that Selig was getting ready to reinstate Rose in 2003, but the plan got leaked to Jayson Stark and Selig backed off.

 

the voters are jackasses for so many reasons, for decades. Like who are the 36 jackasses who didn't think Jackie Robinson was a Hall of Famer. What brain dead asshole didn't think Hank Aaron was a HOF? Out the bitches and revoke their memberships, retroactively and remove their names from the roll of voters.

MLB doesn't own the NBHOF, the voters should not bind themselves to the politics of the game. Rose belongs as a player, so does Shoeless Joe Jackson

 

I still maintain that Rose will be let in the HOF after he dies.

Lifetime bans are that. (To my previous post on this matter, Shoeless Joe should be in too.)

 

Typically, commissioners like to start their reign with an overture to the fans to try and show that they aren't a total shill for the owners. Selig did the Home Run Derby at the ASG, Selig retired Jackie Robinson's number, and made inter league play happen, Ueberoth reinstated Mays and Mantle, Adam Silver banned Sterling for life, Goodell cracked down on off-field behavior, Tagliabue moved the Super Bowl to Pasadena after Arizona didn't make MLK Day a holiday and compelled the Saints to return to New Orleans.
Some of these moves happened well into their terms, but commissioners do need to curry some fan favor.

 

Let's just tweak the timeline ever so slightly and see what we have. Let's say . . . .

Rose retires as a player, waits his five years, gets elected to the Hall of Fame.

Soon after, he's named manager of the Reds. Bets on baseball. Is summarily banned from the game.

He would still be in the Hall of Fame, as nobody ever gets removed from the Hall once they are in (not even O.J. Simpson).

And that's really all that happened this time, only the manager/betting/banning happened before the five-year period for election. Same events in the same order. So if he would be in the Hall under one timeline, why not under both timelines? What's different?

 

Where the hell does the notion come from that there is some booming groundswell of public demand to put Pete Rose in the HOF?

In BTE's hypothetical, the HOF directors would call a special election to deal with the situation, and Rose would be expelled.

Of course, the pro football HOF and the baseball HOF have nothing directly to do with each other, but I would bet that if O.J. Simpson had been convicted of the double murders he committed, almost certainly he would have been expelled from the PFHOF (and the college HOF too.)

The fact Simpson was not convicted of the murders allow some people to carry on with the 'presumption of innocence' bullshit.

 

From everything I've seen and heard, Rose is a piece of work as a human being. But he absolutely belongs in the HOF based on his body of work as a player. Fuck what he did as a manager; it still doesn't change the stats he compiled.

Of course, I also don't get bent out of shape about the steroids era. Yeah, they helped players recover from injury faster, and maybe hit a ball farther, but they still had to square up the ball and hit it. It's not like steroids made their eyesight exponentially better or their skill at recognizing a pitch better. The still had to hit it. And the pitchers still had to hit the strike zone.

So put me in the camp that says what happened between the lines is all that matters. The rest — and especially the inconsistently applied morality component — is just sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Release the hounds.

 

Let him in. It's been long enough. Baseball needs a jolt anyway -- it's fallen so, so far in the last 25 years on the national sports radar.

I was in the "never let Rose into the HOF" camp for years, then it moved to indifference. I didn't have a problem with Jim Gray throwing hard questions at him in 1999.

Rose is an old man now. No one is going to hire him to run an MLB franchise. Let the man in and be done with it.

 

Probably the same person who put a gun to Ty Cobb's and Tris Speaker's heads in their 1919 game-fixing scheme.

You know, those two Hall of Famers.

Of course, all this was known in 1936, when Cobb was elected to the Hall with 98.2 percent of the vote.

So spare us the "they would have commissioned a special committee to remove Rose" nonsense based on the timeline I presented above. Its bullshit, and you know it. Sports penalties are justice by roulette wheel.