The Sports Curmudgeon®

If you have been reading these rants for any period of time, you must realize by now that I think Pete Rose should have been in the MLB Hall of Fame a long time ago. The number of reasons for that opinion is in excess of 4,250. And I believe that the Hall of Fame is an institution that honors/glorifies/preserves the athletic accomplishments of the best players of the game.

The Hall of Fame is not a place where people go to learn about and soak in the quintessential goodness of Nobel Peace Prize recipients. The Hall of Fame has lots of people in there who are folks you would prefer not to serve as role models for your children. In the current time where obesity is about to become the newest social faux pas that must be shunned, even the venerable Bambino will soon come under criticism from an overzealous social activist. Nonetheless, Babe Ruth belongs in the Hall of Fame because he was a great baseball player. The criteria should begin and end there.

Just a short aside here. Please notice that I said that the criterion should be “great baseball player” and should never have been diluted over the years to include “very good player who was a nice guy and did not ever punch out a sportswriter.” Sadly, we have a couple of those kinds of folks in the Hall of Fame. Never fear, I am not going to propose defrocking those imposters – they know who they are and you should too.

The story about the possible deal between Pete Rose and Bud Selig to get Rose reinstated into baseball has come up again. Have you noticed how this issue always comes up during time of the year when there is not much else happening in the world of sports and how serendipitously it provides for “column material” for journalists all over the country? That will have to go down as one of the great-unexplained mysteries of the Cosmos until some physicist shows how that too was predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

The “problem” that has to be “overcome” is one of MLB’s making. Former commissioner, A Bartlett Giamatti, banned Pete Rose from baseball for life for gambling on games. Then his successor, Faye Vincent, arranged to be sure that Rose’s name could not be included on any Hall of Fame ballots lest those pesky sportswriters who do the voting might put him in the Hall of Fame for whatever reasons. [Remember, there are over 4,250 of those “reasons”.] If you are a reader of these rants, you know already that I consider Giamatti and Vincent to have been feckless posers as Commissioners of Baseball. This situation is really the only lasting legacy of their tenure in office. Everything else – to include Giamatti’s ultra-lame poems about the game – is memorable only by its trivial nature.

Baseball faces a dilemma that will not be easy to solve in a PR/face-saving way if there is to be any logic associated with the process or the outcome. Rose has been banned from baseball for more than a decade based on a report given to Giamatti by a former Federal prosecutor that asserts and concludes that Rose bet on baseball. Importantly, this is a prosecutorial document. Remember that. I may not have spent even an hour in law school, but legal briefs and reports prepared by prosecutors are not – and should not be – fair and balanced views of all the evidence. They are documents that assert and conclude in no uncertain terms that the subject of the report is undoubtedly guilty of whatever transgression is on the table at the moment. And if these documents leave open the possibility – or give you the opinion – that the subject of the report might just be a molester of household pets, well that is possibly the case.

So, there has yet to be a fair and impartial adjudication of the evidence. And on that basis this contretemps has gone on for a long time. So how does everyone back out of this and move to a different place?

If baseball would take my simple advice – which I have suggested to them in letters on two previous occasions – they would separate eligibility for the Hall of Fame from eligibility to participate in baseball games or management activities. In that way, they can put Pete Rose’s name on the ballot for the Hall of Fame and he can be inducted and that would end all of this.

The way that Giamatti and Vincent did this is that they banned him from baseball for life for gambling AND said that banned players cannot be in the Hall of Fame or on the ballot. So baseball has to change its stance and that is the face-saving obstacle.

If they readmit him to baseball, he may manage the Reds again. Even though he was no great shakes as a manager, the Reds’ owner reportedly wants to hire Rose back into that position. No, I don’t know why. Allowing that would mean that the baseball Poobahs would have to say that Giamatti and Vincent were dead flat wrong about the evidence in that report and that it cannot possibly be so that Rose bet on baseball. Otherwise, how can they allow him in the dugout again?

Or, baseball can find a way to get an impartial person/group to review the evidence and judge if Rose did bet on baseball. Good luck with that since the debate over the standards of proof and the person(s) who would be “impartial” should take until the Twelfth of Never.

Or, they could convince Pete Rose to admit he bet on baseball and then they can forgive him.

Good luck on that last one working out in any simple manner. First of all, Pete Rose has yet to admit that he bet on baseball after about 13 years of backing and forthing on this issue. So if he changes his story now, that means he has been a liar and a scoundrel all that time. When you then allow him in the Hall of Fame and or the dugout on the basis of his being a demonstrated liar and scoundrel and scam artist over the past decade, it becomes a PR nightmare.

Secondly, if Pete Rose says he bet on baseball, that is precisely the time at which Bud Selig should ban him from the game and not allow him near any ballpark without registering as a “baseball offender”. That is when he needs to invoke the game’s equivalent of Megan’s Law. Yet, there are some who say that this is the way to get Rose reinstated. I’m sure some of the deep thinkers of the world might explain that to me; but unfortunately, Mike Tyson has had all his cell phones re-possessed and I won’t be able to contact him for a consultation on this matter.

Thirdly, if Rose admits he bet on baseball and is then readmitted to the game and allowed into the Hall of Fame, what does that do to the situation of one Shoeless Joe Jackson who certainly has Hall of Fame credentials and who was proclaimed innocent of fixing the 1919 World Series. It would be impossible to have the admitted Rose in the Hall and the exonerated Jackson out of the Hall. I would be necessary for Selig to throw out the decision of the venerated Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis in order to let Jackson back in the game sufficiently to be in the Hall of Fame and such an action might give significant credence to longstanding charges that former White Sox owner Charles Comiskey framed Jackson and at least some of the other players accused of throwing the Series. The Commissioner of Baseball is hired by the owners – and in this case Bud Selig is an owner – and there is a long-standing tradition among these owners and commissioners that they may have their spats and disagreements; but they do not rat each other out.

Actually, the Shoeless Joe Jackson case is a bit less complicated than the Pete Rose case because Selig can readmit Jackson to baseball without any subtleties or nuances. Jackson won’t be in line for a managerial position since he is – still – dead. He is not merely brain-dead in the sense that some managers are “stupid”; Jackson is no longer exchanging oxygen in the biosphere.

This is a mess of entanglements – sort of like a plate of spaghetti. The simple way to solve this is to put the names of Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson on the ballot for the Hall of Fame as if they both just became eligible in the year 2004 and to let the voters know that on-field accomplishments should not be diminished by off-field behaviors unless the off-field behaviors are sufficiently egregious – and proven! – to render the person unredeemable by society.

Charles Manson is unredeemable; the Unabomber is unredeemable.

Shoeless Joe Jackson is guilty only of being an illiterate man who had no idea what some other teammates were up to.

Pete Rose is a convicted tax evader; if that is unredeemable, then far too many people are unredeemable. Oh yeah, and Pete Rose has had a record number of consecutive bad hair days. That can be redeemed with a trip to a stylist whose repertoire includes something besides putting a bowl on his head…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…