I doubt that Pete Rose ever had such a sophisticated thought.
Why am I getting a feeling of deja vu? I don’t think you have to be sophisticated, or even smart, to think you can do anything you want because you are famous.
Pete believed, like Donald Trump, that his fans were so devoted they’d swallow any BS story he told and side with him no matter what he did. And like Trump, he was right.
Luckily, those delusional fans didn’t have the power to enforce their wishes.
I don’t think he thinks far ahead enough to even imagine getting away with something. The future is beyond his ken. He just does shit that he wants to do purely based on his urges.
I went to Cooperstown earlier this year with my son and daughter. It was a great trip, and even my daughter - who doesn’t care about baseball even a little bit - was impressed by the museum and interested in the history. Here’s what I wanted to say to my daughter:
In this room are the names of the absolute best players who ever played this sport. They came from everywhere and they are about the most perfect cross section of American society you could take. Some of them were great guys, and some of them were absolute monsters. Some of them were racists more vile than anyone you’ve ever met. Quite a few of them were drunks and drug addicts. A lot of them cheated; some of them cheated in ways we decided were fun so they became beloved, while others cheated in ways we decided were gross so we booed them and rooted against them. But memorize every name in this room and you will know the name of every single man who was ever really great at baseball. This room is all you really need to know to get started.
I didn’t get to say that, though. I didn’t really say much of anything, because the explanation of what the room has become instead is (to me, only to me, specifically to me, I am not generalizing to anyone outside of my own living room) kind of lame. It’s a collection of guys, mostly great but not all, who passed certain purity tests that were (TO ME) fairly arbitrary. Of the absolute greatest 15 men who ever played the game, it omits 20%. It’s a list of people we decided to reward for succeeding in a way that we decided was sufficiently virtuous. But if you want to hear about the best of the best, you’ll have to look outside this room, because there are only two guys in 150 years who ever hit better than .360 for their careers and one of them isn’t here.
So for me, personally, that’s way less fun. I don’t care about Pete Rose as a human being. At all. I am not a fan of his in any way. He is, by all accounts, a garbage person - though he probably wouldn’t even be in the bottom quartile of garbage humans already in the Hall of Fame - but I frankly am not interested in whether or not he feels rewarded or punished by being included or not. I want him in the Hall of Fame because that big room is more complete and correct - FOR ME - with his plaque on the wall than without it.
I completely understand that mine is the minority view, and that so long as it remains so I’ll be outvoted and Rose (and the rest of the guys who I’d put in if I were king) will not be enshrined. But I think at times the folks on the other side of the aisle start assigning moral and/or intellectual value to the positions, and that gets tiresome. I don’t assume that anyone who disagrees with me is stupid, delusional, or evil, and I’d appreciate the same courtesy in return.
I’m perfectly comfortable with this. Every game has rules and in the game of who gets the highest honor, I am all in favor of a rule that says “If you’re an utter, vile piece of shit, however we decide what that is, you don’t get the honor.” When it comes down to it, it the big picture, it absolutely does matter how you reached that goal.
Whether a human being should be revered is not a simple mathematical calculation and it shouldn’t be one.
Who, besides Ty Cobb, batted over .360 for his career?
I’m GUESSING you meant Shoeless Joe Jackson (who didn’t QUITE bat .360). But frankly, I don’t feel the least bit bad about Jackson being kept out of the Hall of Fame OR about him being banned from baseball.
Little pedantic, innit? Yeah, you caught me in a misremembered bit of trivia. Change the quoted sentence to “only three guys in 150 years who ever hit better than .350 for their careers” and LET’S move on.
You sure don’t need to feel bad. I don’t feel bad either. Joe Jackson’s been dead for longer than my father has been alive. My opinion, with which you are free to disagree, is that as a chronicle of the best players of all time, the Hall of Fame falls short by leaving out Jackson (and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and kinda sorta Pete Rose). Now, leaving those guys out makes the Hall more successful at representing a certain brand of Virtue - a brand of Virtue that includes Cap Anson, but whatever - and that’s fine too, if that’s what you want from your Hall.
It’s not what I want from mine, and I don’t feel bad about that, either.
As a “chronicle” of baseball, the Hall represents all of those players just fine - they just don’t have plaques, and aren’t in the “Hall” portion of the museum. It won’t be long before Clemens and Bonds are in, though - so don’t worry about that.
The Hall of Fame is not some kind of Stalinist museum in which certain players are completely erased and never mentioned again.
Pete Rose HAS appeared in numerous exhibits there, and will probably appear in more. Same with Bonds, Clemens, et al. They just don’t have their little plaques. Maybe that’s a minor injustice, maybe not. Regardless, I can think of about 5 billion people I feel sorrier for than any of those guys.
I’m curious as to which of Jackson or Rose you think is one of the 15 best baseball players of all time.
Joe Jackson was a hell of a hitter, but even had he continued playing past age 32, it seems unlikely to me he’d have ended up as great a player as, say, Mike Schmidt or Frank Robinson, neither of whom I’d place among the 15 best players ever. Bear in mind that for all his gaudy batting averages he never did win a batting title - in fact, he never led the league in most offensive categories. He was unlikely to get to 3000 hits or any other significant counting stat (he didn’t start especially young and got hurt a few times.) I think his career would have ended up roughly equivalent to, say, Rod Carew or Chipper Jones, vertainly Hall of Famers but not on par with the likes of Willie Mays or Lou Gehrig.
Pete Rose had a very long and distinguished career but was never at any one time the best player in baseball, which kind of makes it hard to put him in the top fifteen. In fact, for most of his career he had at least one teammate who was a better candidate for All Time Top 15.
Bonds and Clemens will eventually get in, once the writers are a little less butthurt.
Certainly I don’t mean Rose. I think a Small Hall person could make a good faith case to exclude Rose from the Hall altogether on merit alone.
I was referring to Jackson. I admit I struggle when trying to evaluate guys who played baseball before Babe Ruth; the statistics are so fundamentally different that I feel like I’m trying to analyze a different game that I never watched. But his OPS+ through age 32 was 170 (!), which was better than Mays, better than Musial, better than Cobb. And that age 32 season was his best season in a lot of ways - he got into double figure HR for the first time in his life and had his best ever slugging percentage. It seems entirely possible that he could have had a little late-career power Renaissance, posted four or five more excellent seasons, and ended up looking even better from a modern perspective.
That said, I guess I probably overstated it when I said “best 15.” Best 25? Best 50? I think my point stands either way.
That he would have made it to top 50 is, I think, quite plausible, and certainly that is a hell of a thing. Top 100 is a hell of a thing, actually. According to the current list the 101st best MLB player of all time was Gary Carter, who is a no-brainer Hall of Famer.
The thing is, though, he DID stop playing at 32, and it was entirely his fault he did. He conspired to throw the World Series. That was his decision and a lifetime ban was the standard punishment for such things.
The issue of whether Jackson or Rose should be in the Hall is not one that can be objectively settled, but I do know there are a fair number of players more accomplished than Joe Jackson who aren’t in the Hall of Fame, and to my mind they, logically, should go in first, beginning with Clemens and Bonds.
How about inducting him with an asterisk next to his name?
He has lied so much and so often, I’m really strongly in favor of keeping the lifetime ban. He can go in after he’s dead, but the man is a bold face liar and broke the most basic rule baseball had that everyone knew they treated most seriously.
The warning about gambling was up in every locker room in every stadium in all of baseball from long before his career started. He bet on baseball and he bet on his team.
As opposed to an italic liar.
A couple of things that so many seem to be missing, either forgot or never aware of.
Permanent ineligible goes beyond lifetime.
Pete Rose Voluntarily took a permanent ineligible ruling to end the investigation with a baseball has no definitive proof.
The Baseball HOF rules says for enshrinement a player may not be on the PI list.
That was what baseball ( the commissioner) said
So Pete says I will except a permanent ineligible status, if you will quit investigating …
Baseball agrees and media keeps digging, and finds evidence. Pete finally admits it… ( IMO to sell books) and thinks he should be eligible again.
He AGREED to it. He was not placed on the list while screaming innocence …
Whether anyone thinks gambling is worthy of being on the PI list or not… HE AGREED to it.
It was a plea bargain he signed off on.
IF you make a deal, and the other party holds up the agreement, don’t come crying back later that you got a raw deal.
He should have fought as hard off the field as he did on it.
I’m sure he thought, once the investigation ends, with no official finding, in a few years, all will be forgiven. But MLB is just following up on what was mutually agreed upon.
…including his crappy 1911 season where he hit .408 and still only came in fourth in the MVP (actually the Chalmers Award) voting.* 
He was a terrific hitter, probably best to leave it at that.
I still think it would be an acceptable compromise to let Rose into the HOF but keep him banned from all baseball activities (except a HOF induction speech, which would probably be a doozie).
*Chalmers voting included pitchers, but Jackson also came in behind Eddie Collins (.365) and someone named Cobb, who hit .420 and won the award.
Just to clarify, because you make it a little confusing here, the HOF isn’t the Commissioner. The HOF is a separate organization from Major League Baseball. They are closely connected, but are legally separate.
The rule that players on the Permanently Ineligible list could not be elected to the Hall of Fame did not exist when Rose accepted his banishment. That rule was invented in 1991 primarily to prevent Rose’s election. It had never occurred to anyone prior to that to have sch a rule, because
- Joe Jackson was really the only person who would have been affected, and
- The writers would no more have voted Joe Jackson into the Hall of Fame than they would have voted in Satan. For as long as Jackson was part of the living memory of baseball writers, he was loathed to an extent that makes the animus towards Barry Bonds look like how people think of Santa Claus.
So let us be very fair here:
Pete Rose never agreed to be banned from the Hall of Fame.
The agreement he signed said nothing about the Hall of Fame, since it was not an agreement with the Hall of Fame. And it did not imply anything about the Hall of Fame, because at the time there was no rule against it. Rose only agreed to a banishment from MLB/MiLB activities. The Hall of Fame rule was invented over a year later by a third party. Had they not invented the rule, Rose would have been duly added to the ballot in 1991 and he would have gotten a lot of votes, and, in my opinion, would have been elected, though later on as the evidence poured out a lot of people would have regretted their vote.
Now, don’t get me wrong; nobody has some God-given right to be elected to the Hall of Fame, and I don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for Pete Rose, a man who appears to be completely free of any regard for honesty, ethics, or self-restraint. But he didn’t agree to be kicked out of the Hall; that was sprung on him.
If Rose had a brain in his head, he… well, he never would have gambled on baseball. But after that point (and let’s assume he has a gambling addiction, and folks that is no joke) the smart thing to do would have been to completely admit everything to the very last detail, accept the ban, and go straight to GA meetings. Then after ten years of clean living, they would have let him back in, I am sure of it. Both Bud Selig and Rob Manfred have refused to let him back in largely because he wouldn’t admit what he did and apparently hasn’t changed anything about his lifestyle.