Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame
It’s early January, baseball Hall of Fame season. This is one of the trickiest and most debate filled times on the baseball calendar. Think pieces and hot takes fly left and right — this guy should get in, that guy shouldn’t, the voting system is broken! No one seems to be able to agree in the slightest on exactly how the induction process should be handled. There is a very simple reason for that — the Hall of Fame itself is a broken concept.
At the same time the Hall of fame is two, often contradictory things:
- It is a museum dedicated to the history of baseball. It has a physical location in Cooperstown, New York that you can visit. There you will find exhibits, demonstrations, and a well-stocked gift shop.
- It is a concept, a reward, and an acknowledgement that the inductee has accomplished a great deal and is worthy of being remembered. In this regard, it is unquestionably a deep personal honor and an implicit endorsement. Each newly elected Hall of Famer gets their day to make a speech, have their name and face put on a plaque, and forever be acknowledged as a representative of everything good about baseball.
That is a crazy set of rules. In this way, the Hall is either a museum showcasing the very best of history while ignoring the dark parts, or honoring the darker parts in the same light as it does the good. To put it into context, imagine a museum of prohibition without any mention of Al Capone; or one where Al Capone was celebrated and got to make a speech as his exhibit went in. It’s hard to wrap your head around. Perhaps Hall of Fame’s weren’t such a great idea to begin with. These flaws have caused a great deal of stress for a number of real people, none more so than Pete Rose.
Rose holds the MLB record for most base hits with 4,256, unquestionably an accomplishment worthy of recording. Even ignoring that record he retired with an 80.1 WAR, easily good enough to warrant induction. But Rose is not the in Hall and likely never will be.
In 1989 The Dowd report came out with allegations that Rose gambled on a large number of Cincinnati Reds games between 1985 and 1987. Since Rose was the manager of the club at that time, it brought him into direct contravention of Major League Rule 21, forbidding the gambling on any game in which the individual will play a part, under punishment of permanent exile from the sport. Rather than go through a lengthy criminal trial, Rose agreed to enter his exile voluntarily, making himself permanently ineligible to have any official connection with Major League Baseball.
The rule against gambling on baseball has been around since 1919 when ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson and the Black Sox conspired with gamblers to throw that years World Series and were caught. It doesn’t matter that Jackson seems likely to have been innocent and was the best player of his era, his name remains tarred in connection to baseball’s first massive scandal. I say this to make the point that Pete Rose knew how serious the crime was when he was committing it.
Whatever your opinions on gambling, the MLB takes it very seriously. This is baseball’s unbreakable rule, it’s sole unforgivable curse. When Rose voluntarily accepted a place on the permanently ineligible list he admitted there was a factual reason behind it, and in so doing cast himself forever as a dark part of baseball history. By the current, and likely continuing, rules of how the Hall operates, Rose cannot be allowed without celebrating him — warts and all. This is something the MLB is unwilling to do.
In a perfect world, the Hall and the perception of it would go through a thorough makeover. It would be nice to see that building in Cooperstown become a museum housing info on the entire story of the game, Rose and Black Sox included. As for the honor now associated with induction, change it to something akin to the Lifetime achievement awards often presented at movie awards. By separating the two aspects of the current Hall, everyone would get a lot more sleep. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely to happen in the near future.
