Pete Rose is dead, and as the Hit King greets the great hereafter, the cry for his inclusion in baseball’s Hall of Fame may only grow louder.
Mere hypocrisy, the theory goes, that Major League Baseball would keep Rose on its permanently ineligible list – and by extension, out of the Hall – because he gambled on baseball while the league accepts, encourages, profits off wagers placed on its games.
Don’t believe them.
Rose, who died at 83 Monday at his Las Vegas home, lived the last 35 years of his life in a state of permanent grievance after an exhaustive report concluded that he bet on Cincinnati Reds games in his position of significant influence as Cincinnati Reds manager.
The accusations, the revelations and the hammer that ultimately came down were stunning. It was a highly compressed gut punch to the game, the equivalent of its steroids era and its sign-stealing cheating scandals compressed in a roughly 90-day period that saw one of the game’s icons toppled.
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And ever since August 1989, when commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti leveled his lifetime ban, Rose used the tincture of time as a rehabilitative balm for his image.
Yet through three more commissioners and far more scandals in the game, nothing changed. The game’s all-time greats – some of them cheated, some of them chemically enhanced – greeted each other at the gates of Cooperstown’s Hall.
Rose signed autographs less than 500 feet down Main Street at a collectibles store.
Those 500 feet might as well have been 500 miles, though Rose always had his defenders who’d happily trek twice that distance to fall down at his door.
Yet the passing decades could not erase Rose’s sins – nor should they.
While the voluminous Dowd Report did not turn up evidence Rose fixed games, notebooks seized from his former associate indicate he bet on games not only as a manager, but also as he closed in on toppling Ty Cobb atop baseball’s all-time hits list.
It’s all very sad, and it doesn’t take a proprietary algorithm to assess the damage done to a game when a manager bets on games involving his team. Bad enough as a player, sure, but Rose controlled not only his own destiny but that of 24 other men under his watch. His actions affected the careers, perhaps the livelihoods, of others, and even if it was not his intent, surely the outcome of games.
Rose’s many defenders might at this point ask, well who cares? And it is a fair question.
MLB’s embrace of gambling has been inevitable but at times disgusting, nonetheless.
Look, this arranged marriage was sown in 2018, when a Supreme Court ruling paved the way for legalized sports gambling on a state-by-state basis. In 2024, you can wager on the big game – or even the littlest one – in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
It’s reasonable that sports leagues would have a significant interest in helping regulate this new frontier. It’s understandable that, sure, they’d want to get a little piece of the action, too, what with fresh revenue streams available as their most reliable and lucrative – massive national and regional sports network deals that greatly enrich the biggest franchises in baseball and the NBA – wither.
Yet they certainly didn’t need to pepper stadiums with gambling advertising. To construct sports books literally within the gates of their arenas and stadiums, sad places where the destitute can enjoy some chicken wings while trying to beat the house’s increasingly impossible odds. To blast the airwaves with incessant ads for every janky-ass book offering a promo code and a gateway to addiction.
We now live in a world where LeBron James and Kevin Hart shill for DraftKings, a wildly mixed message that tells every active athlete, from the cricket fields to the collegiate hardwood to the pros, you can look, but you better not touch.
Yet all of that doesn’t make Rose’s transgressions disappear. It has simply tested the level of trust between athlete, league and fan.
As consumers and sports aficionados and perhaps even low-stakes gamblers, we must take it on faith that leagues will do the right thing when it comes to enforcement. That they will truly guard “the integrity of the game” and not the reps of their biggest-time athletes if they’re ensnared in gambling on their sport.
So far, the league’s enforcement arms have a few small pelts on the wall.
The NFL has ensnared a handful of offenders, most notably wide receiver Calvin Ridley, who received a one-year ban for gambling on football games. Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter was hit with a lifetime ban from the NBA for a particularly insidious – and poorly conceived – scheme in which he aimed to affect the outcome of a prop bet involving himself.
And five MLB players were suspended – infielder Tucupita Marcano receiving a lifetime ban – for betting on baseball, a discovery the league credited in part to “significant cooperation from MLB’s legal sportsbook partners.”
The specter of a larger scandal is always looming. The game seemingly dodged a bullet when global superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter admitted to stealing some $16 million from his boss to furnish his own gambling addiction. In the end, there was no “Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal,” but this was an unsettling close call, where bookmakers, associates and the game’s greatest star found themselves in the same orbit.
It’s all pretty jarring. And for those of us who lived through the Rose debacle, hearing athletes discuss point spreads or walk around with virtual casinos in their back pockets is sobering. Be careful, kids.
Yet for as much as Rose liked to make almost anything about himself, this has little to do with him. Sports betting is now the law of much of the land. Leagues are attempting to enforce it. They are punishing wrongdoers.
Rose spat in the face of the game, lied about it, aimed to profit off his contrition. That ate him up, because a case could plausibly be made that nobody loved the game more.
And now he is gone. In five years, so, too, will commissioner Rob Manfred. When his replacement takes the gavel, one of the first questions will almost certainly be, “Will you consider reinstating Pete Rose?”
From Giamatti to Fay Vincent to Bud Selig and now Manfred, the answer was always no, even if Rose managed to wangle an audience with the commissioner to plead his case.
The name will change in the commissioner’s office, but the answer most likely will not. Giamatti died of a heart attack one week after banishing Rose, and the line of succession has upheld his wishes.
Perhaps a change of heart will come. But you shouldn’t bet on it.
