“Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.”

Above, Rule 21. Pete Rose broke it — and, after almost 15 years, he has finally admitted to breaking it.

So now what do we do with him?

Ask a hundred people that question, you’ll get a hundred different answers, but anyone who cares about the issue would probably agree that it’s time to do something with Pete Rose — and not because it would finally put a stop to the endless arguing over whether he belongs in the Hall of Fame. It won’t do any such thing, sad to say. But as it stands now, organized baseball needs to get The Pete Rose Issue off its desk, and soon, for two reasons.

First, every guy elected to the Hall of Fame since 1990 has seen himself relegated to a sub-headline, because the story is perennially framed as “Pete Rose Still Ineligible For The Hall — Oh, Yeah, And Two Reasonably Well-Behaved Guys Did Get In, But Anyway, About Pete Rose.” Take Gary Carter’s induction as an example. I always liked The Kid, but I didn’t think of him as Hall of Fame material back in the eighties. Did anyone want to discuss that with me when the writers sent him in? Did anyone want to talk about Carter’s underrated defensive contributions, or the relevance of the parks he hit in? No, not really. Everybody wanted to talk about Pete Rose.

Second, and far more importantly, all the wrangling over Pete Rose, who is one guy, lets the commissioner continue to avoid the far bigger problems that affect all of baseball. Whether you think of Pete Rose as one guy who got more hits than any other guy, or as one guy who’s a bigger slime than any other guy, he’s…one guy. The epidemic steroid use at all levels of organized baseball is not about one guy. The disparity between small- and big-market teams is not about one guy. It’s about everyone on the field, everyone in the stands, and everyone who watches on TV or listens on the radio or gives a damn about the game. The steroid thing is far more threatening to the integrity of the game than anything one guy ever did (with the possible exception of Hal Chase, but he’s another column). The use of steroids is outright cheating, to my mind, and instead of dealing with it — and protecting the Hall of Fame from future controversy when guys who played and set records juiced start coming up for election in a few years’ time — what is Selig doing? He’s taking meetings with Pete damn Rose.

Okay, so I don’t know for a fact that Selig crossed “deal with ‘roids” out of his day planner and wrote in “buy Pete Rose lunch and let him tell me some more half-truths” instead. But I do think that it tends to distract us, the fans, from issues that really threaten the game, and I think that, if we could just get Pete Rose out of our faces once and for all, we could start raising holy hell on the call-in shows about drug testing, instead of whining at each other about slugging percentages and the sportsmanship clause.

So, let’s get Pete Rose dealt with. Let’s put him on the Hall of Fame ballot, and if he gets in, let’s slap an asterisk the size of the Goodyear blimp next to his plaque and get on with our lives.

Rose bet on baseball. Worse, he bet on his own team — and even if you bet on your team to win, you’ll make decisions differently as a bettor from the way you’ll make them as a straight-up manager. You’ll do your line-up differently, you’ll make different pitching changes — it’ll have an effect. Not like if you bet on your team to lose, but an effect nonetheless. Add to that the fact that he’s only just now fessing up to it, and I don’t want him to manage a team, at any level; I don’t want him to coach, I don’t want him in the broadcast booth, I don’t even want him to throw out any first pitches. Hell, I wouldn’t let the guy use my bathroom. The idea of taking him off the permanently ineligible list — feh.

But he can’t get into the Hall of Fame unless he’s taken off the ineligible list. As bad a precedent as I think that sets, and as much as I dislike the idea of saying, in effect, “Any other rule-breaker would have to suck it up, but we’ll make an exception in your case because you hold the all-time hits record” — he does hold the all-time hits record. He isn’t in the Hall of Fame, and it’s — well, it’s weird.

The Hall of Fame isn’t just about records and stats, of course. Roger Maris isn’t in the Hall, and if he had gotten selected in the pre-McGwire/Bonds era, it would seem like a blunder today. But the Hall of Fame isn’t “just about” any one thing, really — it’s about a lot of things, including the notorious Rule 5 on the ballot. Rule 5 reads as follows: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team on which the player played.”

Rule 5 is frequently cited as the reason Pete Rose does not belong in Cooperstown. Fair enough, since he fails the integrity and character tests in spectacular fashion. But…so does Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb broke rules too, the ones about not getting into fistfights with fans. Or umpires. Or teammates. But he’s in the Hall, and so is Cap Anson, who basically built the color barrier in baseball and then patrolled it with a caulking gun so nobody got through. We don’t call virulent racism “sportsmanship” where I come from. King Kelly drinking himself to death, Rogers Hornsby peeing in the communal shower every day and forcing his players to appeal to the team owner to get him to stop, Gaylord Perry throwing spitballs, Babe Ruth collapsing from an attack of venereal disease…this is “character”?

It’s also worth pointing out that Rose broke the rule in question as a manager, not as a player. It might seem like splitting hairs, but he’d get into the Hall of Fame based on his accomplishments as a player, not as a manager — and as a player, he busted his ass. He made the All-Star team, like, half a hundred times; he led the league in batting average three times; he’s got more hits than anyone, and as a switch-hitter too. He had a Hall of Fame career — and if you watch the footage of him from the sixties, it’s something to see, partly because he has a beaten-up ham with giant caterpillars stuck to the sides for a head, but mostly because he’s running around, scrapping, rolling, jumping, sprinting down to first even on a base on balls, making shit happen on every play, and he’s always smiling. He’s not just playing baseball, he’s playing the hell out of it, and he’s thrilled about it. To me, that counts, that he played so hard and obviously loved it so much.

“Well, bully for him, but he bet on his own team.” Yes, he did, and as I said, I don’t love the idea of exempting Pete Rose from the standard punishment for breaking the rule against gambling — but if he’s barred from the Hall, make it because he broke the rule, not because he’s just generally a jerk. Cooperstown is full of plain old jerks — and it’s also full of guys accused of fixing games (Tris Speaker, also a Klansman), taking bribes to sit out key games (Rube Waddell…whom we can probably excuse, since evidence suggests that he suffered from a developmental delay, and they never proved that he took a bribe…but then again, they never investigated it in the first place), consorting with gamblers (Leo Durocher, who took a year’s suspension for it), running unlicensed gambling parlors (John McGraw), compulsively betting the ponies with the team’s equipment fund (Rogers Hornsby again — in fact, it’s always fucking Hornsby. Hey, guess what organization Hornsby belonged to? Yep. Klan. Barely human, that guy), ticket-scalping (Rube Marquard), and just straight-up cheating (Whitey Ford, Gaylord Perry).

You can argue that, if you put Rose in Cooperstown, you have to put Shoeless Joe in too — I won’t agree with you, because Jackson took a bribe to lose a World Series and dogged it in the field to that end, and as sins against the game go, it’s a different order of magnitude. You can argue that Rose just isn’t impressive enough stat-wise for us to forgive him his mistakes, but I won’t agree with that either; the place is full of guys who, stat-wise, don’t come close to belonging there. Lloyd Waner, Chick Hafey, Joe Tinker — come on. Joe Tinker? Getting a poem written about your DP combo shouldn’t cut it at this level. Rose has the numbers. You can argue that he screwed up and he’s got to take the punishment, and I don’t have much to say against that. He did screw up. The punishment for that particular screw-up is not really ambiguous.

But.

As I said before, the Hall of Fame isn’t just about your batting average, and it isn’t just about whether you went home after the game and ate milk and cookies or stayed out all night drinking, and it isn’t just about how many pennants your team won, or how big a park you played in, or if you had a way more famous teammate who overshadowed you — it’s about the big picture. I think we have to see the Hall of Fame and the players enshrined there not as a measure of talent and/or character alone, but as a record of the game’s history also — (ham-headed) warts and all. I had a conversation with the Couch Baron about it yesterday, and it occurred to us that, if for no other reason, Pete Rose belongs in Cooperstown because the discussion about whether he belongs in Cooperstown has preoccupied so many of us for so long.

The Hall of Fame isn’t reserved for men of great principle; it exists to honor men of great talent and their achievements in the game. Men, not angels — many of whom performed their wonderful feats in spite of bad decisions and revolting personalities, not because of them. True, most of the non-angelic behavior isn’t relevant to the Rose issue, because Babe Ruth ate and drank too much and boinked everything in a skirt and wrecked his car, like, weekly, but it didn’t affect the game as a whole and he didn’t hurt anyone but himself. Whitey Ford, on the other hand, pitched in World Series games — and may have cheated during them. Do we want him kicked out of the Hall for that? Or do we want to make a note of it when we talk about Whitey Ford, add that to the discussion, let that become a part of the history of the game — just like all the things we know now about Judge Landis and Joe DiMaggio and poor broken-down Grover Cleveland Alexander coming out of the bullpen, just like all the things we know now about Pete Rose? He’s a human being, and he’s not all that good at that, as it turns out, but he’d get on base if he had to hail a cab to do it, and it’s all part of the story, the whole important story of what made him a famous baseball player, good and bad — part of the story of the game and how it keeps becoming.

It’s hard to tell if I’ve put forth a coherent argument here — I hope it’s reasonably clear what I mean. It’s not even an argument, really, since I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind; I don’t think it’s “wrong” to believe that Pete Rose should remain ineligible forever and for everything, amen. I can live with it if he never gets a plaque, because it’s not like I won’t know how many hits he got, or that he got more than anyone else ever did. But he’s a part of the game of baseball, a matter of its record, and years from now, when nobody really remembers seeing him play except now and then on a highlight reel, or why we used to raise our voices about him…well, it’s not a Hall of Footnotes.

January 12, 2004

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