Pete Rose’s posthumous Baseball Hall of Fame argument

His reach was enormous in the same way that baseball once dominated much of the real estate of American sports that today feels impossible to imagine. His baseball career crossed paths with those who played through most of the 20th century and into the first decade of the 21st.

Warren Spahn, who fought the Germans in World War II at the Battle of the Bulge and retired as the winningest left-hander in baseball history, faced Rose 32 times, beginning in 1963, when Rose was 22 and Spahn was 42. Rose hit .531 against him. Dwight Gooden, born in Rose’s second season and retired in 2001, first faced Rose as a 19-year-old in 1984. In 26 at-bats, from age 43 to 45, Rose hit .346 against Gooden.

Rose also played for the entirety of Bobby Bonds‘ MLB career (1968-1981) and managed against his son, Barry, who played from 1986 to 2007. Rose was most associated with Ty Cobb, who was born in the 19th century and was a toddler when baseball changed the walk rule from eight balls to four in 1889. The final hit of Cobb’s career (No. 4,191) occurred a year before the start of the Great Depression, off a pinch double in the first game of a doubleheader. Fifty-seven years later, Rose singled to left-center field, hitting No. 4,192. Tony Gwynn, who retired in 2001 with 3,141 hits of his own, was in right field that night.

Along with Reggie Jackson, Rose was one of the very last baseball players to command the national market the way LeBron James and Steph Curry do now — before baseball made the disastrous decision to market itself as a regional game. Rose lit up Madison Avenue, where stars are truly born, selling everything from cereal to aftershave.

Perhaps, most ironically, Rose was the last baseball player to captivate the nation in pursuit of a major record free of the two scandals — steroids and his own — that forever tainted baseball’s two most important assets: the record book and the Hall of Fame. He was that big.

Rose was the entry point for millions of baseball fans for a certain generation, and their nostalgia for him was so strong that it could return the most hard-bitten adults back to childhood. He was also the perfect story for baseball: the Cincinnati kid who grew up in the birthplace of the professional game, eventually excelling for the home team — and being the one to win a title there after a 35-year drought.

In Mark Monroe and J.J. Abrams’ four-part HBO documentary, “Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose,” Hall of Famer and Dayton, Ohio, native Mike Schmidt said a poster of Rose hung on a door in his grandmother’s house. For nearly the entirety of his post-playing life, Rose’s die-hards would force their old, younger selves to reconcile their boyhood idol with the disgrace he would become. So many would relent, choosing to recall the unadulterated Rose; others would fight — the facts and the hypocrisy.

None of these reasons — numbers and memories — sufficiently explain how Rose could have lived so deeply in the American bloodstream for so long. America has certainly endured too many public falls to make Rose unique — and yet he was. There had to be something more revealing about the saga of Pete Rose. If it said nothing more about him, certainly it exposed more about us.

Only one way to play

“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.” — Major League Baseball Rule 21

OF ALL THE stars who fell to Earth, Rose was by far the least complicated. Unlike the long, lost “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, no new batch of scholarship ever emerged attempting to exonerate him. New allegations about Rose, such as an alleged affair with a minor while he was married, only made him look worse. And yet his supporters still campaigned for him.

Rose was unequivocally guilty of betting on baseball when he was first suspected of doing so by the commissioner’s office in 1987 and banned two years later — but the loud choruses of people, especially in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, only grew louder, vilifying leadership for targeting their guy.

Rose was just as guilty 15 years later when selling his story and admitting he had been lying all along. His infamous “I didn’t bet on baseball, I have too much respect for the game, too much love for the game,” was a lie finally put to rest by his own hand — and yet the people responded to his betrayal of them even more convinced Rose belonged in the Hall of Fame.

He was guilty every day and every night of his life of doing the thing he swore he had never done, right up until the news struck that Monday evening in September announcing his death. Still, the first words from so many mouths, even on the campaign trail, were the same: Put Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame. Now.

When stars fail, they are discarded and diminished. They let their public down and the public moves on. Even when superstars give us nothing but joy and dominance, they still diminish, their time passes and new generations who never saw them play ungraciously wonder whether they were ever any good in the first place. Time erodes everything.

Not Pete Rose. His star never faded in presence or the imagination. He was, by the simple mention of his name, a referendum, still at the passionate center of the longest nondebate in American history.

Rose endured because you could see it on his face 200 days a year that he cared — the same way that fans do. Because over 24 seasons and 3,562 games, 15,890 plate appearances and 14,053 at-bats — to go along with his record 4,256 hits — you always knew Rose was fully engaged in the game of baseball. He reinforced that dedication with his titanic individual and team achievements.

“There’s only one way to play,” Rose said. “And that’s to bust ass.”

When news of Rose’s death circulated, I texted former pitcher Dave Stewart, known for “The Stare,” his three World Series titles and four straight 20-win seasons with the Oakland A’s. Rose went 1-for-7 with a walk against him.

“He’s a Hall of Famer for sure,” Stewart texted back. “He’s the guy you teach your kids to play like. He’s the example.”

Show it on your face

“I want to be remembered as a person, a competitor that gave 100% every time I went out on the field. Sometimes I wasn’t too good, but nobody could accuse me of cheating them out of what they paid to see.”

ROSE REFLECTED AMERICA’S contradictory views of itself; the two-touchdown favorite that loves to see itself as the scrappy underdog, shoving its humble origin story of being handed nothing down our collective throats, until it’s time to show everyone who was boss all along. Then, suddenly, the colossus flexes and resumes its rightful place as The Greatest Country in the World. The empire not to be tread upon. The second to none.

Rose, who was born in the lower middle class, was comfortable socializing with Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Tommy Harper and the other Black players on the Reds against the wishes of the team’s management. Rose was no racist, but he existed as an avatar of whiteness — and of America. In the 1960s, he was the fresh-faced white Midwestern kid with the boyish haircut playing the American game when the fight for civil rights — and against them — was tearing the country apart. As the nation’s sports grew more Black, Rose became representative of the scrappiness that white fans saw in themselves.

Rose — despite possessing 20/20 vision and world-class hand-eye coordination — was lauded for being that gritty overachiever who was not the best player, but the hardest worker who got the most out of his limited abilities, which is precisely how Americans want to be portrayed in their self-made, come-from-nothing fantasies.

He symbolized exceptionalism. The big leaguer who never forgot the little league lessons, of how the game is played and who was treated as unique in his ferocious professionalism, even though the italicized quote above was not said by Rose, but by Bob Gibson during his 1981 Hall of Fame induction speech — proof that many players brought passion and professionalism to their job. For an American colossus that always needed to be first and best, it somehow through Rose became an asset not to be the biggest, fastest and strongest. Because Rose provided the optic of the white, blue-collar little guy outworking the more talented (but assumed less disciplined) Black and Latino guys who were overtaking the sport.

The white ticket-buying dads, who were (and remain) the financial lifeblood of the game might admire the physical gifts of Black players, but through Rose, the game could still look like them. Run out every ball. Like Rose. Show it on your face. Like Rose. Think the game. Like Rose. Rose did not play along with the racial dramas that played out around him; he knew his hard-nosed Black teammates like Robinson and Hal McRae also weren’t the most physically gifted but busted their asses every at-bat, every play, just as he did. Still, so many of these stereotypical optics were crucial to his public. The Black players saw through it all and loved Rose because they were pushing each other competitively, but the white public needed Rose to reflect them.

Through Rose, they, too, could appear less physically gifted but still superior. Rose provided the mirror. Long after his career ended, he would remain the avatar — but not in the way they expected.

What about Rose?

“I will be told that I am an idealist. I hope so.” — A. Bartlett Giamatti

JOINING THE BASEBALL Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) provides entry into the central nervous system of the game. The writers do not just cover the game, they own some of its most coveted intellectual property. Sick of the writers, ready to wrest free their remaining influence, the game and its players over the years have attempted to escape from tradition by creating new awards.

They were nice, but nobody really wanted them. The players want the Cy Young, MVP, Rookie of the Year and Manager of the Year awards, the awards that connect today to yesterday — and those awards belong to the BBWAA.

The baseball writers largely decide who enters the Hall of Fame … and who doesn’t. The newest members are given the highest numbers. My first number, in 1998, was 806. In 2024, my number was 118. In the gallows humor of the press box, the lower the number, the higher the chance your number’s almost up.

Admission comes with the ultimate perk: members who served 10 consecutive years are eligible to vote for the Hall. Seventy-five percent of the vote is required for induction. Players with less than 5 percent in any year fall permanently off the ballot. Players once remained on the ballot for 15 years, a number now reduced to 10.

My first vote came in the winter of 2007 for the Class of 2008. Goose Gossage (85.8%) was the only inductee selected by the BBWAA. Brady Anderson (no votes) was in his first (and last) year on the ballot. Mark McGwire (128 votes, 23.6%) was in his second. I recalled a thought in my first years of voting: The time would soon come when the entire ballot would consist of steroid-era players.

Rose wasn’t on the ballot and never has been. In 1991, just before his first year of eligibility, the Hall instituted what was known as the “Pete Rose Rule,” stating that any player on MLB’s ineligible list was therefore prohibited from appearing on the Hall of Fame ballot — including the Veterans Committee (now known as the Era Committees), the second chance for players the BBWAA did not admit.

In 1936, in the Hall’s inaugural year, Joe Jackson received two votes. Hal Chase, connected to gambling throughout his career — including the infamous 1919 World Series fix that buried Jackson — received 4.9% of the vote that same year and 9% the next before no longer being considered. The two, separate, independent bodies of MLB and the Hall had never before colluded to create policy, but Rose was too big to trust precedent. The Rose Rule guaranteed against a popular uprising.

I stopped voting consistently for the Hall about 5 years ago. Labor was the reason. The Hall gave its voters specific instructions on Rose. He wasn’t on the ballot. In 2007, the Mitchell Report, baseball’s internal investigation of the sport during the steroid era, concluded the period to be a “collective failure,” yet the Hall offered voters no instruction on how to proceed. In turn, voters have immortalized some of the steroid-suspected — Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, Iván “Pudge” Rodriguez, David Ortiz — and kept out the steroid-confirmed and confirmed-adjacent: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Gary Sheffield and Manny Ramirez.

Within the inconsistencies and selective justice of the steroid era has been the constant whisper: What about Rose?

While the writers were keeping the players out of the Hall, management was inducting itself in. Bud Selig, who presided over the entire period, is in. He even has a statue at Miller Park. The killer of two title droughts, Theo Epstein will soon be a well-deserved Hall of Famer, but without Ramirez, the 2004 and 2007 Red Sox titles are far less likely. Joe Torre and Jim Leyland are rightfully Hall of Fame managers, but Clemens and Andy Pettitte, Bonds, Pudge Rodriguez and Sheffield helped them get there.

Punishing players while management enjoyed induction was unacceptable. To vote for players who cheated the game and their fellow players was to be complicit in the sport’s lack of leadership. They were kept out while the executives enjoyed their day in Cooperstown after doing MLB’s (and the Hall’s) dirty work. For this and numerous other reasons, the process stopped feeling like the high honor it once was, and I chose to no longer participate. The day had been long in coming.

A piece of the action

“The matter of Mister Rose is now closed. It will be debated and discussed. Let no one think it did not hurt baseball. That hurt will pass, however, as the great glory of the game asserts itself and the resilient institution goes forward.” — Giamatti

THE RESILIENT INSTITUTION went forward. Walking across Park Avenue about a decade ago, Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLB Players Association, glumly recounted a scene that resembled the moment in “The Godfather” when the entire enterprise of organized crime was faced with an enormous moneymaking opportunity, which the Corleone family viewed as an existential threat: narcotics. In a meeting with MLB leadership, Clark recalled the scenario: the laws were changing. Gambling would soon be legalized. Some financial estimates put the windfall from legalized gambling as high as $45 billion over the coming years. Football already had a head start on everyone because of the embedded culture of gambling that has fueled the sport for more than a half-century.

All of the other sports — including the NBA, NCAA and NHL — were going leap at this staggering pot of money at the middle of the table. Baseball either had to get in, too, or be left behind. Clark was from the old school. Gambling was the ultimate sin of the sport. But baseball had made up its mind: The dollars were too overwhelming. “There’s a lot of money in that white powder,” Sonny Corleone famously said in the film. Despite the specter of commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who banned Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox for life), Pete Rose and the Philadelphia Phillies, there was a lot of money in those parleys. Baseball leapt in.

The Phillies, established in 1883, losers of more games than any team in professional baseball history, won their first championship with Rose in 1980, and a National League pennant three years later. From 1883 to 1978, the Phillies won two pennants (1915 and 1950) and no World Series. From 1979 to 1983 with Rose, they won a championship and two pennants. Ninety-five years of losing without Rose, winners with him.

When the Carpenter family, the Phillies’ owners, at long last held up that 1980 World Series trophy, they did so because of gambling. Thirty-seven years earlier, in March 1943, a consortium led by William D. Cox purchased the Phillies only to have Bucky Harris, the former manager, accuse Cox of betting on games. Landis banished Cox for life. In the wake of the ruling, the Carpenters took over the team and owned the Phillies from 1943 until 1981.

Baseball took the gambling money the same way the states that legalized marijuana took the money. In the latter case, many states confronted the hypocrisy of profiting from drugs while millions of people were currently incarcerated for profiting (or using) drugs by reducing or expunging prison sentences. In an introductory news conference, commissioner Rob Manfred barely used the word “gambling.” He called it “audience engagement.”

That resurrected the undying question: What about Rose?

Baseball kept Rose on the ineligible list even though today’s broadcasters cannot construct a paragraph without mentioning the oddsmakers. With the approval of Major League Baseball, millions of dollars change hands on every pitch, every swing. Bally’s (now FanDuel Sports Network) is the regional sports network broadcast rightsholder of several teams, including the Reds. Nor should it be forgotten that for all the hype surrounding his remarkable 50/50 performance this season, Shohei Ohtani began the 2024 season at the center of the biggest gambling scandal in history, a story forgotten faster than a 6-4-3 double play.

In the HBO documentary, Rose is interviewed at the Bally Sports Club at Great American Ball Park. During the American League Division Series between the Royals and Yankees, the giant logo for MGM Bet adorned a bullpen wall. On MLB Network and ESPN — another rights holder with its betting service ESPN BET — odds for each game scroll across the crawl line.

Fittingly for the times, during the tense eighth inning of the deciding Game 5 of the ALDS between Cleveland and Detroit, TBS erroneously and embarrassingly cut away from live action and aired a DraftKings commercial. During the season, the fluctuating win probability graphic hovers above the game score. In the fifth inning of Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, TBS took a moment to remind viewers of the DraftKings Same Game Parlay of the Night. To watch a baseball game is to be bombarded by waves of gambling information masquerading as important data — when the goal is to encourage prop bets.

When the institution is corrupted, the guilty become victims. Steroids and gambling increased Rose’s standing as a populist, the flawed man singled out by the vindictive, hypocritical institution. Rose’s transgressions, already forgiven by his partisans, now resembled to them the unfair exception. The institution’s mishandling of one scandal was now rehabilitating another.

At a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona, earlier this summer, Dave Stewart said he has changed his mind on Rose and now supports his Hall of Fame induction, even though Rose broke rules then that would still result in a lifetime banishment today. The reason is uncomplicated: Baseball has chosen to partner with the gambling industry. Stewart does not deny the money or the financial imperatives that drove the decision, but also believes taking the money also comes with the collateral cost, like marijuana, of expunging sentences. If there are no longer rules, this one should not apply disproportionately to Rose. The resilient institution went forward by choosing money over its credibility. That sounds familiar.

Accountability

“You wanna cut my b—s off? I mean, enough is enough. All I did was bet on baseball. I didn’t rob banks. I didn’t go around knocking up girls. To be honest with you … the only bad quality I had was that I bet on baseball.” — Pete Rose

THE HBO DOCUMENTARY on Rose doubled as a last-ditch appeal for a Hall of Fame induction before the polls closed. Rose was unrepentant in his reflections, and he left that to his loyal followers, who made excuses that Rose would not make for himself.

When he did speak, Rose was not wistful but defiant. He spoke like the victim. Like a man done wrong. Like a narcissist. Like America. The two — the man and his country — reflected one another in that narcissism. Rose and his sycophants have mastered the art of conspiracy in a land where it has become a second language.

“Wouldn’t it be horrible if I died and they put me in the Hall of Fame next year?” Rose asked. “They forgive them when they die. That seems kind of unfair to me.”

Finally, the significance of Rose, of why he still mattered — and always found a sympathetic network to air a grievance as stale as a crouton — began to crystallize: Pete Rose embodied the redefinition of American exceptionalism.

If it had once been an arrogant but admirable mythology — the country as a unique entrepreneurial experiment bound by an uncommon democratic ideal — American exceptionalism no longer signified not being exceptional but demanding to be the exception. Rose and his ahistorical supporters wanted what they wanted when they wanted it.

Rose had been told no, and exceptions do not accept no for an answer. They make their own rules. They can lie for nearly half of their adult lives, and when they finally admit the truth, they move the goalposts, as narcissists do. As America does. He bet on baseball he said, but it’s not like he killed anyone.

As a final statement, so convinced that he had been the one who suffered after all, Rose decided that after 15 years of denying he had ever bet on the sport, the lie that had long been his truth should be seen as a virtue. Now, proud and full-throated, he voiced the former lie as a closing argument.

“I hate people who talk about me, and they start talking about Joe Jackson. Joe Jackson was a great player, OK? But Joe Jackson took money to throw a baseball game in the World Series,” Rose said. “I bet on my own team to win … so there’s a big difference: take the money to throw a game or bet on your own team to win.”

Americans say they demand accountability. They see the entitled and say, “I couldn’t get away with that at my job.” They tell themselves no one is above the law and rules are rules and then twist themselves into pretzels for Rose just because he taught them to choke up with two strikes.

What Americans really mean is accountability is for the unexceptional. For the ones on the bottom, on whom this society stomps mercilessly for not being rich, successful or functional. They were getting something for nothing — off everyone else’s back. Who was going to hold them accountable?

Accountability is for the poor, the unexceptional, and the non-celebrity Black. The ones who get knees in their backs and cops on their necks. It’s for the ones who get their asses kicked or don’t have enough sycophants lapping up their every word. It’s for the ones whose swings we didn’t copy in the backyard. Around the dinner table, and at the bar, and at the polls, the ones who squawk about the injustice done to Rose are so often the ones believing in law and order and dismissing the dead Black kids with an uncomplicated, It’s so simple. Why didn’t they just obey?

And yet, there is no simpler piece of legalese in baseball than Rule 21, Section D, Paragraph 2. If you bet on baseball, you’re banned for life.

Why didn’t Pete just obey?

Total victory

“I thought this was a country of giving second chances. What happened to me? What happened to me?” — Pete Rose

THE DOCUMENTARY DID not serve its purpose. The final push failed, and at 83 years old, Pete Rose died without ever standing at the podium in Cooperstown, fully recognized as rehabilitated and immortal. Joe Jackson, who died in 1951, knew the feeling. As did George Steinbrenner, the convicted felon with seven World Series championships and 11 pennants.

In a moment of complete absurdity, the longtime Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman said a posthumous Rose induction would be the “greatest injustice of all.” His exclusion from the Hall is not an injustice — outrage for Rose is better spent on Josh Gibson or even the illiterate, manipulated Jackson. Time will decide whether Rose will be a victim of vindictiveness in the Leo Durocher vein, the man baseball hated so much he would be inducted into the Hall three years after his death.

The matter of Mr. Rose has always been a straw argument. No one has ever argued Rose was unworthy as a player, just as no one argues the accomplishments of Bonds, Clemens or Alex Rodriguez.

The resistance to a Rose induction — and its true importance — lies in rejecting this dark redefinition of exceptionalism, the insistence on total victory, that if you lie long enough and loud enough and have enough support for that lie, you can beat people into submission and get what you want. You can make your own rules.

You get to determine the punishment and the length and decide that “enough is enough” because you said so.

That may not be the example of American exceptionalism Rose once represented, but that is the space he represents now. In the end he decided to brazenly lean into it, and the famous and powerful of every walk of American life apply the same unaccountability to themselves. When the institutions fail, as baseball has failed, their failure becomes the best defense for guilty people like Rose. They can argue they are now innocent, and this is one of the great costs of the resilient institution trading its purported standards for money.

His supporters can argue about all Rose has been denied when Rose was denied nothing, nothing he had not possessed and lost on his own. He died with his baseball reputation intact; no one said Rose was not one of the greatest baseball players of all time. The game had allowed him to enter its ballparks. He was introduced to a new generation of fans on its nationally televised postseason broadcasts. No one questioned the results of the games he bet on. No one called for any of his records to contain asterisks.

Pete Rose lived and died as the first son of Cincinnati. He is equally beloved in Philadelphia as one of its own. Take a drive to Cooperstown. Go into the Hall of Fame, and you’ll find Pete Rose. His artifacts are on display. Go to Cincinnati, to Great American Ball Park, and outside you’ll find a statue of Rose in his famous onrushing headfirst slide. Talk to the greatest players of the game. Talk to its greatest fans. They’ll all tell you about Rose.

All Rose did not get was a plaque, an honor that was not denied him, but one he lost because of his undeniable actions, because one institution held him — and itself — accountable. Rose got everything out of life: the stats, the adulation, the money, the pleasures, and to an overwhelming degree, the forgiveness. The only thing Rose did not achieve was total victory, which in today’s version of American exceptionalism — where we must have it all, or insist we’ve been wronged — has become the equivalent of injustice.