Rose deserves the grace in death he didn’t get in life
Time has not been unkind as much as indifferent to Pete Rose, making him no better than he deserved, allowing him to fade into a cliché, noticing him now because he is dead, restarting an old argument that lost its heat when baseball joined hands with gambling.
How silly it all seems some 35 years after Rose was canceled from the game he defined. The reason for his disgrace can now be found in ads between innings and on ballpark signage.
Bet on baseball? Sure. Got a phone? Walk across the street if you’ve got the energy. Pete Rose will always be a gambler. Baseball has become an enabler.
What was banishment in 1989 is earnest commerce in 2024. And yet the stain of yesterday sticks to Rose through tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Rose has been judged by those who never got a basehit, and Rose had 4,256 of them, leaving him to hustle collectibles, in summers just down Main Street in Cooperstown from the brick museum that mocks him, but more steadily in Las Vegas where he died.
He was left alone to protest the unfairness of consequence, to exist on the periphery of the game that continued merrily on without him. He needed special permission to be honored and was not too proud to ask for it.
Rose repeatedly appealed to be considered for the Hall of Fame, admitting after denying again and again that he had bet on baseball. I have always believed that it was not the gambling for which he could not be forgiven but the lying about it.
Every reminiscence of Rose has included, in headlines or high up, his exclusion from the game for gambling, the defining detail of his life, earned and indelible, along with his omission from the Hall of Fame, unearned and permanent.
A snarky columnist once wrote that the only way Rose would get into the Hall is to die and now that he has, I might need to take that back. The rule that has kept Rose out will have to change, but it has not for Shoeless Joe Jackson, nor is amnesty likely to come for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, sinners of a different stripe.
What I have found from among those already in the Hall of Fame is that they are not eager to accommodate anyone who did not get in the same way they did.
Yet, as in his life, the Hall of Fame is the beacon in Rose’s death, as if it will obliterate the wrongs and make a complicated human journey all right for Rose. That is bunk, of course, but some honors weigh more than others.
Every review of Rose, like this one, predictably comes to the Hall of Fame, and if I still had a vote and Rose was eligible, whether out of pity or justice, I would vote him in, the same for Bonds and Clemens.
I do not insist, as some ex-Presidents have, that Rose be put in the Hall, right now, while we are still thinking about it, because Rose’s cause will fade and the self-satisfied sentinels of baseball’s scrapbook will give Rose no more thought, filed away with the ghosts and the disgraced.
The Hall is full of those already, but nowhere on their plaques does it say that Ty Cobb once beat a cripple with his own crutches, or that Cobb and Rogers Hornsby conspired to fix a game or that Babe Ruth was serially unfaithful or that Mickey Mantle ruined his liver and was jumped to the head of list for a new one.
Absolution does not come on a sportswriter’s ballot. A plaque on a wall does not erase personal misconduct — wife beating, drug or alcohol addiction, racism, theft, all the usual vices. Nor cheating on taxes, which Rose did and went to prison for.
It matters not that Rose was the most enjoyable of baseball companions, that he got more from less than those who got less from more, that he was egotistical and selfish, that maybe he got all those hits because he played so long, no other player did it, no other player ever will.