Reinstating Pete Rose?

Did you hear that Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is seriously considering reinstating Pete Rose into baseball? I think this is a question that has been long overdue. One of the greatest hitters in the history of and the sport’s all-time hit leader, Pete Rose was a study in fierce determination and an everyman’s glee at being able to play a game for a living. That he is being kept away from the sport for so long is a travesty, particularly when you consider that any wagering that he did was never against his own team. If he had bet against his own team, I can see where the integrity of the games in which he participated come into question. Yet the Dowd Report turned up no betting slips that implicated Pete Rose as having bet against his own team. Baseball needs to recognize Pete Rose’s greatness as a player or continue to make light of any shred of significance the Baseball Hall of Fame continues to cling to.

The common comparison here is Pete Rose versus Shoeless Joe Jackson. Based upon his playing accomplishments, Jackson is a player who should be in the Hall of Fame. However, as a member of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, Jackson was one of the players who accepted money from gamblers in order to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. So Pete Rose and Joe Jackson gambled on baseball and are both banned from the sport. Open and shut case, right? Wrong. Even though Joe Jackson played well during the 1919 World Series, he still accepted the money offered him under the pretense that he would lay down during key moments of certain games so as to influence the betting line. Thus, he damaged the image of the sport. On a side note, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team wasn’t all that inferior to the White Sox. This is something that history as most people remember it has simply got it wrong. The Redlegs had a number of skilled players on offense and defense and the pitc! her’s mound, led by stars like Edd Roush, Heinie Groh, Jake Daubert, Sherry Magee, Morrie Rath, Dolph Luque and Slim Sallee. Pitching and defense were their primary stock in trade, but their roster was stacked as a whole. The White Sox versus the Reds wasn’t a men versus boys contest. Sure, the White Sox had Joe Jackson, Eddie Collins and Ed Cicotte, who are all Hall of Fame caliber (Collins being in the Hall), but they were so dominant that the Reds belong on the same field.

Pete Rose played for championship teams. As a player he found great success, never giving an inch on any play. He was known primarily as a line drive machine who was always in the run for a batting title, but perhaps what was most remarkable about Pete Rose on the playing field is that he played Gold glove caliber defense at three different positions: first base, third base and left field. That is a unique accomplishment, and it gets lost amidst the 4,256 hits he peppered all over the ballpark.

Bart Giamatti was the commissioner of baseball when Pete Rose was suspended.Giamatti was a great fan of the game, an educated man and a poet. He said these words once about baseball, and he could almost have been speaking of the disappointment he felt when he discovered that banning Pete Rose from the game was inevitable:

“It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Commissioner Giamatti died of a heart attack. I wonder how much of that has to do with Pete Rose.