Pete Rose has just passed away at 83. That will no doubt bring forward yet again one of the diciest of ethical issues in sports: Should he be selected to Baseball's Hall of Fame?
On paper, it's a no-brainer, and ridiculous to suggest otherwise. He's still, and because of big money contracts and the inclination to retire early now, probably will always be, the all-time leader in base hits with 4256. Beyond that, his on-field actions, his aggressiveness (sometimes pretentious, as when he would sprint to first base upon walking) and nickname of Charlie Hustle made him an icon to many.
But Rose smudged the game itself. Addicted to gambling--and upon his own admission, though much later--he bet on baseball games while managing one of its major league teams. Implicitly, he's been blamed for the sudden death of Bart Giamatti, then commissioner of baseball and a raging idealist of the game's contributions to our world ("Baseball breaks your heart," he once wrote, in a hauntingly prescient phrase), who died very soon after making the ruling that banned Rose from baseball from that day forward.
He has also been linked to fooling around with underage girls--not a good image for someone trying to be in someone else's Hall of Fame. His baseball accomplishments are terrific. How he conducted himself beyond his sports career is not.
The betting alone is shaky, but if he had bet on horses or football games, he might even be forgiven. But he didn't. He bet on the game he said he loved so much, despite how bad he made it look.
For many of the Baseball Writers of America, the institution in charge of nominating and selecting the members of the Hall of Fame (with the exception of a players' committee which might override a rejection here and there), what Rose did is unforgivable. I happen to know something about some of the members of that group, or at least those who used to be.
During the 1980s, I earned myself a master's degree in journalism from Marquette University. To do that, one must write a thesis. I figured to combine two things I loved, journalism and baseball (I was in the middle of my experience of writing a local sports column), after reading a book that suggested that baseball writers--which I once dreamed of becoming, but life got in the way--didn't especially like what they did but you know, like other things, it's a living.
So I thought, pre-internet: They must stay in Milwaukee while the teams they cover play at (then) County Stadium. They would most likely work out of their rooms and they might eat breakfast or lunch at those hotels. I also did some digging as to who wrote for what newspaper (still in that heyday, soon to sunset). I also learned the hotels at which the visiting teams stayed and wondered, Could they be the same? Would make sense to try to get 'insider' stories.
I put that guessing together and called front desks. Sure enough: not only were the writers there, they were dispatched to me straightaway and suddenly I would be talking to them (our world now being much different, I highly doubt that you'd be able to do this now). I invited them to lunch. Most said yes; this to someone they'd never met.
I brought my tape recorder. We'd have the most fascinating talks. Going around the league, contributing to their newspapers in an important way--what fan didn't turn to the sports page every morning?--but operating mostly facelessly, they were eager to talk to anyone interested in what they did and how they did it, to get a glance under the hood, so to speak.
I was having the fun of my life. There's nothing like the enthusiasm that original research gives you. And I learned quite the opposite of what I had postulated: Baseball writers loved what they did, but like most of the rest of us, would take a moment to whine about its challenges and its daily grind of deadlines and need to say about games in a fresh way, even though what would take place on the field would have ringing similarities to the last game and the one before that.
But they also considered (and still do, I'm sure) themselves guardians of the game's lore and history, a significant contribution to our culture. They knew that what they wrote on a daily basis, while not necessarily anything a Pulitzer Prize committee might consider, would be ensconced in someone's library and archives forever. That status, they took very seriously.
I talked to just a few of them at later dates. They were crabbier, which meant I'd interrupted them in the middle of something, which could be any time of the day or night for baseball writers, who write about baseball generally besides the teams to which they are assigned. In no indirect way, then, they have to be 'on' 24-7, because staying in, maybe, Seattle, they might get a call about something in New York. They do not take fools gladly.
Considering all that, their stance against Rose being in the Hall of Fame makes sense. If they're the ones who measure the greatest of the sport they knew more about than just about anyone else, if it still means something very important to a vast bunch of us, then determining who gets that honor must still contain the essence of honor--being a cut above people who, even though a different kind of elite in that they, too, were major leaguers, didn't quite measure up. That means setting standards, standards they're allowed to set for the Hall, and thus for the sport.
But some of the BBWA's hallowed practices have bordered on the silly. After an obvious first installment, for a particularly long time, nobody got a placement on the first opportunity, after the five years that the BBWA required to wait for it. Willie Mays didn't. Hank Aaron didn't. (Go ahead. Look it up.) That was preposterous, a 'tradition' that made absolutely no sense and diminished the Hall of Fame's seriousness rather than extol it. It made the process look much like a conjured star chamber.
Rose, for his side, said he didn't bet against his team (though he would bet on them to win), and didn't throw any games to win bets. I believe that. I don't think he stooped as low as Joe Jackson, a member of the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919, who did throw two games of the World Series, then changed his mind, except it was too late and too little to prevent his team's defeat.
But that didn't mean Rose's actions weren't highly questionable or beyond the realm of decent ethics. They were akin to insider trading. Betting on major league baseball games, when one has been a player and manager, means you're taking advantage of information and a sense of learning few others have about those who play the game, either genuinely because you've done it yourself, you know and have watched the people themselves, or implicitly because the game itself has to be played at a certain level and you can tell who can get it done and who can't. I've played the game at a Division III collegiate level, for instance, but I can't extend that experience to knowing how to hit, say, Corbin Byrnes of Baltimore, if I could at all.
Pete Rose knew enough, or thought he did (though he ended up losing a lot of money, because the game is still full of inexactitudes, full of statistics compiled only after the fact), to think he could fool the system and make plenty of money on the side. He took advantage of a privilege that he had earned, but one that few can have, and to the hardworking members of the BBWA, that's being something of a sneak and a bully.
Rose never apologized, either. The road back to forgiveness belongs to the perpetrator, at least at first. Rose thought that not betting against his team was enough for him to secure a pathway to the Hall. But he played fast and loose with the rules. 4,256 hits should have been more than enough, and no one lives a perfect life. He also slapped the deciders in the face, though, again and again, and that tells you something about him. The writers hold the keys to the door. His key never fit. (Shoeless Joe Jackson apologized, but with more than 3000 hits, he's still been denied entrance, too. So there's that.)
I don't like attaching Rose's denial of entrance to Giamatti's untimely death at age 51, though. To say that speaks to a sense of the Salem witchcraft trials, where bad events were blamed on people who had nothing to do with them. My own heart attack can't be tied to anything going on in my life at the time, though I had just moved from a very nice apartment under duress because my rent had been jacked up and I felt a sense of betrayal about that (though business is business in that racket, too). My cholesterol count was way-way up there, though.
If Giamatti passed away that soon, something else would probably have gotten him, and not too far later. It's not like being commissioner of baseball is a cakewalk. Did Giamatti's good karma get drained by Rose's bad? Come on now. That means the bad guy won. You want to go with that?
No, let's not go there. Let's stay with the core issue: Rose isn't in the Hall of Fame because the Baseball Writers of America say he shouldn't be. Their reasons are fair enough. But the grudge match can be called off, too, now that Rose has passed. He can't enjoy it now, not even for a day. That might change the equation.
I leave that to you. It's still not an easy call. Much will be made of it on the sports talk shows. If it happens, it will probably have to be some time later, after the greyhairs of the BBWA (and many of us) are gone.
Can certain values remain? Which ones? We'll be making a different evaluation of that, too, after November 5. That determination is still far more imporant.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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