It was twenty years ago that Pete Rose was officially banned from baseball for gambling:
(CNN) — It’s one of the great ironies in all of sports: Pro baseball’s career hitting leader is not in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
On Monday, 20 years to the day Pete Rose signed an agreement with Major League Baseball banning him from the sport, he is no closer to being reinstated.
In that agreement, Rose, accused of betting on MLB games while he managed the Cincinnati Reds, was “declared permanently ineligible in accordance with Major League Rule 21.”
Rose didn’t publicly admit the betting until this decade. Baseball’s history, Rose’s lying about his gambling and his brash nature in handling the manner have all painted him into this corner, with no apparent way out.
“Nobody who has ever been thrown out of baseball has ever been reinstated. An owner of Philadelphia bet on baseball, the 1919 White Sox, you name it. No matter if it’s a third-base coach or an all-star, Hall of Fame-type player,” said Faye Vincent, who was MLB deputy commissioner at the time baseball investigated Rose for betting on his team.
Vincent, who talked to CNN.com from his summer home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, wrote the agreement in 1989. It was signed by then-MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, Rose and his attorneys, and Vincent.
“I think the door is closed. There is no possible way they can retract what was done,” said Furman Bisher, longtime columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a voting member of the Hall of Fame’s Pre-1943 Veterans Committee. “Every club has it as you walk into their clubhouse in big letters: No gambling.
“I think Bart Giamatti handled it beautifully. He was banned for life, and that should be the last line of his career.”
For the reasons I noted back in July, that’s exactly right:
[N]otwithstanding his accomplishments and notwithstanding that, for the better part of the 1970s and 80s he was the face of Major League Baseball, the fact remains that what he did struck at the integrity of the game in a much more fundamental way than all of the drug scandals ever could. By better on baseball in general and on his own team specifically, Rose put a cloud on the integrity of the game as a whole in the same manner that the Black Sox Scandal did and, just as the members of that team have been banned for life, the same punishment should be applied to Rose.
No, Pete Rose shouldn’t be reinstated, and I say that as someone who was, once a long time ago, one of his biggest fans.
And that’s all that needs to be said.
