Near the end of a lengthy conversation with Pete Rose on his permanent ban from baseball for gambling on games, he considered the question of what’s in it for MLB to reinstate him from its ineligible list after 35 years.
“I don’t know what their benefit is,” he says. “All of a sudden being fair?”
Maybe.
From where he sits, that might be the most reasonable answer.
But fairness has nothing to do with it. And won’t. No matter how you define it.
If he were able to come up with a more compelling answer to the question, he might finally find his successful case for reinstatement.
Short of that, it’s simply time.
Time to for baseball to lift the ban. Time for baseball to look in the mirror. Time for baseball to see its own conflicts of interest in a fast-changing sports landscape in which the once-unthinkable reality is that pro leagues have made a strange, gross bedfellow of the gambling industry.
In other words, enough.
Enough is enough for Pete, Hall
Enough time served for Rose, whose ban for gambling on his games while managing the Cincinnati Reds in the 1980s reaches 35 years on Aug. 24.
Rose aside, MLB finds itself in a slippery place these days on an issue it long ago determined was “baseball’s No. 1 rule,” as commissioner Rob Manfred refers to it.
That was necessary to preserve the integrity of the league in 1920 when the commissioner’s office was established in the aftermath of the White Sox fixing the World Series with gamblers and throwing it to the Reds in 1919 — one of several World Series in the early part of the century rumored to be influenced by gamblers paying off players to tank games.
With the recent widespread legalization of sports gambling in the country, MLB and other leagues have quickly capitalized through partnerships with sportsbooks, and a century of unassailable firewalls have come down as sports gambling has become as ubiquitous in American culture as booing.
That makes upholding “Rule No. 1” as important as ever for the integrity of the game, to assure deterrence, league officials say.
And they might be right.
Rose's ban has not been deterrent to gambling
Except that Rose’s ban has proven to be of little deterrent value already in this new culture of pervasive, casual sports betting.
The NBA’s Jontay Porter, a player in a league with a $1.1 million minimum salary in 2023-24, was permanently banned this year after it was determined he bet against himself in NBA games.
Former major leaguer Tucupita Marcano was banned permanently by MLB in June for betting on baseball, and four other players were suspended for a year each for gambling on other sports.
To MLB’s credit, it has increased investigative and enforcement resources around this issue in an effort to keep pace, if not get ahead of problems.
But the fact is MLB has ceded its authority — certainly its moral authority — on this issue by its embrace of gambling-related revenues, including the approval by league owners of the Oakland Athletics franchise move to Las Vegas.
The minute you obliterate for profit the firewalls between your industry and the one industry you have declared in a century of rhetoric, policy and actions to be the mortal enemy, you have surrendered your highest hill in the fight.
If baseball needs a reason that better serves its own interests in considering a Rose reinstatement, how about this one: its near-miss with Shohei Ohtani.
Making Rose eligible would be no harm to MLB
Reinstating Rose at age 83, which comes at no substantive cost to the league, suggests an acknowledgment of the changing sports/gambling culture, suggests that 35 years is more proportionate in that context, and, yes, establishes a precedent for case-by-case wiggle room.
Imagine if MLB hadn’t found the path so quickly and emphatically to clear Ohtani — its most economically important, internationally bankable star — from connection to his interpreter’s felony fraud and gambling scandal.
The interpreter’s original public confession included a portrayal of Ohtani as a sympathetic friend, willing to help. If true, that connection would have at least launched a deeper investigation by MLB and could have resulted in severe penalties.
With a more moderated league position in light of changing times, it might have allowed a narrow window for the sympathetic-friend role to be acceptable.
Besides, the biggest deterrent against players gambling on their games always has been making sure they’re paid commensurately based on the money the league makes off them.
And consider the example of recent widespread legalization of marijuana. Once considered felony-worthy violations of law in the context of America’s so-called war on drugs, some jurisdictions have overturned past convictions for recreational use and possession.
It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. MLB is a privatized industry, free to make whatever rules it wants. And its integrity and deterrence concerns are not the same as the question of legal freedoms of an adult citizen to intoxicate oneself.
Cultural norms have been changing
But changing cultural norms should matter. So should 35 years.
And context always matters.
For example, the Hall of Fame, which proactively instituted its own rule in Rose’s first possible year for eligibility, creating an ineligible list in 1991 for anyone on MLB’s ineligible list.
Technically, it makes Rose’s Hall of Fame ban a separate question.
In the public discourse that question often gets conflated with off-the-field transgressions and perceived character issues that have nothing to do with baseball.
But it’s the Baseball Hall of Fame, not the husbands hall of fame, the nice-guy hall of fame or the non-addictive-behavior hall of fame.
And while character is listed among the considerations on the ballot, it’s in that context that character applies — how somebody played the game, made his team better, exemplified playing by the rules and competing.
No one who saw Rose play or manage could reasonably believe he ever did anything but try to win and represent the game in that context. Few demonstrated those qualities more vigorously as a player.
A century ago, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were accused of game-fixing, and it was quickly swept under the rug. Cobb was reputed to be widely disliked, a bad person.
Both are in the Hall of Fame.
And don’t get us started on the crime against baseball that executives have wrought for more than a decade in their widespread tanking of whole seasons.
Ultimately, Rose’s greatest crime since his ban might be an arrogance, an unapologetic immodesty — “I am co*cky, by the way,” he said — that has made it difficult at best for commissioners past and present to reconcile some post-ban behavior and optics with reinstatement.
It’s probably the same brash, combative quality that also made him as great a player as he was.
Which makes the whole thing almost Shakespearean.
If the attitude of an 83-year-old man banned from the game he still loves — a game he impacted in profoundly positive ways as a player — is part of what’s still keeping Rose out all these years later, MLB might want to consider the integrity it can show by owning the risk of the optics.
Because it’s time.
Time to do what’s fair?
No.
Time to do what’s right.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Here's what's in it for MLB to lift Pete Rose ban for gambling
