Donald Trump Just Made Another American Institution Bend to His Will. It’s Especially Ugly.
If anybody ever earned it, Pete Rose has certainly earned his place on Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list. Rose guaranteed himself that spot by committing one specific cardinal sin: betting on baseball. There are no good ways to bet on one’s own sport, in violation of the single most known personal-conduct regulation that applies to everyone working in that sport. But there are extra-bad ways, and Rose managed to find them. He bet on his own team’s games, and for style points, he spent years lying about it. He broke the most fundamental rule meant to uphold public trust in what baseball fans are watching, and he did it with as much panache as he showed in piling up his 4,256 hits between 1963 and 1986. Most came for the Cincinnati Reds, a team that has never stopped deifying Rose.
Rose, who died last year at 83, has now received a get-off-the-list-free card: MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced Tuesday that he had removed from that sheet of baseball infamy Rose and the list’s 16 other members, all deceased and all banned from having anything to do with the league in life or death. In a letter to a Rose family lawyer, Manfred wrote that “in my view, a determination must be made” as to how baseball’s anti-gambling policy, Rule 21, Part D, should apply to dead players. Manfred sought to explain the move as a basic policy change born out of thoughtful deliberation: “Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.” Hmm—I can think of one, and that’s a punishment that lasts permanently with no reprieve. That didn’t even take much effort.
Manfred is honoring Rose mainly by mimicking the game’s all-time hit leader in his dishonesty. The truth about Rose’s removal from the list is that it is a shameless political favor to Donald Trump. Moreover, Manfred is massaging how he arrived at a political decision. Rose earned this outcome not by dying, but by having a friend in the highest possible place. His reinstatement is a blight, and now the league needs to hold its breath to see if a small group of Baseball Hall of Fame electors does not make the result even worse by inducting him to a spot of eternal glory.
What changed after all these years? Manfred would tell you it was Rose’s death that prompted a reconsideration of the MLB’s approach to his case. There is no particular reason to believe him, though, when a far simpler explanation sits right in front of us and puts Manfred in league with dozens of technology executives, law firm managing partners, and businesspeople: Trump likes Pete Rose, an apparent supporter of his who once signed a baseball for him with the message “Please Make America Great Again.” The president has supported Rose’s reinstatement in public and private, not just promising “a complete PARDON” for Rose (for what, who knows) but lobbying Manfred in a recent meeting to excuse him. Manfred would prefer to be in Trump’s good graces. J.D. Vance, once an Ohio kid, taunted Joe Biden in January over an unrelated matter, telling the outgoing president, “Hey Joe if we’re doing fake shit on the way out can you declare Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame?”
The executive branch’s treatment of businesses now depends in at least some part on how much Trump personally likes them or can profit off them, and Manfred would rather not have Trump disappointed in him. The league also stands to have major problems if Trump’s immigration policy reaches certain levels of restrictiveness. Could the secretary of state deport a Venezuelan outfielder if he says something that Stephen Miller thinks sounds a little socialist? It’s a sincere question.
But the MLB would not acknowledge that its motivation was to appease the president. Manfred instead acted as if he had no choice but to make a difficult call. “It is incumbent upon the Office of the Commissioner to reach a policy decision regarding this unprecedented issue in the modern era,” the league says. Why? Because Rose is the first person “banned by a Commissioner other than Kenesaw Mountain Landis” to die while on the ineligible list. Landis was the baseball commissioner who punished the participants in the 1919 Black Sox scandal. That event’s most famous figure, Shoeless Joe Jackson, also got off the list on Tuesday. Manfred seems to be trying to argue that a rule that hasn’t been necessary in a while no longer needs to be a rule, but it’s clear why he needed to invoke Landis.
Letting Jackson—whom the league found had participated in rigging a World Series—off the list allows Manfred to give Rose a partner in headlines about his decision: See! How could I have tailored all of this to get the president’s friend off the list? Just look at Shoeless Joe! Never mind that Manfred had previously made clear that Jackson, already dead, was not fit for reinstatement. According to the MLB, the question of whether a player should remain on the permanently ineligible list after their death “has never been formally addressed by Major League Baseball.” But of course it has, unless the word permanent has undergone a recent change in meaning.
Manfred’s effort to frame this move as the product of an obligatory and challenging policy consideration, rather than a retrofitted way to justify an outcome he preferred, is one of the most cynical things any commissioner has ever done. Manfred is already no stranger to insulting the intelligence of fans of his sport. But dressing up Rose’s convenient reinstatement as a natural policy adjustment is a new low.
Most harmful is what this reinstatement will signal to future generations. As the excellent baseball writer Joe Sheehan noted in his newsletter of Manfred’s decision: “You can’t have a commissioner of baseball who doesn’t understand that Pete Rose’s ineligibility for breaking Rule 21(d) is the game’s firewall against other players breaking Rule 21(d).” Indeed, Manfred knows well that Rose’s benefit to baseball at this stage is as a cautionary tale, one the commissioner has now defanged. Rose himself sought reinstatement many times, including in 2015. Manfred denied him then and issued a clear explanation. Rose, he said, had not shown “an honest acceptance” of his wrongdoing, even then, more than 25 years after his ban had gone into effect. Rose made these efforts because he had wanted to get a job in baseball, and, Manfred asserted, “allowing him to work in the game presents an unacceptable risk of a future violation.” At the time, Manfred was right. Rose can’t try to coach third base for some team anymore. But if Manfred thought that letting an elderly Rose get a job in baseball created an “unacceptable risk” of a future gambling infraction, then what does Manfred think it will do to put a halo around Rose in his grave?
Manfred knows exactly how important it is that nobody in baseball bet on baseball. The game’s randomness and lack of a prejudiced outcome are the foundation that holds up the whole enterprise, from ticket sales to television. Rule 21 is the game’s golden rule, the only thing that prevents another Black Sox episode. That’s why breaking it netted permanent ineligibility, until now. This regulation has held up even as sports gambling has gone mainstream and violations have become possible to commit out of arrogance or absent-mindedness rather than requiring some grand scheme and cover-up. After a fringe MLB utility player named Tucupita Marcano placed bets on his phone, the league banned him last year. The permanent ban on Rose made that move noncontroversial, even in a world where critics often argue (unconvincingly, I might add) that punishing gambling by players while promoting it commercially is hypocritical. If you could ban the Hit King for compromising baseball’s competitive position, you could ban anyone.
Rose might have been a more sympathetic figure, but there was also his other behavior. The investigator who looked into Rose’s gambling later said that the Hit King’s bookie had told his team that the player “not only ran bets, but ran young girls down at spring training, ages 12 to 14.” A woman once issued a sworn statement that she had been in a sexual relationship with Rose in the ’70s, before she was 16, the age of consent in Ohio, where Rose lived and played for the Reds. Pressed on the subject by a female reporter years later, Rose replied, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”
Merely shedding the permanently ineligible label will be a feather in Rose’s historical cap. But it is only a prelude to the prize he wanted for decades and that his allies, from his family to the president and vice president, will only push harder for now. The Rose camp will angle for his enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Rose also has significant support among today’s MLB managers, for what it’s worth.)
Now his fate will rest with the hall’s Eras Committees, a small group that weighs the cases of players who dropped off the standard ballot long ago. (Most Hall of Famers get in by a vote from the sport’s journalist association, which I suspect wouldn’t admit Rose. I don’t know if a smaller committee will.) Manfred has determined that permanence is no longer so permanent when he has other objectives. All that is left to learn is whether every visitor to Cooperstown, New York, will soon be reminded of the commissioner’s surrender. Rose’s ultimate loss would be that he did not live to see it.
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