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Reinstatement or no, Pete Rose doesn’t deserve the Hall

Major League Baseball made the decision to reinstate several deceased players who had been banned from Major League Baseball on Tuesday, among them disgraced players like Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.

Rose and Jackson were permanently barred from baseball for gambling-related reasons. Shoeless Joe and seven other members of (Pope Leo’s own) Chicago White Sox were accused of a conspiracy to throw the 1919 World Series. Rose bet on his team’s games while coaching the Cincinnati Reds. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision sets the stage for Rose’s potential induction into the sport’s Hall of Fame.

Rose holds the league record for most hits across a career with 4,126. No one else is even within spitting distance, but that alone shouldn’t be enough to get “Charlie Hustle” into Cooperstown. For one, Rose played in more games and took more at-bats than anyone else in history, elevating his “pretty good” year-to-year performances into “iconic” through sheer, dumb repetition. Why Rose shouldn’t sniff the Hall follows from that: in spite of his decades of work among a small group of professionals, there are remarkably few people who would call Rose a friend.

Rose spent decades after his downfall outright lying about his gambling, admitting to wrongdoing for the first time a full 15 years after his ban came down. Even after admitting he gambled on his own team, Rose never once stopped painting himself as the victim of cruel fate. Well into his twilight years, the man with hustle in his name acted as if he was carried aloft on a breeze to his local bookie. With sports betting ads draped over every-inch of ballpark that isn’t covered in ivy, Commissioner Manfred caved under the sheer force of irony and seems ready to give in to persistent demands to make one professional sports’ loudest whiners a hero, posthumously.

But Rose wasn’t a hero. Allegations of statutory rape in 2017 only cemented a league-wide cold shoulder that Rose had more than earned decades before. Pro baseball is a small fraternity and unlike many other careers, who you know has next to nothing to do with how you’re remembered. It’s a rare space where what you know actually matters and what the pros know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that Pete Rose was an all-time schmuck.

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They Said What?

• “He was controlling the whole situation. He was directing it.”

  Cassie Ventura detailed the notorious “freak-offs” of mogul and accused sex trafficker Sean “Diddy” Combs in testimony on Tuesday. The former romantic partner of Combs also said that he assaulted her “too many [times] to count.”

• “You’re part of the problem”

  Chuck Todd didn’t hold back in his critique of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on CNN. Shortly after the senator from New York spoke on the network, Todd accused Schumer of tanking public perception of the Democratic Party via secrecy around President Joe Biden’s mental decline, noting “he could’ve said something sooner, and he didn’t.”

• “Please be merciful”

  Erik and Lyle Menendez’s cousin Diane Hernandez was one of several witnesses who asked a judge to reconsider the pair’s murder sentences on Tuesday. A judge resentenced the siblings, who killed their parents in 1989, so that they are eligible for parole. Support for the brothers’ release from prison has grown in recent years, aided by a popular Netflix series.

• “If we weren’t there, he would’ve just been left on the sidewalk”

  Community volunteers in Massachusetts were horrified when ICE agents left a 12-year-old to fend for himself after they detained an adult he was with. Surprise detentions have become part of the landscape in the first 120 days of President Donald Trump’s second term with everyone from student protestors on up to mayors being caught up in the actions of emboldened immigration officers.

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