During the 1970s, the era of peak Pete Rose, Major League Baseball still maintained an air of innocence. Nary a betting booth was to be found in a stadium, game broadcasts had not a single FanDuel ad, and the leagues lacked an Official Sports Betting Partner.
Rose’s death at 83 on Monday evoked that distant era and brought on a good dose of cognitive dissonance. His fame rested equally in being one of baseball’s greatest players and one of its most disgraced. He was barred for life from the game in 1989 for regularly betting on baseball, including on his own Cincinnati Reds while manager. The door slammed shut forever at the Baseball Hall of Fame, where his entry would have been a sure bet.
But baseball over the long decades has lost that innocence, acknowledging that many fans have a financial interest in the outcome of games. The professional sports world, including M.L.B., has become deeply entwined with the gambling industry. The explosion began with a 2018 Supreme Court ruling overturning a ban on organized sports betting in most states. Monthly wagering grew from less than $50 million to more than $1 billion last year, according to figures cited by Charles Fain Lehman in The Atlantic, who chronicled the terrible social and economic cost to ordinary people, mostly on the lower rungs of society, from sports betting.
In that light, should we think differently about Rose’s shame? It’s hard not to.
Rose or any other player would probably earn a substantial suspension today for betting on baseball — still a cardinal sin, said Marc Edelman, a law professor at Baruch College who studies gambling. But it’s also likely that given the 180-degree change in the sports world’s attitude toward gambling in general, Edelman said, Rose might have earned reinstatement.
Except for another sin: For years, Rose lied about his gambling. He only publicly admitted to betting on the Reds in a book released in 2004. He defended his honor by noting he never bet the Reds to lose — but that in itself was a signal to bookies on a game’s likely outcome.
Certainly betting on a game by its protagonists is a corrupt act — even worse in a way than taking performance-enhancing drugs. Both are betrayals. But juicing is more like cheating and lying to the fans, while betting is also selling out your fellow players and undermining the whole endeavor.
In the end, we probably should not forgive Rose just because baseball moguls are now seeing dollar signs. “He violated the holy law,” said the writer Dan Okrent, who invented Rotisserie Baseball. “It’s the one thing everybody knows you can’t do.” But thanks to baseball’s embrace of the gambling industry, we may soon find other players sharing Charlie Hustle’s shame. As Okrent said, “There’s no question they’ve invited the monster in.”
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