On Aug. 23, 1989, Pete Rose accepted a settlement from Major League Baseball in which he agreed to be banned from the game for life, a ban that prevented him from entering the Hall of Fame. The ban was punishment for betting on MLB games, including games played by his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, when he was the Reds’ manager.
Rose would have been an easy choice for induction into the Hall. In 1985, he surpassed Ty Cobb’s then-57-year-old record for most base hits in a career, recording his hit No. 4,192.
Rose wrapped up his playing career the following year, finishing with 4,256 hits — a record that has remained unapproached for the past 39 years.
Rose’s hits record appears certain to stay in place for decades. The active player closest to the mark is Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman. But Freeman, after playing 16 big league seasons, remains 1,948 hits short of passing Rose.
In other words, even if he maintained his career average of 144 hits per season, Freeman would need to play 14 more years, until the age of 48 without slowing down, to have a shot at reaching Rose.
That surely is one of the reasons that commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday lifted the “permanent” ban on Rose — as well as on “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, a member of the 1919 Chicago White Sox team, known as the “Black Sox” because they actively participated in losing the World Series on purpose to benefit an organized criminal gambling racket.
Manfred ruled that such “permanent” bans must end at the termination of the banned player’s lifetime. Rose died in September of last year.
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In keeping with that ruling, the commissioner also reinstated 15 more deceased players, many of them also members of the “Black Sox” team. They include first baseman Chick Gandil, the ringleader of the plot to tank the World Series, and who is believed to have first approached criminal gamblers with the idea.
On the “Foul Territory” podcast Wednesday, host A.J. Pierzynski, a two-time American League All-Star who played 19 MLB seasons as a catcher for seven different teams, made it extremely clear that he objected to Manfred’s decision.
“I’ve said it everywhere, and to anyone that’ll listen to me, that I am against (Rose) being reinstated, when he was originally permanently banned,” Pierzynski said in his podcast rant. “And I’ve looked it up and it was permanently banned. OK? Permanently. That doesn’t stop it when you die, right?
“By the way, also, the argument is he bet on games every time they won. OK. Well, the games he didn’t bet on to win, did he think they were gonna lose? So why did he? He didn’t bet on every game. He had to have feelings. Correct? He had to have inside information, right?”
Pierzynski concluded by saying that players or managers who bet on baseball should face “repercussions,” and be “kicked out” of MLB.
But Rose may yet remain ostracized. His entry into the Hall of Fame is not guaranteed by Manfred’s decision. In fact, Rose’s Hall of Fame fate is in the hands of the Hall’s 10-member Classic Baseball Era committee, which does not meet again until 2027.
Only players, managers and others whose primary contributions came prior to 1980, a category which would include Rose, may be considered by the Classic Baseball committee.
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