The recent death of the baseball legend and pariah Pete Rose offers a timely opportunity to reflect on our culture’s notions of punishment and forgiveness, at least as they relate to sports.
“Pete should go into the Hall of Fame,” the noted baseball writer Jon Heyman tweeted post-mortem. “As a great baseball person reminded me, he was given a lifetime suspension. So he has satisfied the terms of his ban.”
It’s an intriguing proposition. But as is often the case, the situation is not nearly that simple. For one thing, it wasn’t a “lifetime suspension.” Rose was deemed “permanently ineligible.”
And yes, it’s more complicated than that, too. Even those permanently ineligible can be reinstated. “The burden to show a redirected, reconfigured, rehabilitated life is entirely Pete Rose’s,” Commissioner Bart Giamatti said at the time of Rose’s banishment, in 1989.
Rose never showed that.
His punishment followed an investigation that found that he had bet on baseball games while playing and/or managing. The product of a negotiation between Rose and Giamatti, the ban actually did not specifically cite gambling or any other reason, but – wink, wink – everybody knew.
The ban prohibited Rose from being employed by or otherwise associated with Major League Baseball. It wasn’t a new punishment devised for him; it had been applied a few dozen times or so before, dating back to 1865. It most notably involved eight players from the Chicago White Sox accused of conspiring with bookies to throw the 1919 World Series.
The ban also didn’t itself keep Rose from the Hall of Fame: The Hall’s board separately decided in 1991 to render banned players ineligible. Rose just became the most prominent example.
No one disputes his baseball accomplishments – all-time hits leader, former Most Valuable Player, former Rookie of the Year, three batting titles, 17 All-Star appearances, among others – would otherwise have made him a surefire, first-ballot inductee. And his grit and all-out approach to the game – not for nothing was he nicknamed Charlie Hustle – made him a favorite of millions.
I am not among those millions. I prefer that a player’s headfirst slides and combative spunk carry a degree of sportsmanship that Rose’s win-at-all-costs approach didn’t allow for. But as has often been pointed out, the Hall wasn’t conceived to be a repository for nice guys. And it certainly has its share of drunks, philanderers, reprobates and racists among its members. Perhaps more than its share.
It also has members once banned but later reinstated, including Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, who were barred after they were hired by Atlantic City casinos as glad-handers. And it has one member currently banned from baseball: Roberto Alomar, enshrined in 2011 and banned in 2021 for sexual misconduct seven years earlier. Once in, people don’t get kicked out.
As for our notions of punishment and forgiveness, first up: Did Rose’s punishment fit the crime?
Yes. Major League Rule 21 states the situation unambiguously: “Any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible.”
Next question: Should Rose have been, or should he now be, forgiven?
I’ve written before about the injustice of barring felons who have completed their punishments from voting, or of establishing onerous procedures before they can regain the ability.
But admission to the Baseball Hall of Fame isn’t a constitutional right, it’s a privilege. And while death may have spared Rose further indignity, it didn’t remove the stain he left on the sport he professed to serve.
For 15 years after his ban, Rose lied about his betting on baseball, changing his story only in 2004 when he had a book he wanted to sell.
Even then, he didn’t see that he had done anything wrong.
“I knew that I broke the letter of the law,” he wrote. “But I didn’t think that I broke the ‘spirit’ of the law, which was designed to prevent corruption. … I never allowed my wagers to influence my baseball decisions. So in my mind, I wasn’t corrupt. Granted, it was a thin distinction but it was one that I believed at the time.”
He never stopped believing that the rules should be bent for him, and he spent the rest of his life trying to downplay his transgressions while peddling his autographs and tired shtick far and wide – including at a fan show in Franklin the day before he died.
Christians believe God offers us grace freely, grace that we don’t deserve and cannot earn. We lesser humans generally require an element of remorse, of contrition, before granting someone secular absolution.
Pete Rose got what he deserved and he still deserves it. Now, as for Roger Clemens …
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at jrogink@gmail.com