Put Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame: While We’re Waiting…

Happy Tuesday WFNY!

It’s hard to believe we are now just a little over a week away from Christmas. Especially when you consider how bizarre this recent spell of warm weather has been. Then just one week after Christmas, we have New Year’s. It’s truly mind blowing to me that 2015 is almost over already. I feel like it just started.

With 2016 just around the corner, we are soon going to be doing our annual series looking back at the top Cleveland sports stories of the year. It’s been a pretty interesting year in Cleveland sports for sure. Some of it has been good, some of it was great, but a decent portion of it was pretty horrible (I’m looking at you, Cleveland Browns).

For me, this year has been about balancing the frustration of the Browns and Indians with the successes of the Cavaliers and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Yet even those teams offered more than their fair share of frustrations this year. And I guess that’s the funny thing about sports. It’s so rarely good for our teams. And by “our”, I don’t mean Cleveland’s. I mean anyone’s teams.

In this country, we have three “major” sports, then we have the fringe team sports like soccer and hockey. If you want to include college sports, football and basketball are the big sports that most people follow. The one thing all of these sports have in common is that there is only one champion. Every other team has to measure the value of where they finished with what their own level of expectations were. So if you root for a team in each of the above mentioned sports, you still only have seven chances at seeing your team finish their season on top¹.

So time flies by, the seasons keep passing, and the teams we root for keep failing to win championships. Yet we keep coming back to sports. We keep coming back for more. And more. And more. Because we all know that all these years of losing will be worth it for just one taste of glory. Will 2016 be different from all the previous ones in that respect? I can’t wait to find out.

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Pete Rose not being in the Hall of Fame is really dumb

On Monday there was some pretty big news coming out of major league baseball. Pete Rose, who was banned from baseball for life in 1989, had recently applied for reinstatement with new MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. Monday, Manfred announced that he had decided that Rose could not be trusted to not embarrass the league further with his continued gambling habits and thus he would not be reinstating Pete Rose.

This ban from baseball has meant two things to Rose. First, he can’t be employed by a team in any capacity. Second, it has meant that he can’t be inducted to the baseball Hall of Fame. The first part makes sense. The second is one of the dumbest things in sports.

We’ll start with the first. Pete Rose has made his own bed here. He has lied so many times about his gambling practices that he might not even remember what the truth is anymore. For years he denied ever betting on baseball at all. And then every year he would show up in Cooperstown on HoF weekend to sign autographs and rub MLB’s face in his defiance.

Then, his story changed. He decided to come clean and finally tell us the truth. He had bet on baseball, but only when he was a manager, and he only bet on his team to win. He seemed remorseful.

Then we found out that, well, that story wasn’t quite true. It turns out, Pete Rose’s gambling ledger had been found in 1989 and it shows that Rose bet on baseball when he was a player. Pete Rose lied even when he was trying to tell the truth. When he met with Manfred earlier this year, he first told the commish that he no longer bets on baseball, before eventually admitting that yes, he does still bet on baseball to this day. With Rose, every revelation is just a slow trickle of truths wrapped in even more lies.

Rose isn’t sorry. He has shown no contrition. He doesn’t understand what he did wrong. He’s done nothing to change his life and to make himself a sympathetic figure that baseball might be able to forgive. He deserves to be banned from baseball for life.

But how is he not in the Hall of Fame? I don’t care how despicable of a person one might be, the HoF is not a measure of character and principle, it’s a shrine to on-field accomplishments. And nobody in baseball has ever accomplished more as a pure hitter. Rose is the all time hits leader and nobody has even come close since Rose took the crown. Derek Jeter is the recent player with the most hits in his career, and he finished around 800 hits short of Rose.

People can feel free to disagree with me, and I know plenty of people do. But I just don’t understand how a player with Rose’s accomplishments is not in the Hall of Fame. There have been tons of players who have had less than stellar character who were put in the Hall. Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson are the only players I can think of who are not in the Hall of Fame based solely on issues of character. And I don’t know Jackson’s qualifications nor do I really know what he was guilty of. I can only speak about Rose and I think he should be in.

If there was a silver lining for Rose in Monday’s announcement, it’s that Rob Manfred seemed to give room for Rose to be put into the Hall of Fame.

With this background in mind, let me clarify the precise nature of the issue before me. Under the Major League Constitution, my only concern has to be the protection of the integrity of play on the field through appropriate enforcement of the Major League Rules. It is not a part of my authority or responsibility here to make any determination concerning Mr. Rose’s eligibility as a candidate for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame (“Hall of Fame”). In fact, in my view, the considerations that should drive a decision on whether an individual should be allowed to work in Baseball are not the same as those that should drive a decision on Hall of Fame eligibility.

Manfred makes it pretty clear that Rose’s ban from baseball should not be taken as also a ban from the Hall of Fame. This doesn’t mean the Hall will let Rose in, but they now have to stop using MLB as their excuse.

I doubt the HoF will ever let Rose in, at least not as long as he is alive and still gambling and making public appearances and generally being antagonistic toward MLB. But I think it is the height of ridiculousness that the all time leader in career hits is not in the Hall of Fame. In my opinion, it merely cheapens the impact and weakens the authoritative nature of the Hall.

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My favorite albums of 2015 (20 through 11)

This week we continue counting down my personal favorite albums of the year, picking up where I left off last Tuesday.

11. Colleen Green – I Want To Grow Up
12. Faith No More – Sol Invictus
13. Local H – Hey, Killer
14. The Sidekicks – Runners In the Nerved World
15. Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit
16. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly
17. The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven
18. Envy – Atheist’s Cornea
19. Bully – Feels Like
20. Wavves – V

Next week we finally get to my Top Ten. I look forward to talking about them next week and unveiling my favorite album of the year.

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That’s all I have this week. Next week I will be writing WWW as I spend time with my family in the midst of my holiday break. I hope you guys all have a great rest of your week!

1. I suppose you could argue there are more than seven if you root for a successful European soccer club as they have their own league championships and then Champions League, not to count all the other various cups out there. [↩]