Pete Rose in the HOF? Yes or no?

I have to agree here...to a point. The use of his first few seasons definitely skews the statistics.

I do believe he used PED's and that they definitely boosted his numbers, but to use the statistics as they were listed above is unfair.

 

I think you can be smart and arrogant. When I said biggest crime, I should have said something like worst character feature. Rose's crime was betting on baseball.

While the Cobb-Speaker affair was unseemly, it was a different time and situation than Pete Rose.

There is a such thing as "integrity of the game" in baseball. There have been examples of teams in the NBA and NHL not going all out to win in hopes of getting a top draft choice. The example in the NBA would be the Houston Rockets when they manuvered to get the number one pick the year they drafted Akeem after getting Ralph Sampson the prior year. In the NHL, the Pittsburgh Penguins played down to draft Mario Lemeiux in 1984 - the Devils went 20 games without a win in an 80-game season and didn't finish last - think about that.

In baseball, there is an ethic that teams out of the pennant race are supposed to make an effort to beat teams contending for the pennant. That is a tradition in baseball and people watch that closely.

How can somebody talk about the integrity of the game when it wasn't integrated until 1947? Well, a lot of America wasn't integrated in 1947, 1957 and 1967. There was an attitude where if you were black, you had a place. However, baseball was the first place where that was tested and on display. Hank Aaron talked about talking to his father about being a doctor and a ballplayer, and his father said something like, "ain't no colored doctors" and "ain't no colored ballplayers". As Aaron said, after Jackie Robinson, his father never said that any more. A year after baseball integrated, the armed forces integrated. Baseball was the first stage where this played out, and within five years there were a lot more opportunities for players - not every team integrated but integration became a matter of trying to win rather than any social engineering effort. There is a lot of tradition in baseball, and there is concern about integrity. It's not coincidence that the NFL would play and count in the standings games played by scabs with inferior talent.

 

We both know that you can make statistics back up any argument.
Who is to say that Barry didn't hit his prime until later in life?

 

The difference is baseball still celebrates some of its biggest racists.

And further, if playing against inferior talent is indeed the bench mark -- then you better put asterisks next to every single accomplishment that happened prior to 1947 -- actually baseball really didn't get integrated until much later than that but we'll start there -- when a large portion of the talent pool was not allowed to participate.

What is baseball something like 40 percent minority right now when you count Hispanics and Orientals?

That is a large portion of a talent pool to exclude.

And that's the point -- each era had and will have its own unique aspects to it -- and we just happen to be in the hitter's -- call it steroid -- era which is no different.

And once again -- explain how steroids are any different than scuffing the balls, corking the bats, spitballs and all the other forms of "cheating" which are always dismissed by so-called purists as gamesmanship.

 

Maybe the fact that his career arc is unlike that of any baseball player in recorded history.

Maybe he's a freak of nature. Maybe he hasn't broken any rules or laws. Maybe he's "special."

Or maybe the overwhelming evidence is pointing in the right direction.

Regardless, I apologize for the threadjack. Back to your regularly scheduled Rose defense/bash.

 

The only evidence they did was the testimony of other gamblers hoping to implicate as many big names as possible, trying to take as many people down with themselves.

The Bill James Historical Abstract (first edition, the better one) has a good article on this subject. The evidence against Cobb and Speaker was about 1/10,000th as strong as the evidence against Joe Jackson (who did, of course, confess to participating in the Black Sox fix in the stolen confessions), and about 1/100,000,000th as strong as the evidence against Pete Rose, who has confessed to everything so far except actually fixing games -- I guess that comes in his next book, in 2009.

In addition to the pretty strong evidence that as a player, Rose was also (gasp) using steroids.

 

Where is the evidence against Barry. Forget what you theorize. The evidence.

 

His head is bigger can't you see it and he gained 30 pounds since he was young and a scorned lover who lost her luxurious Scottsdale love shack when he dumped her told two journalists with a clear agenda that she saw him do it....

 

Well said, but that last point bothers me. Baseball threatened to do exactly the same thing in 1995 and in fact was putting together teams of scabs.

But you are right that an intelligent person can be arrogant. The idea that arrogance is part of idiocy a pretty ridiculous stretch.

Barry Bonds is a good example (as if we haven't threadjacked into him enough here). The man has plenty of flaws, but stupidity isn't one of them. Arrogance definitely is.

 

Agreed that the evidence was about 1/10,000th as strong, although even without this incident, "prearranging" (or "letting up" in harmless situations, like Walter Johnson was known to do) was pretty common in that era. So it's not out of the question that Cobb and Speaker ... and a good hundred or so of their contemporaries ... were involved in this sort of "aiding the enemy." Even Eddie Collins was involved in paying off the Tigers once, too.

Hard to single out any players of that era for doing something on which baseball so often looked the other way.

I didn't bring up Cobb and Speaker to damn them, only to make the point that baseball has swept quite a few loads of dirty laundry under the rug over the years. And the Hall of Fame is not immune from that.

 

I don't see how anybody can defend him being out.
Has anyone ever accused him of betting on baseball while a player?

 

I especially like the tradition of a World Series being played every year.

Well, almost every year.

I believe the NFL had three weeks of games that, looking back, could be considered a black eye.

Baseball has . . . 1994.

Regarding Rose:

If I had my druthers, I would put him in the Hall.

But that's all. He's in . . . with no ceremony. No fanfare. No speeches.

You wanted in. You deserve to be in. You're in. Now get off our back.