Should Pete Rose be reinstated?

Dooley: Everything he does is relevant. What he does today is relevant. Imagine the HOF voting for Derek Jeter was held at lunchtime today. He would receive a high % of votes, everyone knows that. If Jeter commits a triple homicide tonight, do you think he would receive the same number of votes at a lunchtime vote tomorrow?

The exact same?

No way, and I suspect you know it.


The Dowd report should be read I agree. The proof "as a player" is there for you.

 

Absolutely -- and they weren't hidden, either. Here's a prime example at West Side Park, the Cubs' home before Wrigley: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/ichicdn.s056839 (hope that link works; if it doesn't, go here and search for "Gowdy betting" instead.) That sign is massive.

Problem was, despite these ballpark warnings and despite Ban Johnson's public "we will stop at nothing" pronouncements and despite Taylor Spink's heavy-handed editorials in TSN, betting on baseball was tacitly encouraged by the baseball powers-that-be before 1920 in the same way that the use of steroids was ignored in the 1990s. It generated a TON of popularity and interest, like fantasy football does for the NFL today. In fact, I'm not sure why fantasy football gets a pass other than the fact that most people in money leagues chip in to a season-long pot rather than cash exchanging hands every week like the old baseball pools used to do.

I have no doubt there were dozens of games fixed in that era ... almost certainly including other World Series games. And we know for a fact that players bet on their own teams in the exact same way that Rose did decades later. This not only wasn't illegal then (mostly because many of baseball's rules weren't codified until 1950; for instance, "home teams batting last", which had been the custom since the early 1890s but wasn't actually written down anywhere official until 1950 ... amazing), few players even thought twice about laying down a small sum on their own games. It was just another way to earn some extra cash. "Oh, we got Walter Johnson going today ... put me down for $25."

Rose, of course, faced a much different attitude in his day. It's impossible to compare eras here and say the same behavior was just as wrong in both. Baseball and betting have never truly been far apart, but the culture was far, far different in the 1910s.

 

Paul McCartney and John Lennon ripped off Chuck Berry songs for "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Come Together," respectively.

 

Without single-game betting on the NFL, prevailing ratings would be at least 30% lower.

 

And if that is criteria the HOF wants to use to judge a player's worthiness for inclusion, it's their HOF.

Personally, every such decision de-legitimizes a Hall of Fame to me.

That's just me, and I'm certainly not so full of myself as to think that matters. I'm just saying that every day the Hall of Fame makes its decisions on something that doesn't have to do with the execution of the game, it loses its power as an opinion-maker to me.

 

Another terrific thread in support of the argument that journalists not be allowed to vote on this nonsense.

 

Just let me be sure that you're not looking for the fans to be the final authority on these matters . . .

 

I'm not, but only because I have no specific interest in the mechanics of the thing.

Having so said, however, why not the fans? Since they're the ones who actually pay for both the game and the wax museum honoring it.

 

Because then you run the risk of an outbreak of MankyJimys tearing down Cooperstown and setting up a monstrous Derek Jeter shrine.

Complete with Derek Jeter velour portraits and car-seat covers.

 

I guess I'm unclear on how that differs from the current use of the space.

 

shotty, it's better to allow the actual sport's integrity to be compromised than to devalue its Hall of Fame? Is that ultimately where your point leads?

 

If the HOF is going to be held up as the ultimate arbiter of baseball greatness, then I want their decisions to be based on on-field performance. There's not enough agreement on what is morally or competitively damning to the game to make cement-solid rulings on the other stuff.

And remember, just because you can get a consensus in here that says Issue A is a deal-breaker doesn't mean that it necessarily should be.

And JD, don't hold the "game's integrity" on too high a pedestal. Some of that was romanticism.