COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — To walk through the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s museum is to realize that the old scamp Pete Rose is already in the house.
There’s his Cincinnati Reds uniform, No. 14. There’s a video of his 4,192nd hit, which broke the record of Ty Cobb. There’s a discussion of Rose’s gambling jones, replete with a smart use of social media and dueling quotes.
All that’s missing is a bronze Hall of Fame plaque for Rose, and Major League Baseball’s refusal to reverse a ban that has lasted 26 years is a bit silly.
We baseball writers dig our high dudgeon. Rose has a hustler’s persona, a desperado’s grubbiness. He gambled on baseball as a player and a manager, and that was reckless and deserving of a hard thwack. His performance on the field, however, was astonishing, a triumph of determination and will over the limitations of his plug of a body. To bar the Hall of Fame door to this old man feels smaller each day, like a bishop insisting on the inerrancy of past vengeful judgment.
Sniffy rectitude, too, tends to draw attention to one’s own contradictions.
Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner, cataloged Rose’s sins and lies. Then he arched his eyebrows. “Significantly,“ he wrote, Rose “told me that currently he bets recreationally and legally on horses and sports.” Imagine that.
Under Manfred’s guidance, Major League Baseball has become a gilded partner of FanDuel and DraftKings, two companies expert at separating fans from their gambling dollars. That Rose in his dotage has placed legal bets on baseball registers as no lightning strike of revelation.
At 74, Rose has long since stroked his last hit. He’s no threat to manage a game. He will not stand in the third-base box waving around a runner. This deeply flawed man has passed decades in a purgatory of his own making.
It’s hard to see the harm in giving this man a Hall of Fame plaque. The museum, set amid the rolling hills and fens of central New York, has displayed an admirable willingness to take a clear-eyed view of the sport it celebrates. There are home runs and no-hitters, and discussions of steroids and racism and owners’ illegal collusion.
“The role of a history museum is to educate,” said Jeffrey Idelson, the Hall’s president. “The premise is to inform, not to direct people to think one way or the other.”
We might also reconsider baseball’s steroid decades, which are like a first cousin to the Rose gambling scandal. That Popeye era in baseball featured overpectoraled men hitting balls long distances and ran in its most unregulated form from the late 1980s to 2008.
In the early 1990s, team owners tried various, sometimes illegal means to cripple the players’ union. Those efforts eventually led to a long strike. Soon after, attendance fell. Soon after that, home runs began to fly. The much-hyped Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run chase was the baseball establishment’s way of putting defibrillators to the collective heart of its fans. Baseball saved the patient at the expense of sacrificing the integrity of the game.
For a long while, I wished a pox on the owners and its steroidal stars. I confess to having contracted a case of the second thoughts.
To walk the Hall and not see Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the two best players, clean or dirty, of that generation is to conduct a historical mind-wipe. And moralism’s fires burn unevenly; surely some players possessing plaques used steroids surreptitiously.
Manager Tony La Russa played shepherd to the pharmaceutically enhanced. He oversaw the Bash Brothers of the Oakland A’s, McGwire and Jose Canseco, who later admitted to injecting McGwire with steroids in the men’s room. Then La Russa smiled beatifically in St. Louis as McGwire, now a Cardinal, sent home runs soaring into the stratosphere.
Although La Russa possessed a keen baseball mind, he apparently never noticed anything amiss. He was elected to the Hall of Fame two years ago. Manfred, and the former commissioner Bud Selig, stood and clapped.
All of which brings us to the steroid-era stars who have yet to get inducted. Many writers have made clear that they will admit no player who carried even a whiff of performance-enhancing drugs.
History and context offer a path out.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, reckons with none of that sport’s many shadows. Asked last year by Sports Business Daily if the museum would deal with concussions, the Hall’s president, David Baker, shook his head. Museum officials, he said, are “the Knights Templar of the holy game of football.”
Really, that’s what he said.
Fortunately, the Baseball Hall of Fame is intent on a more dispassionate approach. Bonds, Clemens, Mike Piazza and David Ortiz put up outsize numbers in an era of chemical enhancement. Rose was a gambling fool.
Acknowledge their accomplishments, and acknowledge the context. Then celebrate at your own risk.
Michael Powell is a New York Times columnist.
