Song Lyric of the Day (Billy Joel, With a View of Pete Rose Overturned by History)

“Rose, he knows he's such a credit to the game

But the Yankees grab the headlines every time

Melodrama's so much fun

In black and white for everyone to see.”—Billy Joel, “Zanzibar,” from the 52nd Street album (1979)

Time has shown how radically Billy Joel’s ripped-from-the-headlines judgment on baseball and morality needs to be revised.

In the late Seventies, it was hard to argue with him: Pete Rose was coming off a 44-game consecutive hitting streak with the Cincinnati Reds, proving that sheer willpower could lift a ballplayer of average skill to the height of his profession.

Meanwhile, the Yankees were dismaying longtime fans, as bullying owner George Steinbrenner, combative, alcoholic manager Billy Martin, and egotistical slugger Reggie Jackson engaged in a daily triangular psychodrama.

It all changed on this date 20 years ago, when Rose’s fall from grace was dramatically confirmed.

Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti announced that the owner of the record for most lifetime hits was being suspended for life for “conduct not in the best interests of the game,” related to betting on contests—including those in which he was involved as manager of the Reds. Subsequently, Rose went to jail on charges of income-tax evasion.

Hank Aaron’s recent support of Rose’s reinstatement—actuated partly by his disgust for the drip-by-drip stain left by the steroids scandal—comes from a man far better than his statement’s beneficiary.

If Rose sits now on the sidelines of the game he loved, it’s his own fault. I’m not referring here strictly to his original sin, the betting itself, but also to the 15 years of stonewalling on which he embarked as soon as he was implicated in the scandal.

Americans, a forgiving people, would have embraced someone who confessed to a gambling addiction so powerful that it even caused him to ignore the enormous risks associated with violating Major League Baseball Rule 21(d), the ban on betting on one’s team—a restriction that’s posted in every clubhouse.

In 2004, Rose finally copped to what the 225-page Dowd Report had documented in damning detail at the time of his banishment: not only had he bet on the Reds, but he’d wager as much as $10,000 per game.

The former hits leader and his defenders say that he never bet against the Reds, but they ignore the following:

* Even a decision to abstain on the part of an habitual gambler can be read by others as a signal that the team will be in the tank that day.

* The possibility of debts too steep to be paid would have opened Rose to severe pressure from the underworld and possibly affected the course of a pennant race. This happened to Denny McLain in 1967, when the young pitcher’s involvement in a bookmaking operation led him to be visited by a mob operative who, while threatening far worse, dislocated two toes on McLain’s left foot. Had the pitcher not missed several starts down the stretch, he might have helped the Tigers win the pennant that year instead of falling one game short. (Incidentally, Rose and McLain collaborated on a book two years later: How to Play Better Baseball. I wonder if they traded betting tips? Actually, on second thought, I don’t.)

Rose stained the game and betrayed his players with his misconduct, as Giamatti noted with his grave but spot-on summary of the case. In his autobiography, the pathetically titled My Prison Without Bars, the banned ballplayer had the gall to write: “I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way."

As he elaborates, Rose demonstrates only that, in his transparent lack of remorse, there’s one career he might still be suited for, if a job in baseball (increasingly remote, given not only his dangerous gambling addiction but even his professed lack of interest in managing compared with the thrill of hitting) remains outside his reach: politician. “So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let's move on."

It might be just as well that Rose allows people like Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench and Mike Schmidt make the case for allowing him back into the game and onto the Hall of Fame ballots, because every word he says or writes is a self-indictment that reveals his profound callousness and lack of concern for the damage he caused.

At the same time, with each passing year, the ’78 Yankees look better and better. Disregard their crazy owner and the even crazier manager he dumped halfway through the year (then re-hired for the next year), and concentrate on the 25 players (yes, even Reggie).

Remember this about that sometimes brawling, always mentally tough squad: When everyone else had them counted out at 14 games down (including Jim Rice of the Red Sox, who, with his recent comments on Derek Jeter, proves he remains clueless about character), they refused to give up.

When making the playoffs at all, without the option of a wild-card slot, was far harder then than it is now, the Bombers became the exemplar of determination and perseverance against all odds.

They, my friends, represent a “credit to the game,” not an irresponsible, skirt-chasing, records-obsessed, gambling-addicted, felonious has-been who might be 68, but has the moral sense of a six-year-old. In fact, that last statement might even be an insult to children.