Quote of the Day (Ken Rosenthal, on Rob Manfred’s Pete Rose Decision)

“[Major league baseball commissioner Rob] Manfred is nothing if not shrewd. He surely did not want to risk the president embarrassing him publicly on social media. He also probably did not want to get on Trump’s wrong side at a time when he is pushing for a direct-to-consumer streaming service for the league, and the migration from broadcast to streaming by professional sports leagues is under government scrutiny. Also, while Trump is known to be pro-management, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, if sufficiently annoyed, he could threaten baseball’s antitrust exemption.”—Ken Rosenthal, sportswriter for “The Athletic,” on the decision to remove Pete Rose from MLB’s “permanently ineligible” list, in "Hall Must Weigh 4,256 Hits Against a Heap of Questions," The New York Times, May 15, 2025

Two decades ago, as many entertainers raised their voices against the Iraq War, a Laura Ingraham book popularized unsought advice that right-wingers offered progressives who were, to their way of thinking, sticking their noses where they shouldn’t: Shut Up and Sing.

These days, many Americans are likely to co-opt the first two words of Ms. Ingraham’s title and hurl them at President Trump. 

Prior Presidents, too busy with affairs of state, never felt the need to comment 24/7 on so many non-governmental areas of life to which people, no matter their parties or ideologies, retreated for relief.

Consider this just one more precedent, one more norm broken wide open by the current administration.

Don’t imagine that such blustering and blundering will end with the case of baseball’s all-time hits king (who, it has come out, also sought to score with a teenager in the Seventies, at a time when he was married with two children).

This week, former Death Row Records head Suge Knight predicted that Trump could pardon Sean “Diddy” Combs if the rapper is convicted at his current trial.

In that case, will Rose fans—will Trump fans—continue to excuse the President’s intrusions in areas that should not concern him?