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?

Quote of the Day (Bart Giamatti, on Baseball)

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”—A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind," in A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, edited by Kenneth S. Robson (1998)

A. Bartlett Giamatti was born on this date 75 years ago in Boston. The passage above tells you everything you need to know about why this Renaissance scholar left a career in academe—capped by eight years as President of Yale University—to become President of the National League and, later, Commissioner of Baseball. It was in the latter role that he banned Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, for life for betting on games--including those involving his own team. Eight days after the announcement in August 1989, Giamatti, his heart taxed by this stress on top of his years of heavy smoking, died.

Rose denied the allegations at the time of the agreement he signed, and for more than a decade later, until it became clear that he would never have a chance of entering the Baseball Hall of Fame unless he owned up to his error.

When his confession came, in 2004, it was grudging and graceless, not to mention totally anticlimactic, the way that Joey Buttafuoco’s was when he admitted at last that yup, he had had sex with Amy Fisher. Even the book’s title, My Prison Without Bars, gave the game away about his lack of contrition. “Right or wrong, the punishment didn’t fit the crime—so I denied the crime.”

And then, this summary passage: “I’m sorry it happened….Let’s move on.” That said all you needed to know about transgressors’ desired moral outcome in our time: forgiveness without contrition. They deny, deny, deny; they put up every legal defense known to man; they incinerate the reputation of their accusers; when the weight of the evidence is finally too much, they say something to the effect of, "If I offended anyone, I apologize."  It’s the same script used by Buttafuoco, Lance Armstrong, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Mark Sanford…The list goes on and on.

Contrast that with Giamatti’s closing of the book on “Charlie Hustle”—old-fashioned, and all the more powerful and haunting for that: “The matter of Mr. Rose is now closed. It will be debated and discussed. Let no one think that it did not hurt baseball. That hurt will pass, however, as the great glory of the game asserts itself and a resilient institution goes forward. Let it also be clear that no individual is superior to the game.”

Would that Giamatti—and his successor, Fay Vincent—had been around when baseball entered in earnest upon its steroid era. Performance-enhancing drugs spread like a contagion in Bud Selig’s reign as baseball commissioner. Thank God gambling didn’t after Giamatti acted against Rose. It hurt, as he said it had done, but nothing like how might have if Giamatti had played “see no evil.”

This Day in Baseball History (Rose Surpasses Cobb as All-Time Hits Leader)

September 11, 1985—When the nearly 60-year-old career-hits record held by Ty Cobb was surpassed, it was done by a player, Pete Rose, fully the equal of “the Georgia Peach” in desire to excel—but also, it would turn out in a few years, a match for the Hall of Famer in a tendency not only to exceed yardsticks of excellence set on the diamond but also in codes of conduct off the field.

Rose lost no time in beating Cobb’s record of 4,192 on this evening. Latecomers to the game might have been annoyed that the Cincinnati Red legend slapped a hit (characteristically, it was a single) off the San Diego Padres’ Eric Show in the first inning.

Unlike, say, Alex Rodriguez, Rose never showed nervousness. In this case, he didn’t have to, anyway: as player-manager, he could keep writing his name on the lineup card, not having to worry that he might lose his position to a younger, better player.

The evening was treated as one of the great moments in baseball. Rose received a Corvette, along with a phone call from President Ronald Reagan. It was all in keeping with a carefully burnished public image with few if any public dissenters.

As I indicated last year in a post marking Rose’s banishment from baseball, the man who broke Cobb’s record for hits was “an irresponsible, skirt-chasing, records-obsessed, gambling-addicted, felonious has-been.” That conduct was present from the beginning of his career, as were the well-springs of Cobb's behavior.

What were the sources of each man’s competitive fury? One incident spurred Cobb in particular: three weeks before he made his debut in center field with the Detroit Tigers, his mother accidentally shot and killed his father. (The pathologically jealous William Cobb was sneaking around the house, hoping to catch his wife in the act with a lover, when she, suspecting the silhouette near the window was an intruder, shot and killed him. She would be acquitted of murder seven months later.) "I did it for my father,” Cobb admitted later about what drove him. “He never got to see me play ... but I knew he was watching me, and I never let him down.”

Young Cobb, like young Rose nearly 60 years later, provoked the anger of team veterans. Some took the rookie hazing beyond the acceptable limits because they wanted him off the team. Tiger manager Hughie Jennings permitted the razzing to proceed until, convinced that Cobb had the guts not to back down, he finally passed the word that it had to stop.

Rose survived his own hazing in 1963. Reds veterans, annoyed that manager Fred Hutchinson was benching second baseman Don Blasingame—who’d hit .281 and played creditable in the field the year before—in favor of the 22-year-old Rose, gave the youngster the business.

Rose’s attitude didn’t help matters. His competitive drive—notably, sprinting to first base after a walk—was so comically histrionic that sharp-tongued Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford had already christened him “Charlie Hustle.” Whatever latitude teammates might have given him for brashness (the same confidence meant he’d hit anybody under any circumstances) quickly vanished when they realized something else almost immediately about him: he felt the unwritten rules of the game didn’t apply to him.

Years later, pitcher Jim O’Toole remembered an incident in Pete Rose: Baseball's Charlie Hustle, by Mike Towle: During spring training, the Reds had gone to Mexico City. At one club, Rose had called a stripper over to the table “and bingo, he had her down on the table doing something no one should be doing in public….I broke in a few years earlier than that, and if I had done something like that as a rookie, I would have found myself right back down in Double-A. But Pete got away with a lot of stuff that normal players couldn’t have gotten away with. He was just different.”

Veterans took extreme exception to a rookie assuming such prerogatives for himself. The only way Rose survived that season was because of an outlet that would never have occurred to the racist Cobb even if it had been open to him: assistance from African-American veterans. Vada Pinson and Frank Robinson, who knew all about snubs because of the color of their skin, made sure they took Rose under their wing. They not only made him feel accepted, but taught him some of the niceties of the game.

In another sense, they could only get so far with him. New York Met fans still seethe over the fight Rose picked with shortstop Bud Harrelson during the 1973 playoffs. Less understandable, because it occurred with no high stakes involved whatsoever, was Rose’s home-plate collision with catcher Ray Fosse during the 1970 All-Star Game—although it’s the type of play that Cobb, who sharpened his cleats (the better for stealing bases), might have appreciated.

One other similarity between the two players: involvement in gambling. Rose’s is well-documented—and finally, after 15 years of stonewalling after his banishment from baseball, confessed. Cobb’s is far murkier.

A former Tiger teammate, Dutch Leonard, claimed after the 1926 season that he, Cobb, and two Cleveland Indian players, Tris Speaker and Joe Wood, had conspired to fix a game in the 1919 season. The matter eventually came to the attention of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who eventually exonerated the accused players.

But ever since then, many have wondered if Landis was trying to contain another potentially damaging baseball gambling scandal on the order of the “Black Sox” series of 1919. A scandal involving a future Hall of Famer (or, in the Cobb-Speaker affair, two) would have wounded America’s pastime as much in the 1920s as it did 60 years later. Cobb--who, like Rose later, had been serving as player-manager for his longtime team--moved on from the Tigers in his last two years in the big leagues, playing for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics.

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.