Don’t kid yourself, it wasn’t MLB commissioner Rob Manfred who reinstated Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson and made them eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this week. It was President Donald Trump.
Does anybody really think it’s just a coincidence that Rose was reinstated just a couple of weeks after Trump — an avid Rose supporter — met with Manfred? Trump had previously written (using ALL CAPS, of course) on social media that he would be “signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING.”
It’s no secret that baseball wants to stay on Trump’s good side to keep baseball’s antitrust exemption intact as the sport, according to the New York Times, “is moving forward 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.”
This certainly isn’t the first time Trump has gotten involved with sports issues, and it certainly won’t be the last. He’s convened with officials from the PGA Tour and LIV Golf in an attempt to settle their feud. He’s called for a governmental commission to end the turmoil in college athletics. He’s effectively prodded sports leagues to ban transgender athletes from competing against biological females.
While I agree with Trump’s stand on transgender athletes and would also love to see him settle the golf dispute and quell the chaos in college football and basketball, I hate the idea that Rose and Jackson are suddenly free and clear to get into the Hall of Fame.
To me, this isn’t just a baseball story; it’s a snapshot of where we are in society. Shoeless Joe was part of a team that threw a World Series. Rose bet on baseball games while both playing the game and managing a team. These are cardinal sins — the kind of violations that strike at the very soul of the sport.
Rose didn’t spend decades showing remorse; he spent them selling autographs in Vegas and playing the victim. But here we are, getting ready to dust off his Hall of Fame plaque like he’s some sort of wronged hero. Shoeless Joe, too, had Hall of Fame numbers, no doubt, but he took gambling money, played along and stayed silent.
In sports today, you can get caught cheating, sign-stealing, juicing, tampering, betting — and we just shrug and say, “Everybody’s doing it.” In politics, you can lie, deny, get convicted, call facts fake — and still get elected.
Accepted rules don’t matter anymore. History can be rewritten. The bar can be lowered. And dishonor now comes with an expiration date.
Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball surrendered earlier this week.
They surrendered to the idea that ethics are optional and integrity is negotiable. …
