What Do You Do With Pete?

(Open the side door and walk away)

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This was probably where Major League Baseball was always headed with Pete Rose. There seemed to be no way to let Rose walk in through the front door of a Hall of Fame whose process — and meaning — he’d so badly muddied by his own careless and self-destructive behavior.

So, you know: When in doubt, the side door will do.

That door has finally been cracked open. Commissioner Rob Manfred, apparently having been assured that Rose is in fact dead, on Monday removed Pete from MLB’s list of permanently ineligible players. That was Manfred’s don’t-blame-me way of triggering action by the technically independent Hall of Fame, which had been bound by its own rule (the “Pete Rose Rule”) that said any player on the ineligible list could not be considered for Cooperstown induction.

With Rose’s banishment posthumously lifted, he now can be so considered — but not by the Hall of Fame’s 400-some voters. Instead, Rose’s candidacy will be pondered by a special committee set up to review the cases of players whose careers ended more than 15 years ago.

So Rose won’t need the hundreds and hundreds of votes that tainted players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens required as they went through the normal HOF election process, which denied them both. Pete will need to garner 12 of 16 votes from the special committee, which is dynamically composed but generally is a mix of Hall of Fame players, front office executives and baseball historians.

A HOF steering group that assembles the ballot for that committee does not meet again until December 2027. Making a few assumptions here and there about what happens, we can guess that Rose will be eligible for the Hall of Fame on the 2028 special committee ballot.

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That’s about it, really. Rose did not suddenly un-blemish the game for which he professed such love; his catastrophic but evidently incurable need to bet on anything and everything remained intact straight through his controversies, investigations and ultimate decision to accept a lifetime ban from baseball in 1989.

It is a little ironic that Rose believed the term “permanently ineligible” to mean a couple of years at the most. He always assumed that there was no way they’d keep Charlie Hustle from getting his due. Perhaps because of that, he was, on balance, unremorseful and aggressively unapologetic.

As someone who covered baseball through those years and interacted with Rose regularly, I can assure you that he knew what he was doing. Pete knew that betting on baseball was the cardinal sin of the sport, and he most certainly knew that the only thing worse than betting on an MLB game was betting on his own team, which at one point he was both playing for and managing.

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During one stretch along the long and twisting field of his denials of and justifications for what he did, Rose’s defense became that, hey, he only bet on his Reds teams when he thought they would win. He seemed unmoved by the obvious follow-up question: Don’t you realize that on the days you don’t bet, the bookies know you don’t think your team is going to win?

Instead, Rose launched into decades of alternating and erratic public behavior. He either attacked baseball head-on and insisted that the sport crown him king, or pledged to whichever commissioner was in office that he had become a changed man deserving of redemption. Either way, it was rough sledding for both Rose and the industry.

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You’ll notice that, to this point, we haven’t spoken of Rose the player. Let’s do that now. He was a Hall of Fame talent. End of story. No one doubted or questioned it. Rose never received his HOF vote simply because the voters weren’t allowed to consider him, and that was because of the ban, and the ban was absolutely and totally because of Pete.

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Despite his longing to remain in the shadows on the topic, Rob Manfred actually committed a little history with this announcement. Pete Rose is the headline, but what the commissioner decided more broadly was that for MLB’s purposes, any lifetime banishment — “permanent ineligibility” — reasonably ends when a person’s life ends.

That profoundly affects the bans of the players of Chicago Black Sox infamy, notably Shoeless Joe Jackson. Jackson was a lifetime .356 hitter, fourth-highest in baseball history. He may receive a new appraisal by the special committee.

As for Rose, this is what he predicted for himself. Just 10 days before he died from a heart condition last September, he participated in an interview with John Condit, a sportscaster in Dayton, Ohio, about an hour’s drive from old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, where Rose did much of his damage on and off the field. (Great America Ball Park now stands on the spot.)

“I’ve come to the conclusion – I hope I’m wrong – that I’ll make the Hall of Fame after I die,” Rose told Condit. “Which I totally disagree with, because the Hall of Fame is for two reasons: your fans and your family. That’s what the Hall of Fame is for. Your fans and your family. And it’s for your family if you’re here. It’s for your fans if you’re here. Not if you’re 10 feet under.”

You know that expression. It’s actually “six feet under.” Pete could always stretch a story, especially his own. He just couldn’t write the ending.

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