Here's a sentence you probably haven't imagined ever reading: The 1919 Black Sox are BACK!
Oh sure, you fell for the splashier "Commissioner Lifts Lifetime Ban On Pete Rose Because He's Stopped Being Alive" headlines, in part because it looks Manfred gave in to the whims expressed during a regularly scheduled unhinged rant of the current President. But Manfred went further with his favor-currying than anyone could have imagined. The commissioner’s elite constituent service expanded by sucking up to the still-new Pope by forgiving the greatest scandal in the sport's history, which just happens to have been authored by the Chicago-born Pope’s team of choice. Say what you want about baseball's place in the culture, but no other commissioner is nuzzling up to this many levels of power quite like our Robbo.
Manfred lifted the ban on Rose, which makes him eligible for the Hall of Fame as soon as a committee can be assembled to print up some ballots with his name on them. But he noticed that 15 other dead people with gambling histories had also been banned for that reason, and decided for the sake of consistency to yank all 16 back into play. That includes Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, or as you know them, D.B. Sweeney and John Cusack.
Fourteen of those were players banned in the 1920s by tinpot dictator and part-time legal gadfly Kenesaw Mountain Landis; a fifteenth, Phillies owner William Cox, got it in 1943, when nobody was paying attention because of that war thing. But those were also the days when players got cute nicknames like Happy, Lefty, Cozy, Chick, Buck, Shufflin', and Shoeless, so they won't get the play that Rose gets. There are people alive who remember seeing Rose’s unsettling grin leering out from boxes of breakfast cereal, who have heard his singing voice in aftershave ads, and who remember what he was like. All of the reinstated are dead, but the others are far more ghostly.
The Black Sox, though, have something going for them that Rose doesn't, which is quaintness. They've all been dead for 50 years, for starters, and blinking out of existence before the invention of the high-five is about as quaint as it gets. They were also the subjects of the best baseball movie ever made, Eight Men Out, among many other fictionalizations. Truth is, Manfred did not have to go the extra miles required to free this bunch from historical stasis. He could have done the cheap recency-bias-soaked thing, taken Rose off the suspended list per the President’s oddly capitalized command, and called it a day.
But Rose's candidacy is still fresh enough to be problematic and even worrisome, while the White Sox are the new hot thing in baseball because we are still in the throes of Pope-a-palooza. More to the point, the Sox and their bent antecedents have not been this relevant to casuals since Eight Men Out was released in 1988. This is the franchise’s first moment that isn't about being the new Cleveland Spiders since they won the 2005 World Series, of which there is photographic evidence of Pope Leo at the ballpark when he was just Southside Bobby, and Manfred won’t turn down another big-market team becoming notable even when the baseball they play notably isn't. The Pope is that entry pass.
For the record, the non-Black Sox seven names on the list of the pardoned are just there for snicks and giggles, given that nobody has mentioned former Phillies owner William Cox since 1943, even though his own story—buys hysterically bad team, improves it, gets caught betting on team he bought, is banned for life, all within a year—would be a hilarious movie of its own, probably starring pretty sports geek Timothee Chalamet.
Manfred is not only playing to the President and Pope, but to his newest business partners, the gambling industry. It is an awkward thing to be in business with gamblers on one hand and banning them with the other, and as a result Manfred has been trying to thread a needle with a rope on that relationship, which is essentially the sport's relationship with/shunning of PEDs. The question underlying all of it is always "Is the money coming in or going out?" Frankly, it is remarkable that Manfred restrained himself from making Arnold Rothstein eligible for the Hall of Fame too, given that the mobster famous for bringing illegal narcotics to America and fixing the 1919 World Series was also 110 years ahead of his time with the concept that eventually became DraftKings. Now there's an ad to play in the middle of a Reds-Cardinals rain delay—an AI version of the late Michael Lerner oozing out prop bets on Nick Lodolo strikeout totals or Lars Nootbaar extra-inning RBIs.
The catalog of sepia-toned photos that Manfred’s decision has dusted off is sufficiently thick, and the questions that decision raises sufficiently thorny, that this feels less like the conclusion to a story than the beginning of another round of circular debate. The most powerful parties got what they wanted, which is most of Manfred’s job, but credit is due for going the extra mile. It could have just been Rose, but now we can look ahead to the next shoe to drop in this story, which is Leo The Sox Guy's upcoming encyclical, “De natura divina indisputabili a Kid Gleason ad Will Venable.” Which, as we all know, is Latin for "Go Sox Go."
