On an otherwise calm day for the president (only blaming one country for being invaded is a light day by his standards), he announced his intention to pardon Pete Rose. For what, we're not sure, and with jurisdiction he does not have, he has decided that Rose needs to be reintegrated into America's good graces in the way Rose expressly said he didn't want it: posthumously.
But as the master of the grand and clumsy gesture, the Snickers-bar-in-chief said he was going to pardon him anyway, claiming with syntactical shoes-on-the-wrong-feet grace that Rose "never betted against himself, or the other team. He had the most hits, by far, in baseball history, and won more games than anyone in history." How Rose's betting slips or his Baseball Reference page covers his conviction for tax evasion is hard to parse, as is the claim that he "never betted against himself or the other team" unless he was trying to middle every bet he ever made by betting both ways.
But it adds to Rose's legacy that nothing is ever clean with, by, or for him, even post mortem. His daughter and the Rose family lawyer met with Commissioner Rob Manfred in December, three months after his death, to ask for his reinstatement, and they filed an official appeal in January. Fair play to them. She is doing what a dutiful daughter would do and doing so within baseball guidelines, and according to ESPN noseypants Don Van Natta, MLB had already informally decided in 2020 that a lifetime ban does not survive death. An MLB spokesman told Van Natta Saturday that Manfred is considering that appeal, which he had not done at any point during Rose's life.
In sum, Rose as a debate is back, and because of the newfound interest of the short-attention-span-in-chief he is somehow more polarizing than ever, if such a thing is possible.
On the one hand, Rose's daughter's motivations are clear, understandable, and familial, maybe even noble because of that. On the other, this president ruins everything he touches, and as a result Rose's case for reinstatement and inclusion into the Hall of Fame somehow seems even less appealing than it did when he was alive. There is something telling in the fact that Trump could have issued his baffling pardon during his first administration, which suggests that this could have been an ass-front way of diverting attention from his Zelenskyy debacle.
There is even something noteworthy in the fact that Rose said repeatedly in interviews that he didn't want to be inducted after his death, which means that this "gift" cannot actually be collected by the recipient, which is in its own way a metaphorical bonanza given the person most interested in getting credit for it.
Besides, there is Van Natta's five-year-old scoop that Rose's ban has already been lifted in the eyes of the people who instituted and maintained it, so presumably there is no current bar to his name being put forward for induction in Cooperstown. All the Hall of Fame has to do is to decide the form in which and to whom Rose's case will be presented; his career spanned the purviews of the Classic (pre-1980) and Contemporary (post-1980) Era committees, and the special case that is Rose might be introduced before the full membership since he has never been a candidate before this.
We will now wait while you splash some water on your face and prop up your eyelids. There. Feel better?
However this ends, Rose will be a topical hand grenade yet again if and when his time for belated consideration comes. If he does win induction, baseball is now fully and officially cool with gambling in all its forms, both spiritually and as a bovine client of the wagering industry. As an added benefit, the Black Sox will be back in everyone's administrative good graces without the barnacle of presidential support, making them somehow less besmirched than the defenseless Rose.
Rose getting in also would mean that we would be reintroduced to the voters' bizarre views of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who haven't been banned but have been bureaucratically shunned, which is more amorphous but just as final. If Rose is rehabilitated, the notion that the Hall is only a reward-your-friends/punish-your-enemies proposition is cemented given that neither Bonds nor Clemens ever gambled on baseball nor were ever convicted of anything. On the other hand, they have never had support from a morally deficient politician, and are also not dead, things which while normally considered beneficial would suddenly become disqualifiers.
All these emanations from the simple act of the president saying he will issue an ill-defined pardon to a man whose baseball career ended two generations ago—the mind boggles at how badly Fanatics would bollix up the T-shirts. The lesson for Major League Baseball is clear: This is what happens when you deny your history for reasons of convenience. You end up doing the bidding of the world's worst boss for the most ridiculous reasons of all.
