A presidential pardon would have only a symbolic effect.
Donald Trump says that Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. He’s also floating a pardon:
Over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING. He 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 sports history. Baseball, which is dying all over the place, should get off its fat, lazy ass, and elect Pete Rose, even though far too late, into the Baseball Hall of Fame!
As usual, there’s a lot to chew on here, even aside from the Trumpian approach to grammar and capitalization, which is par for the course by now. It’s true that there’s no evidence that Rose ever bet against his own team, although of Trump saying that Rose never bet “against…the other team” means that Rose never bet on a game he was playing or managing in, he’s just wrong. While Rose denied that in 1989, his 2004 memoir admitted that he bet on his own teams. Rose insisted that he bet on baseball as a manager, not as a player, but there’s some hairsplitting there because he was a player-manager for the Reds from 1984-86, and there’s documentary evidence uncovered in 2015 that shows him betting on the Reds during that time.
Rose served five months in federal prison in 1990 and paid a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to filing false income tax returns. Because it’s a federal crime, Trump could wipe that away with a pardon, but to what end? There’s no dispute that he was guilty; at most one could argue that the tax charges coming on the heels of the gambling scandal would not have come to light without baseball’s investigation. With Rose dead, a pardon would have only a symbolic effect. And while Rose was an admirable on-field figure, there are other aspects of his life that don’t commend him as a hero. In his mid-30s, while married and the father of two children, he started an affair in the mid-1970s with a young woman, who claimed in an affidavit that came to light in 2017 that the affair began before she turned 16 years old. It was long past time to prosecute Rose for statutory rape, and he insisted that she was 16 when the affair started, but the whole business was at least deeply unsavory and predatory even by the unraveling moral standards of the 1970s.
It’s no surprise that Trump likes Rose. Rose was a winner, and Trump likes to associate with winners – be they Tom Brady, Barry Bonds, or Wayne Gretzky – no matter how controversial they may be. Trump also likes men compromised by sexual misconduct, and men who bend and ignore the rules; he’s apt to identify with Rose having been convicted for what Trump doubtless sees as a paperwork crime.
If Rose is a poor candidate for a pardon, however, I agree with Trump that he belongs in Cooperstown. I’ve been arguing that case for 25 years now:
Fact #1. Pete Rose played in more major league baseball games than anyone else, ever.
Fact #2. No one who watched even one of those games doubts that Rose did everything within his power, and sometimes things beyond what we would think of as his physical limitations, to win every single one of those games.
Added together, they have to count for something. Rose was once a certifiable icon, someone who symbolized complete devotion to winning baseball games — the antithesis of the disengaged loafers who were too common then just as they are now. This is a man who got married in the morning and played that same afternoon. He was Cal Ripken Jr. when Ripken was still wearing diapers…
Shoeless Joe Jackson participated in the greatest affront to the game, ever, on the field of play. He was, at minimum, in league with people who deliberately threw the World Series. No amount of heroism can overcome that because it goes to the heart of what makes Jackson a hero: his ability to help his team win ballgames. He willfully threw away the ultimate goal that Chicago baseball fans [wouldn’t taste again for 86 years]: a World Championship. He participated in a conspiracy that TRIED TO LOSE some of the most important games he ever played.
Rose is different. What Pete Rose is accused of doing was giving in to behavior that can subtly, corrosively corrupt the game. It can lead to bad things. It can sap the will to win. For that, for the good of the game, he belongs on the outside looking in. So the bad things stay outside. So everyone in the game knows that this conduct merits a permanent ban. Do it, you’re gone, you’re never coming back.
But he was still trying to win. There’s never been anything to dispute that. Maybe it clouded his judgment and screwed with his incentives, but there are a lot of managers with cloudy judgment and screwy incentives out there. In the end, maybe it’s more a difference of degree than a difference in kind between Rose and Joe Jackson, but then it’s a difference of degree between Pedro Martinez and Todd Van Poppel, too. It’s still a big degree. Rose tried to win and took part in an awful lot of wins.
For that reason, much as we may deny Rose the ability to win future glories, we should not deny him his past ones. He helped his teams win well over a thousand baseball games, seven division titles, five pennants, three championships. He was a great player for five or six years, and a very good one for many, many years. The Hall of Fame is poorer without the hit king.
This is not just about baseball; it’s more of a philosophy of history. The Hall of Fame may, in a marginal case, reward good character, but whatever the woke rewriters of history may demand, it is fundamentally an honor for the baseball greats, not the most honorable people to play the game. In that sense, Shoeless Joe is more like Jefferson Davis than like a flawed Founding Father: we hold against him that he played against his own team. Not Rose. The fact that Ichiro Suzuki surpassed Rose’s hit record if you count Japan, while a worthy and legitimate feather in Ichiro’s cap, takes nothing away from Rose. Nor does the fact that Rose was never as great as Joe Morgan or Johnny Bench, let alone Ty Cobb or Ted Williams. As I wrote in my obituary of Rose last fall:
Baseball rewards the player who plays the percentages rather than diving for every ball, breaking up every double play, and running into every wall. It punishes the guys who play the game as if it’s football, where you get a week to lick your wounds before suiting up again. Rose, uniquely in the game’s history (even moreso than Ty Cobb, the man he measured himself against), played baseball the way football is played and never paid a price for it….He was insanely consistent and durable over a staggeringly long period, being essentially the same player at 38…as he was at 24, and with little variation over a decade and a half between…he kept up that pace of everyday-every-inning play until he was 41….5’11” and stocky, Rose didn’t have the kind of physique that would merit a sculpture or awe anybody in the gym — but he was built to take a licking and keep on ticking.
Rose embodied a certain set of old-school baseball virtues: Never come out of the lineup, never back down, never let them see you hurting, never stop hustling. He uncomplainingly accepted position switches from second base to the outfield to third base to first base, with the move to third a learn-on-the-job gig in 1975 away from a position where he’d won an MVP and two Gold Gloves. The Reds were rewarded with mediocre fielding — and back-to-back World Championships. The winning mattered more.
Trump can’t influence MLB to change its stance on Rose, and he might even harden its opposition to him (see how well outspoken MAGA politics has gone for Curt Schilling’s Hall of Fame candidacy). But he’s right that a proper commemoration of the game’s greats is poorer without Pete Rose.