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    • Now that MLB is embracing gambling, should the MLB reinstate Pete Rose?
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    Now that MLB is embracing gambling, should the MLB reinstate Pete Rose?

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    Pete Rose is dead, and as the Hit King greets the great beyond, the calls for his induction into the baseball Hall of Fame will only grow louder.

    It is sheer hypocrisy, the theory goes, that Major League Baseball would keep Rose on the permanently ineligible list — and by extension, out of the Hall — because he gambled on baseball, while the league accepts and encourages winnings from bets on its games .

    Don’t believe them.

    Rose, who died Monday at his Las Vegas home at the age of 83, lived the last 35 years of his life in a state of permanent resentment after an extensive report concluded that he gambled on Cincinnati Reds games in his position of significant influence as manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

    The accusations, the revelations and the hammer that finally came down were stunning. It was a highly compressed underbelly for the game, the equivalent of the steroid era and the sign-stealing scandals, compressed into a period of about 90 days that toppled one of the game’s icons.

    And since August 1989, when Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti lifted his lifetime ban, Rose has used the tincture of time as a restorative balm for his image.

    But with three more commissioners and many more scandals in the game, nothing changed. The game’s all-time greats – some of them tricked, some of them chemically enhanced – greeted each other at the gates of Cooperstown’s Hall.

    Rose signed autographs less than 500 feet away on Main Street at a collectibles store.

    Those 150 yards might as well have been 500 miles, although Rose always had his defenders eager to travel twice that distance to drop on his doorstep.

    Still, the passing decades couldn’t erase Rose’s sins—nor should they.

    Although the voluminous Dowd Report found no evidence that Rose fixed games, his former colleague’s seized notebooks reveal that he gambled on games not only as a manager, but also when he toppled Ty Cobb onto the all-time baseball hits list .

    It’s all very sad, and it doesn’t require a proprietary algorithm to assess the damage to a game when a manager bets on games involving his team. It was bad enough as a player, of course, but Rose not only controlled his own destiny, but that of 24 other men under his charge. His actions affected the careers, and perhaps livelihoods, of others, and while not his intention, certainly affected the outcome of games.

    Rose’s many defenders might wonder at this point: Who cares? And it’s a fair question.

    MLB’s embrace of gambling was inevitable, yet at times abhorrent.

    See, this arranged marriage was sown in 2018, when a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for sports gambling to be legalized on a state-by-state basis. By 2024, you’ll be able to bet on the big game – or even the smallest game – in 38 states and the District of Columbia.

    It is reasonable that sports leagues have a strong interest in helping to regulate this new frontier. Understandably, they would also want to get a piece of the action, now that new revenue streams are available as their most reliable and lucrative – massive national and regional sports network deals that greatly enrich the biggest franchises in baseball and sports. the NBA – wither.

    Yet they certainly did not have to bombard the stadiums with gambling advertisements. To build sports books literally within the gates of their arenas and stadiums, sad places where the needy can enjoy chicken wings while trying to beat the increasingly impossible odds of the house. To blow up the airwaves with incessant advertisements for every janky-ass book that offers a promo code and a gateway to addiction.

    We now live in a world where LeBron James and Kevin Hart shill for DraftKings, a wildly mixed message that every active athlete is telling, from the cricket fields to the collegiate hardwood to the pros: You can look, but you better not touch them.

    Still, none of this makes Rose’s transgressions go away. It has simply tested the level of trust between athlete, competition and fan.

    As consumers and sports fans and perhaps even low-stakes gamblers, we have to assume that the leagues will do the right thing when it comes to enforcement. That they will truly safeguard “the integrity of the game” and not the representatives of their greatest athletes if they get caught up in gambling on their sport.

    So far, the league’s enforcement arms have some minor skin on the wall.

    The NFL has snared a handful of offenders, most notably wide receiver Calvin Ridley, who received a one-year ban for betting on football games. Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter was banned for life by the NBA for a particularly insidious – and ill-conceived – scheme in which he sought to influence the outcome of a bet involving himself.

    And five MLB players were suspended — infielder Tucupita Marcano received a lifetime ban — for betting on baseball, a discovery the league owed in part to “significant cooperation from MLB’s legal sportsbook partners.”

    The specter of a bigger scandal always looms. The game seemed to dodge a bullet when the interpreter of world superstar Shohei Ohtani admitted to stealing some $16 million from his boss to feed his own gambling addiction. In the end, there was no ‘Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal’, but this was a disturbingly close call, with bookmakers, employees and the game’s biggest star finding themselves in the same orbit.

    It’s all quite shocking. And for those of us who lived through the Rose debacle, it’s sobering to hear athletes talk about point spreads or walk around with virtual casinos in our back pockets. Be careful, children.

    But as much as Rose liked to make almost everything about himself, this has little to do with him. Sports betting is now the law of much of the country. Leagues try to enforce this. They punish offenders.

    Rose spat in the face of the game, lying about it, intent on taking advantage of his remorse. That ate him up, because it could plausibly be argued that no one liked the game anymore.

    And now he’s gone. In five years, Commissioner Rob Manfred will do the same. When his replacement takes the gavel, one of the first questions will almost certainly be: “Would you consider reinstating Pete Rose?”

    From Giamatti to Fay Vincent to Bud Selig and now Manfred, the answer has always been no, even when Rose managed to get an audience with the commissioner to plead his case.

    The name will change to the Commissioner’s Office, but the answer most likely won’t change. Giamatti died of a heart attack a week after banishing Rose, and the line of succession has upheld his wishes.

    Maybe there will be a change of heart. But you shouldn’t bet on it.

    Vaseline
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