Pete Rose was snubbed

After last week’s rebuttal to Mel Kiper, Jr. and his horrendous take on defense, Pete Rose’s death served me up another hotly-contested topic to write about: why he was snubbed from the Hall of Fame.

This is a true ‘separate the art from the artist’ scenario — I do not condone any of his off-the-field behavior. He was a far better — or bettor, for a good pun’s sake — baseball player than he was as a human being, but that is not the point of this tyrade. I am only concerned with his on-the-field play, and the buck stops there.

Pete Rose was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Put him up there with the Great Bambino, DiMaggio, Ty Cobb and Barry Bonds (who, alongside many of his fellow ‘steroid-era’ colleagues, desires a column on why they were snubbed as well). Shoehei Ohtani is the talk of the town in professional baseball right now, and surprisingly, he has a story similar to Rose’s — but his was swept under the rug and forgotten about very quickly.

I don’t laud myself as some big baseball fan. To be honest, I haven’t watched a full game in probably over a decade. But, I was once a big fan of the game, especially when I still played it. Man, I thought I was going to be the next David Ortiz — I even wore his number, his cleats, and my pants the same way he did.

And Rose played, retired, managed, and received a lifetime ban before I was even born. So, I don’t have firsthand experience with the subject, but what I do have is the ability to research and see that this was nothing more than a smear campaign and personal vendetta from someone that ruined the trajectory of Pete Rose and baseball as a whole. Maybe even other sports, too.

This may be a deep-seated hatred for how the voting for the baseball Hall of Fame works. Journalists can, and do, withhold a player from the Hall of Fame just because they don’t like him. Whether this is a rivalry with their favorite team, something he did off the field, or just two people that don’t like each other, but it happens. Take for example, Dan Shaughnessy and his smear campaign against Curt Schilling, where he at first said his personal feelings towards Schilling wouldn’t impact his vote for the Hall of Fame, and then reversed course and did, in fact, let his bias snub one of the greats of the game.

Or the anonymous person who didn’t vote for Derek Jeter to make it in. I mean, drama aside, Jeter was one of the greatest to ever play, and this guy thought he didn’t deserve to be enshrined for eternity because of whatever storyline? Absolutely ridiculous if you ask me.

But, getting back to Rose — in 14,053 at-bats, Rose got 4256 hits and 160 home runs, for a lifetime batting average of .303. Add in his 2,165 runs, 1,314 RBIs, 198 stolen bases, .375 on-base percentage and .409 slugging percentage and undoubtedly Rose is one of the best to ever do it. Plug in a fan-favorite like Jim Thome’s name instead of Rose’s, and you’ve got a unanimous first-ballet HoFer. Unless, that is, some obscure journalist from the middle of Idaho has a personal vendetta to see that Thome doesn’t get a unanimous vote because he received a parking ticket outside of Jacobs Field in August of 1997.

I get it — the number one rule as an athlete is no gambling. It’s plastered inside every MLB locker room for a reason. The Chicago Black Sox scandal of the early-20th century is a stain on the league even to this day, so it’s there for a reason. But the evidence shows Rose didn’t do it as a player, but instead as a manager. And that’s why he should be in the HoF as a player, not a manager. Ban manager Pete Rose for life, enshrine ballplayer Rose for life.

And with today’s world, sports gambling is practically thrown in our faces. You’ll get the DraftKings highlights of the day, provided by FanDuel Sportsbook, with an ad from ESPN Bet and Bet360 at the commercial break. Professional athletes even star in these advertisements. The ticker at the bottom of ESPN shows betting lines and props. All of that, but we demonized Pete Rose for the last 35 years of his life?

The Ohtani topic is one that should be brought to light again. I fully believe Shoehei was guilty of sports gambling, but he had a great cop-out and fall guy. Regardless of language barriers, you don’t just ‘not see’ millions of dollars disappearing from your bank account. And don’t even get me started on Michael Jordan’s cop-out ‘retirement’ because of his gambling problems — something that the NBA still won’t address, even though there are hundreds of stories about the basketball great’s gambling problems.

But, baseball will have yet another PR fumble, and they’ll quickly put Rose in the HoF in Cooperstown, N.Y. as quick as they can. People will gather en masse to see his bust and listen to people talk about how great of a player he was. There will be no mention of his gambling habits or how he was blackballed and shunned by an entire sport for his mistakes after he was done playing. It will be a grand ordeal now that his lifetime suspension is technically over, with the MLB spitting on his grave as they emphatically say “you might have won the battle, but we won the war.”