Jim Alexander: I guess it was inevitable that Pete Rose would be back in the news eventually, and so here we are this week. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred – quite likely reacting to pressure from the White House as well as lobbying from Rose’s heirs – decided this week that Charlie Hustle, along with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of the 1919 Black Sox and a few others who had been permanently banned from the game, should have their bans lifted posthumously. Which means they’re again eligible for the Hall of Fame vote.
Which means … what, exactly?
In the case of Rose, 36 years after he had been banned by then-commissioner Bart Giamatti for not only betting on baseball but betting on his own team, this creates a stew of uncomfortable feelings among many in the game. And while I’m guessing the public assumption is that Rose will eventually have a plaque in Cooperstown – the Hall’s museum already has a large collection of memorabilia from his career, as noted by Jane Forbes Clark, the institution’s chairman of the board – that ultimate honor is no slam dunk, even after his passing and, um, reinstatement.
Rose will almost certainly be among those up for consideration by the Classic Baseball Era committee in December 2027. The ban kept him off the yearly ballots filled out by the Baseball Writers Association of America voters – of which I am one – but while that body is famously cantankerous (guilty, sometimes), Rose at least had a chance among those voters thanks to those 4,256 career hits. The smaller committees – made up of16 voters, a mixture of current Hall of Famers, current and former baseball executives and media members – are a lot more selective, and there remains enough sentiment among ex-players that getting the 75% (12 votes) necessary to go into the Hall may be an even greater hurdle.
Old friend Tyler Kepner of the Athletic, along with David O’Brien and Jayson Stark, polled a dozen current members of the Hall. Only four said Pete should definitely go in. With the rest, there was a lot of indecision. And former Phillies teammate Mike Schmidt, in a separate story, put it this way when Stark asked him if this week’s decision lifted the cloud over Rose’s head:
“No, I think Pete is always going to have a cloud following him around, God rest his soul. You know, Pete’s no longer with us, but there will always be a cloud above any discussion about Pete Rose.”
Would I vote for him if I were on the panel? I still don’t know. And there are lots of factors involved, including this logic: If you voted for Barry Bonds and/or Roger Clemens for the Hall – as I did – even though their careers were clouded by allegations of PED use, for consistency’s sake wouldn’t you vote for Rose as well?
Then again, Bonds and Clemens weren’t declared permanently ineligible.
How do you see it, Mirjam?
Mirjam Swanson: I think there was a time, not too long ago, where it would’ve been a hard no.
The Black Sox scandal is such a substantial piece of baseball lore, everyone knows: Don’t bet on baseball.
But if MLB is going to have an all-inclusive partnership with MGM Resorts and going to boast about its co-exclusive, multi-year partnerships with sports betting sites like FanDuel, and if the MLB Players’ Association is going to partner with PENN, a sports betting platform, allowing it to use players’ names, images and likenesses … etc., well, then. It changes the conversation, doesn’t it?
If baseball is going to be in bed with ALL these betting platforms, then how is baseball also going to treat its historic ballplayers who bet as the ultimate outlaws, with no possibility of parole?
It’s kinda like the Reggie Bush situation, whether or not he accepted unwarranted benefits – the fact that schools are now finding ways to outright pay their student-athletes hand over fist to play for them voids the arguments that made it OK to punish players for alleged transgressions that now seem outright miniscule.
You can hate the new way of doing things, and you can argue the rules were the rules back when, but when we’re experiencing these titanic shifts in what’s not just acceptable and allowed but promoted and championed – both betting and paying collegians – it makes it harder to muster up continued disdain for those who crossed the line and were penalized previously.
Not that ballplayers should be allowed to bet on themselves in any capacity beyond the decisions they make, contractually. But at this point, it also seems hypocritical for baseball to treat betting as the game’s greatest sin, the thing that should banish someone like Rose – who said he never bet AGAINST himself – forever.
Jim: The entire relationship between professional sports – not just baseball – and the sports gambling industry probably should be a topic unto itself for us one of these weeks. The whole environment makes me uneasy, especially when we start seeing current betting scandals involving players like basketball’s Jontay Porter … or when fans/bettors harass players solely because those players’ performances cost them money. (The death threats that Lance McCullers Jr. faced after his return to pitching with the Astros last week very well could be evidence of the latter.)
Or maybe it’s just me, the generation in which I grew up, and my attitude that I have far better things to do with my limited income than let it ride on a Thursday Twins-Orioles game, for example.
We’ll get into that subject at some point, I’m sure. In the meantime … time for some conspiracy theories!!! When the Dallas Mavericks saved Nico Harrison’s job by getting the No. 1 pick in this June’s NBA draft – indeed, when the top three teams in the lottery, the Mavs, Spurs and 76ers, were far from the most deserving if you look at the bottom of the standings – we got the usual suspicions that the process was rigged. (The idea of Dallas trading away a generational talent in Luka Doncic, and then getting a chance to draft another in Cooper Flagg, does seem kind of fishy.)
But I want to explore something you suggested earlier this week – a column idea that didn’t go beyond the idea stage, but one that I found fascinating: Scrap the draft and let NBA teams recruit college stars, only with pro contracts rather than NIL deals. The image of JJ Redick sitting in a college star’s living room trying to impress the kid’s mom … we could have a lot of fun with that.
How would that work, though? Or would it cause more problems than it actually solves? I suggest it wouldn’t do much more for the league’s bottom feeders than the current game of chance. Under those conditions, would the Jazz, Pelicans, Wizards and Hornets be considered mid-majors?
And are there, maybe, better ways to reform the draft?
Mirjam: I got the idea from the NWSL – which abolished its draft last summer and gave rookies entering the league a choice of where they wanted to play. That was both, like, humane (the idea that professional college graduates could pick where they worked!) and also served to incentivize teams to try to make themselves attractive to new talent as good places to work.
I think, in a lot of ways, that would be better than incentivizing teams to be bad, to tank and stink and spread that stink across the league. Because it’s such bad business – and not just in Washington or Utah, but everywhere the Wizards and Jazz go, we know it’s essentially going to be a G League game for which the home team is charging full price. Whether or not their best players even dress out and whether or not anyone has to play especially hard, considering one team is TRYING TO LOSE, as if that really even serves the players they’re supposed to be trying to develop. It’s a charade and it sucks.
And while the lottery is meant to dissuade teams from trying to finish LAST, all it really seems to do is encourage MORE teams to be bad – or bad ENOUGH. To miss the playoffs, at least. Like, this past season, when the young Portland Trail Blazers were figuring it out and winning a bit – giving their fans something worth watching! – the general consensus was: What the hell is Portland doing? They can’t be winning! How dumb!
That’s no way to get people to want to watch your sport.
So I wondered what would happen in the NBA if they scrapped the draft and let Cooper Flagg and his would-be draft class pick the companies they wanted to work for. Would they all just go to L.A. and New York and Miami? Or … would we see rookies do what we’ve seen collegians do, and go to places where they can get playing time and exposure, even if it means leaving a winning team in Westwood for, say, Bloomington, Indiana, or Syracuse, New York, or Knoxville, Tennessee.
What would be so bad about Milwaukee, say, if playing there set you up to get a rich second contract?
I had fun thinking about that, but I think the biggest draw will always be money, in college (these days) or the pros – and teams would wind up tanking in a different way to incentivize the top rookies to sign with them. They’d just limit their payroll and field weak, cheap teams in order to be in position to have enough money available to entice a Cooper Flagg to come aboard. And then, the teams that didn’t get Flagg would be left overpaying a bunch of Timofey Mozgovs …
But the way the NBA is doing it now ain’t great, so they ought to change something – and there’s no way to introduce relegation. (I wish!)
Perhaps teams that whiff on the playoffs should get smaller pieces of the TV revenue pie?
I don’t know, but it’s something I can’t stop thinking about – considering how awesomely entertaining the postseason product has been.
Jim: I like the concept, rookies choosing their own destinations, for the most part. But I guess whatever system would be implemented, the smart guys in front offices would find a way to get around it. And given that every commissioner in every sport has league-wide parity as an ambition, such a laissez-faire approach would be difficult to sell. (I happen to think salary caps are a bigger issue, and that tightening them – as in the NBA, for example – doesn’t incentivize teams to improve.)
Then again, baseball’s lack of a hard salary cap hasn’t incentivized the Pittsburgh Pirates and Colorado Rockies of the world to do anything but whine about the disparity. And baseball’s own draft has changed – specific salary slots depending on your draft position, and the reduction to 20 rounds that not only has gone hand-in-hand with the contraction of the minor leagues but makes it impossible for another 62nd-round pick to have a Hall of Fame career, the way Mike Piazza did.
(MLB has a draft lottery, too. Does anyone even notice?)
Meanwhile, there is some good news out of the NWSL. Savy King of Angel City, who collapsed on the field during a game against Utah last week and had to be taken off in a stretcher, underwent successful heart surgery this week to address an abnormality. I see stories like this, or like the collapse of Damar Hamlin when he went into cardiac arrest during a Bills-Bengals Monday Night Football game in January 2023, and I think of Hank Gathers’ tragic death from a heart attack during a Loyola Marymount game in 1990.
When Hamlin collapsed, in the first quarter, the game was stopped and wasn’t resumed. Players on both teams were shaken, and the coaches, Zac Taylor of the Bengals and Sean McDermott of the Bills, met with the game officials; ultimately the game was stopped and never resumed.
In other words, in the NFL, maybe the epitome of macho toughness, play stopped. In the NWSL, play continued. King collapsed in the 74th minute, with players on both teams visibly shaken and, I’m fairly certain, not wanting to continue, but they instead had to resume the game after a 15-minute break.
Now, just what’s wrong with this picture?
Mirjam: First, much love and strength to Savy King and her family. Local player, Agoura Hills High grad, playing for Angel City? So great. And so glad she’s going to be OK after such a scary moment.
But as far as the show going on … nah. We’ve got to normalize, when someone is facing a life-threatening or possibly life-altering medical issue, calling it a day, or night. Coming back tomorrow, or not. Who cares? That whole Bigger Than Sports mantra that gets thrown around – yeah, this is that. LIFE is bigger than sports.
As U.S. women’s national team star Trinity Rodman posted on social media: “In no world should that game have continued.” Glad to read that the NWSL is reviewing protocols – which, really, every pro league in America should.
Because if you remember, it wasn’t the NFL that called that Bills-Bengals game, it was – per ESPN’s reporting – the people on the ground who made the call. Reportedly, the league was leaving it open for the game to continue until the coaches, players and refs on the scene put their foot down and said: No: “The league did not cancel the game,” a team official told ESPN. “The Bills and the Bengals canceled the game.”
Credit to them for making that call. But no one should even have to MAKE that call, not NFL coaches, not NWSL players, because there should be widely accepted and well-understood protocols to stop the action when something so serious – and seriously so much bigger than the game – occurs.
