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Pete Rose may have died last September, but the saga to see Charlie Hustle enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame continues to thrive, as baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced Tuesday that he is lifting the lifetime ban on Rose and 16 other players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson. Baseball fans of the 1970’s and 1980’s know Rose as the face of the game as he set numerous all-time records, including hits (4,256), games played (3,562) and at-bats (14,053). However, Rose drew his lifetime suspension in 1989 after it was discovered that he bet on baseball games; Cooperstown issued its ban on ineligible players- specifically Rose- two years later. Rose appealed for reinstatement numerous times in the remaining 34 years of his life; now that Manfred has repealed the ban, should the late Charlie Hustle take his place in the plaque room in Cooperstown?
As one of the writers who votes on Cooperstown’s immortals, Bill Madden has covered the Rose scandal for the New York Daily News since the first whispers of his wrongdoings popped up and was himself inducted into the writer’s wing of the Hall of Fame in 2010. Madden appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to debate whether Rose has any chance to finally make the Hall of Fame.
Madden told host Larry Mendte that it was the Hall of Fame, not Major League Baseball, that banned Rose from the Hall in the first place: “When Bart Giamatti, the commissioner, first ruled that he was going to go on the permanently ineligible list, Giamatti never said anything about the Hall of Fame; he left that open. All he said was, ‘Pete, you need to reconfigure your life, and if you do, then this is up for appeal’… [but] it was the Hall of Fame that decided that anybody on the permanent ineligible list was ineligible for the Hall of Fame, effectively taking the matter of Rose away from the Baseball Writers’ Association. We were not happy about that because... we never got a chance to decide one way or another.”
Madden does see one key difference between what Pete Rose did in gambling on games versus what Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens did in taking steroids: “In my opinion, the steroids guys cheated the game, and what they did was, in my opinion, unforgiveable. In Pete’s case, he may have broken baseball’s cardinal rule, but he never cheated the game. He always played all-out. For me, that’s why I probably would have voted for him.”