According to BBWAA voter Tim Kurkijan, who 20 years ago said on ESPN that he’d vote for Pete Rose in the Baseball Hall of Fame if he were ever to be eligible, Rose’s former teammate Hall of Famer Frank Robinson called him and said that if Pete Rose were to ever be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, it’d be a disgrace that would cause Frank Robinson to never visit Cooperstown again. In a 2018 interview on the Dan Patrick Show, Hall of Fame teammate of Rose, Johnny Bench, was vehemently against the idea of Pete Rose being elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame because not only did Rose break the rules that every other player had to follow to secure the integrity of the game, Rose had no remorse and only admitted it when he could make money off of it. Bench stated that fellow inductees Mike Schmidt and Joe Morgan had a committee in 2002 to decide Rose’s eligibility for potential re-instatement that Rose flat out refused to do, ending the potential of ever seeing his name celebrated on a Hall of Fame plaque. Morgan, however, still backed the possibility of Rose being elected up until his death, while Schmidt as recently as yesterday said in a statement implying that while he doesn’t have a stance on whether Rose should be in, it should be up to his peers to decide. Bench elaborated that he’d likely never see the day Rose was eligible, so his further opinion on the matter didn’t really mean much.
As of May 13th, 2025, Johnny Bench is both still alive and as of now, likely to serve on the same veteran’s committee that convenes in December of 2027 to focus on the Pete Rose Hall of Fame candidacy, thanks in part to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred laying down a ruling that once a permanently ineligible player passes away, they are automatically re-instated. This opens up a Hall of Fame avenue for not only Rose, but Hall of Fame caliber players such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Ed Cicotte in future years.
“In my view, a determination must be made regarding how the phrase ‘permanently ineligible’ should be interpreted in light of the purposes and policies behind Rule 21, which are to: (1) protect the game from individuals who pose a risk to the integrity of the sport by prohibiting the participation of such individuals; and to (2) create a deterrent effect that reduces the likelihood of future violations by others,” said Manfred, who had previously denied a re-instatement request from Rose in 2015 and 2020 before Rose went down to a different spiritual plane. “In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 has been served.”
This is the first time an MLB commissioner has solidified guidelines of what has loosely become known as a ‘lifetime ban,’ confirming that it does last the lifetime of the person. Manfred confirmed that he has no say in potential enshrinement to the Baseball Hall of Fame, though that should have been assumed considering the National Baseball Hall of Fame is a different entity altogether that has no correlation to Major League Baseball. Rose, 1973 National League MVP and all-time hits leader, will seemingly finally have his day under a microscope for the Baseball Hall of Fame through a committee of 16 Hall of Famers and writers. This process isn’t always easy to project considering each committee is a different body, allowing 16 new opinions every time a player and his contributions are examined. However, just recently, players such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmeiro garnered fewer than four votes in the same process. It wasn’t because their contributions aren’t great, after all Bonds is the most feared hitter to ever live and the homerun king, Clemens has two Triple Crowns, a record seven Cy Young awards and is one of only four pitchers to collect at least 4,000 strikeouts in the Majors, and Palmeiro is one of only seven hitters to ever collect 500 homeruns and 3,000 hits. The wrinkle that is keeping them out is their link to performance enhancing drugs, and with the contributions as a player, character contribution is a wrinkle in the fabric of the voting process.
The laundry list of Pete Rose and his character clause ranges from baseball sin such as crippling gambling addiction to personal, unforgivable acts such as being a pedophile. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a good chunk of people don’t care because he played hard enough to intentionally end the careers of his opponents with dirty hits at home plate that he also wouldn’t be remorseful for, and to a lot of people, Charlie hustling outweighs Charlie ruining lives, deep in an era where the average person would rather put bad actions on a pedestal if they’re on ‘their team’ rather than hold people to the accountability standards an average person faces.
To tell the story of Pete Rose is to tell the story of a far from perfect human being trying to find himself in a far from perfect institution, creating perhaps the most complex scenario in the history of that institution. In 1989, Pete Rose found himself under investigation for gambling on games he managed and played in as a player/manager for the Reds. An investigation by Commissioner Bartlett Giamatti and investigator John Dowd discovered that Pete Rose had bet on games in 1987 with proof, believed that he had bet both for and against the Reds, and Rose had already voluntarily told Giamatti that ‘if you can prove it, I’ll sign a lifetime ban.’ Rose signed the voluntary ban that made him permanently ineligible to play in the Major Leagues, and in 1991, the Hall formally voted to exclude banned players from the process of enshrinement into the Baseball Hall of Fame. As previously mentioned, Hall of Famers Bench, Morgan, and Schmidt, all of whom have different views on the Pete Rose scandal, put together a list of things for him to do to earn re-instatement and eventual Hall of Fame honors, and Rose refused to do so. For those asking why gambling is still such a big deal in a world where MLB has a deal in place with FanDuel, which seemingly is a common thought process, look at a little bit of nuance in the situation. If a fan bets on an MLB game, the fan cannot control the outcome. The fan cannot call the bullpen while the pitcher is dealing, put in a starting pitcher out of relief in a close game despite the schedule of the pitcher, he cannot pinch-hit the worst player for the best player and cite ‘we liked the match up’ in a post-game press conference, or a variety of other things that could impact the bet that aren’t in spirit of the game or competition. Furthermore, some of these scenarios can directly ruin or impact players careers or free agency. Should the manager arbitrarily decide to leave in a pitcher who clearly doesn’t have it, the change in statistics could impact future earnings. There’s a major league difference between a player who can potentially throw the game and a fan betting on baseball for leisure, and Pete Rose was not a fan using FanDuel. Rule 21 that states betting on baseball is banned for anybody employed by a team has been plastered in every clubhouse Pete Rose ever stepped foot in, which leads to the next point.
In 1989, Pete Rose claimed he didn’t know that betting was banned. When pointed out that there’s no way he didn’t, he claimed that he didn’t bet in general despite irrefutable proof. When Pete Rose could make money off of his gambling addiction, he didn’t apologize, but did admit it…in 2004. It took 15 years for this man to tell the truth about his gambling, yet there’s a large contingent that still believe he was telling the truth when his story changed yet again that ‘he never bet on the Reds to lose,’ and somehow that makes it okay, if it’s even true, considering every story he ever told ended up being a lie. Rose claimed that he didn’t bet on all 162 games either, which means even if he didn’t bet on his team to lose because ‘he didn’t think he’d lose,’ as the story goes, he still, for all intents and purposes, bet on his team to lose, just not in a way that’d lose him money. Pete Rose used the ban for the remainder of his life to grift millions of dollars out of fans while never doing anything to reconcile his past mistakes.
At the end of the day, nobody’s perfect. There are likely steroid users in the Hall of Fame and gamblers in the Hall of Fame, just those who didn’t get caught. Roberto Alomar, currently on Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list, is in the Hall of Fame because he was elected before his sexual assault scandal. The big issue surrounding the lack of enshrinement of Pete Rose isn’t even that he’s baseball’s all-time leader in hits as much as it is that the mission of the Hall of Fame is to ‘preserve and tell the story’ of Major League Baseball. You cannot do this without the Big Red Machine or the steroid era. The Big Red Machine is already well-represented with its manager, second baseman, first baseman, and catcher already in the Hall of Fame, while the steroid era is supplemented by players deemed clean. That said, it’s a lot harder to leave out an entire era of accomplished players for doing something that wasn’t a punishable offense by the league (although illegal at a federal level, so, realistically, if it’s a crime, you probably shouldn’t do it for work), than one player who broke a rule every single player in baseball abides by. There isn’t a world where Roger Clemens wasn’t pitching to Manny Ramirez or Jose Canseco wasn’t facing Andy Pettitte at the plate, thus compromising any competitive edge that they may or may not have allegedly gained through needle therapy. The integrity of the game, until 2005 when the league cracked down, was not destroyed in a remotely similar vein by somebody using performance enhancers as they were during Reds games in the late 1980s.
Pete Rose’s character woes are only solidified by his legal cases. Sure, Rose has his felony tax conviction, but that isn’t the legal case that’s damning in any conversation surrounding Rose. In a civil case brought by Rose for defamation toward Dowd who had claimed in 2015 that Rose was a statutory rapist, Rose admitted under oath that he had sexual relations with a fourteen year old while an active MLB player. When asked in 2022 by a Philadelphia reporter if he had any regrets about that relationship, Rose said “I don’t give a damn. It was 55 years ago, get over it, babe” and offered to sign 1,000 baseballs for the reporter to make sure that the quote didn’t go on record again. Breaking baseball’s cardinal rule aside, baseball also has to decide as a group if they want to celebrate somebody who went to the grave remorseless about his pedophiliac past.
The question that the players now have to grapple with is the same as Bonds or Clemens: how much do the rules of voting balance out the mission of the Hall of Fame? Unlike Bonds and Clemens who did things that were encouraged by the owners and league coming out of the 1994 strike, Rose did something never encouraged, and had far more indictments to go against him. If Roger Clemens can’t get four votes a committee, what makes people think that Pete Rose might? In an interview today with the Athletic, Schmidt noted that he’d estimate it’s a 50/50 split among living Hall of Famers that Pete Rose should or shouldn’t be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and that even though he’d championed Rose’s inclusion in his own induction speech in 1995, he has ‘no hardcore feelings either way.’ Schmidt seems to be taking a more diplomatic approach, probably as more information has come to light about both Rose’s gambling and personal antics. “I see that he squandered so many opportunities to change his life and go forward and do what Selig asked him to do,” Schmidt said. “There wasn’t remorse there. He didn’t show atonement for his admission to betting on baseball.”
That quote comes directly from an article where the Athletic asked 12 members if they’d vote for Pete Rose. Some said yes, notably Reggie Jackson, while players such as Bill Mazeroski said no. Guys like Jim Leyland refused to answer, while Jim Kaat pointed out that each committee member gets only three votes, and if he were on a committee, he’d vote for people who didn’t cheat the game well before Rose, even if Rose were a statistcally better candidate. Tony La Russa had perhaps the most interesting answer. “In Pete’s case, the statistics are undeniable,” La Russa answered. “But from being in Chicago with Seaver, and once I got to St. Louis with Stan, Red, Gibson, and Brock, iconic, legendary Hall of Fame players, they were very upset at Pete for a couple reasons. One: he made the mistake. Two: he wasn’t honest about the mistake. Three: they never really felt like he was contrite or ashamed by it or had a big regret until he wasn’t put in the Hall of Fame. Speaking for them, I know how upset they were to the point where they were very unforgiving. There was always a big sign on the board in the clubhouse about gambling and an official had to read the gambling issue to the team before the season started. It’s a little tough to miss.”
Of course, how the cookie crumbles is based on which committee bites into the cookie. In a world where the committee is led by Tim Kurkijan with players like Schmidt, Jackson, and Tony Perez on the ballot, Rose may find his moment of celebration. In a world where it’s led by La Russa with players such as Kaat, Bench, or any number of players who believe that the rules they follow still matter, Rose may be waiting for eternity. Rose’s first year of eligibility is 2027, yet with the new Hall of Fame rules, players going forward will have two chances on the committee ballot before facing a de-facto permanent ban from eligibility from future opportunities. The new rules state the following: each candidate that does not make it on a committee is not eligible for the next committee examining their era, and if you miss the second time, you will not have the opportunity again. This is to examine more candidates and not let players with intangible problems stuff the ballot every cycle, but also likely not to be as permanent as it sounds. The veteran’s committee system tends to be revamped with new rules every ten years, and realistically, there’s only so many borderline candidates to examine. That pool of candidates looks to sink even lower long term as players such as Scott Rolen, Trevor Hoffman, Billy Wagner, and Larry Walker who’d have been committee selections in other eras have found themselves voted in by a more open-minded writers group in recent memory.
Should Pete Rose make the Baseball Hall of Fame? That isn’t up to anybody but the players in the Hall of Fame themselves. On paper, Rose is an ideal candidate. Pete Rose has more hits than any player in MLB history, and that does matter, even if Rose had to put himself in the lineup to get there far past his prime. From an analytical standpoint, 79.6 career WAR isn’t inner circle Hall of Fame, but it’s well beyond the average value threshold of a Hall of Famer. Rose was a cornerstone player of two different franchises World Series victories, including the first championship in Phillies history and the back-to-back championship wins of perhaps the most prolific team in baseball history. But Pete Rose still ruined many lives with his actions both on and off a baseball field, none of which he faced any real, tangible consequences for or showed remorse for, outside of his Baseball Hall of Fame exclusion. Should the players decide that the exclusion is beneficial because his legacy is his only consequence, that wouldn’t be the worst decision the Hall of Fame has ever made. To reward somebody for ruining the integrity of the game is to encourage continued ruins of the game and its integrity. If they put in Pete Rose? Put Barry Bonds and his 762 homeruns in first.
