Dark day for baseball

Bob Nightengale

USA TODAY

Updated May13, 2025

Apparently, even those who influence their team and at the same time laugh at the rules of the most sacred sport are OK to play baseball.

You want to fool, lie, go to jail for tax evasion and be accused of legal rape; hey, everything is forgiven.

You learn at the Journalism School that you cannot slander the dead.

Who knew that if you were dead, you were dead too, could everything be forgiven? Pete Rose, who played baseball as manager of the

Cincinnati Reds and died in September 2024

at the age of 15, at the age of 83, has revived a chance to join the Hall of Fame from Commissioner Rob Manfred.

Manfred announced on the eve of Pete Rose Day in Cincinnati that he could raise the permanent ban on Rose from baseball and would be selected for the first time in the Hall of Fame.

Manfred decided that the player's permanent acceptability ended after death and released everyone from the 1919 Black Socks Scandal.

"It's a serious dark day for baseball," Marcus Giamatti, the 63-year-old son of former commissioner Bert Giamatti, who permanently halted Rose in 1989, told US Sports. "For my father, it was about protecting the integrity of baseball. Well, now, as we know, I believe that baseball games no longer exist. How do fans entrust the purity of the game to sincerely? ...

"The basic principles in which the game is built, the fair game, this integrity compromises. Fans are losers. They don't know how fans see the game when they know what you're looking at is no longer realistic and fair. This is a truly scary idea."

When Rose, who has produced a record of

256 career hits, ends up in Cooperstown, Giatti says. What stops Joe and everyone wearing black socks from no longer in shoes and someone in black socks from stopping? Bally Bond and Roger Clemens, come in. 2017 Houston Astros? They were immune anyway.

"When you put him in, the lock is open," says Giamatti. "I'm sure why aren't all these boys in one? So there's no discussion. "

Rose’s reinstatement, of course, does not give him a place in the hall of fame. He has to be elected, although Donald Trump, who met Manfred on April 16, thinks it will be fait accompli calling it a done deal on X. “Baseball, which is dying all over the place, should get off its fat, lazy ass, and elect Pete Rose, even though far too late, into the Baseball Hall of Fame!”

Now that Rose, who never appeared on the official BBWAA ballot, can be put up by the Hall of Fame’s Historical Overview Committee to the 2027 Classic Baseball Era committee ballot. He would require a minimum of 12 votes from the 16- member committee ( four former players, four executives, four writers and four historians) to be elected and inducted in summer of 2028.

WHAT'S NEXT? Pete Rose's MLB ban ends. Does that mean he's bound for the Hall of Fame?

“I’d love to be on that committee," said a former All-Star outfielder whose career overlapped with Rose. “I would vote 'no' in a heartbeat and try to convince everyone to do the same. He embarrassed the game. He was a Hall of Famer on the field, but he ruined the integrity of the game off the field."

Said a former GM who also is a candidate to be on the committee: “This guy was jeopardizing players’ careers to win bets as a manager. He could care less about their health. And now you’re going to validate someone like this, someone who’s also accused of statutory rape.

“You let Pete get away with this, you’re opening yourself up to the biggest gambling scandal in baseball history. It makes Rule 21 (prohibiting players, umpires, and other league officials from betting on any baseball game) a complete joke."

Manfred, after rejecting Rose’s bid to be reinstated while he was alive, became the first commissioner since the suspension to even seriously consider lifting the lifetime ban.

Giamatti was the one who suspended Rose. Fay Vincent, who succeeded Giamatti after his sudden death, remained strongly opposed against Rose’s ban ever being lifted before he died in February. Bud Selig, who replaced Vincent and was commissioner from 1992-2015, also has continued to voice his strong opposition against Rose’s reinstatement.

"While it is my preference not to disturb decisions made by prior Commissioners," Manfred said, “Mr. Rose was not placed on the permanently ineligible list by Commissioner action but rather as the result of a 1989 settlement of potential litigation with the Commissioner's Office. My decision today is consistent with Commissioner Giamatti’s expectations of that agreement."

Manfred argues that the lifetime ban was severe enough punishment and denies being persuaded by Trump to lift the ban, saying that Rose’s family visited him in December when he informed them he would reevaluate it.

Besides, MLB says, they're not putting Rose into the Hall of Fame.

That now falls on the museum – which announced in 1991 that no player permanently banned from baseball is eligible – and the voters.

In its announcement, MLB shared a clip from Bart Giamatti's 1989 press conference, where the commissioner stressed that it was the "responsibility" of the Baseball Writers' Association of America to "decide who goes into the Hall of Fame."

"You have the authority and the responsibility and you will make your own individual judgements," Bart Giamatti told assembled media members. "As a devoted reader, I look forward to listening and watching your debates on the relationship of life and art, which you will all have to work out for yourselves."

Said Manfred in his statement: “Commissioner Giamatti’s comments were completely reasonable given that, at the time, the Hall of Fame did not have a rule barring people on the permanently ineligible list from Hall of Fame consideration."

Baseball's most recent commissioner, Bud Selig, also issued a statement supporting MLB's actions and suggested that Bart Giamatti would have respected what Manfred chose to do.

"I understand and respect [his] decision," Selig said. "Given my affection for my friend, the late Bart Giamatti, MLB's seventh commissioner who disciplined Mr. Rose for gambling on his own team all those years ago, I believe Bart would understand and respect the decision as well."

'Ugly time for the game'

“It’s like there’s no rules," Marcus Giamatti says. “It’s like once you die, you can be reinstated and they’ll let you back in. There won’t be any asterisk or anything.

“You’re supposed to consider character, sportsmanship and integrity. He doesn’t check any of those boxes."

Besides Rose’s admission to gambling on baseball, he was accused by an unidentified woman in a defamation lawsuit – filed by Rose against former federal prosecutor John Dowd – that he had a sexual relationship with her before she was 16 years old. Rose, married with two children at the time, acknowledged the relationship in court documents made public in 2017, but said she was 16 years old, which was the age of consent.

Giamatti, an actor, musician, writer and professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, is particularly galled that no one from MLB bothered to talk to him or his younger brother, Paul Giamatti, the award-winning actor. They don’t personally know Rose, but they do know the stress, heartache and the ensuing death threats, with their father dying of a sudden heart attack at the age of just 51, just eight days after Rose’s permanent suspension.

“What’s frustrating is that nobody has talked to me or my family about it,’’ Giamatti said. “I understand that Rose’s daughter (Fawn) talked to them, and had every right to. But nobody has reached out to me or my brother to say, 'What would be your side of the argument? What are your feelings about this now?’

“I don’t think they want to talk to me and hear what I have to say, or what we went through as a family with the tremendous amount of pressure, the death threats that the FBI still has, and all of the backlash my dad faced.

“It was really an ugly, ugly time.

“Now, it’s going to be an ugly time for the game, with everything that my father fought to uphold in peril."