Pete Rose Can Rot

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Posted By: warshawlaw

Disclaimer: I am genuinely pissed because I was a big Pete Rose fan ever since I was a kid (I still have the autographed postcard I got when I was a kid; probably a clubhouse signature, but I've kept it nonetheless over the decades) and felt that he was being screwed by the baseball powers if his ban was not baseball betting related. Now that he's admitted he was lying to fans like me for 14 years, I feel the way I did when I finally got to meet the great Willie Mays and he was a prick. Kills a little more of my love for the game. They can both rot. But on to the arguments raised.

The problem I see with this approach is that it incrementalizes an unlawful act where no incrementalization is provided for and also ascribes to Rose a level of self-control that he claims he did not have, rendering the argument internally contradictory.

I do not agree with incrementalizing violations of the gambling on baseball rule. The rule says you gamble on baseball and you are out. Rose knew good and goddamned well that gambling on baseball was "illegal" under baseball laws and that the penalty was "death", and he did it anyway. Like the theme to Baretta says, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." He did it, he knew he did it, he knew what would happen if he did it, and he deserves the punishment that has been there ever since Landis excommunicated the Black Sox.

The second issue is even more compelling for me, because my late sister was a junkie. Bluntly put, if Rose is a compulsive gambler, Rose is still lying to us. By claiming that he was the victim of an addictive disease, Rose claims he had no self control. I know from firsthand experience that a true addict will lie, cheat, steal and do anything at all to sustain the habit. If Rose was truly addicted, the proposition that he bet on baseball but not on the Reds and that he did not use his position to further his addiction is ludicrous. A junkie is a junkie, regardless of the addiction, and their word is pure $**t. I have no reason to believe he is doing anything other than saying what he needs to say to seek admission to the last HOF ballot he qualifies for next year. If Rose was not an addict and had self control, then he purposefully, intentionally broke the cardinal rule of baseball law and we are back to "Baretta".

Jackson raises a more subtle point. I have long agreed that Jackson was properly excommunicated from the game--as you accurately point out, he accepted money to throw the world series. The difference with Jackson is that there was no HOF at the time of his penalization. I am not sure that extending his sentence past its original scope into an area that was not envisioned at the time is just.

Finally, there is a concept in law called the appearance of impropriety. Judges who have a potential conflict will remove themselves from a case because of the mere appearance that their decision would be tainted. Rose says he never used his position to further his betting, but we will never know because he created the appearance of impropriety by lying for all these years. I would cream him on cross-exam and argue to the jury that we cannot tell whether he is lying now, or was lying then, because the lies just keep flowing. Similarly, I do not accept the argument that Jackson must not have thrown the series because he played well, because whether he did it or not is not the point--he agreed to do it and was paid for it, raising the inference that he did it, an inference that we will never dispell.