Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, spent more than a third of his life banned from Major League Baseball and the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The fault, as he sometimes acknowledged, was his own. In the 1980s, he gambled on games in which he participated and got caught. Nonetheless, Rose, who died this week at 83, never gave up hope for a second chance. To his famously sharp eyes, MLB’s enthusiastic and perhaps hypocritical embrace of gambling in recent years suggested that maybe the league was coming around to his way of thinking.
He was wrong. Legalized gambling isn’t a reason for MLB to relax its approach to enforcing rules and past penalties. Rather, to preserve the integrity of the game in the legalized gambling era, MLB must double down and maintain its now posthumous ban on Rose.
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