Rob Manfred’s Donald Trump fan service

Combine a guy who palpably hates the sport he’s in charge of and a Donald Trump courtier and whammo you get terrible policy decisions:

If anybody ever earned it, Pete Rose has certainly earned his place on Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list. Rose guaranteed himself that spot by committing one specific cardinal sin: betting on baseball. There are no good ways to bet on one’s own sport, in violation of the single most known personal-conduct regulation that applies to everyone working in that sport. But there are extra-bad ways, and Rose managed to find them. He bet on his own team’s games, and for style points, he spent years lying about it. He broke the most fundamental rule meant to uphold public trust in what baseball fans are watching, and he did it with as much panache as he showed in piling up his 4,256 hits between 1963 and 1986. Most came for the Cincinnati Reds, a team that has never stopped deifying Rose.

Rose, who died last year at 83, has now received a get-off-the-list-free card: MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced Tuesday that he had removed from that sheet of baseball infamy Rose and the list’s 16 other members, all deceased and all banned from having anything to do with the league in life or death. In a letter to a Rose family lawyer, Manfred wrote that “in my view, a determination must be made” as to how baseball’s anti-gambling policy, Rule 21, Part D, should apply to dead players. Manfred sought to explain the move as a basic policy change born out of thoughtful deliberation: “Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.” Hmm—I can think of one, and that’s a punishment that lasts permanently with no reprieve. That didn’t even take much effort.

Manfred is honoring Rose mainly by mimicking the game’s all-time hit leader in his dishonesty. The truth about Rose’s removal from the list is that it is a shameless political favor to Donald Trump. Moreover, Manfred is massaging how he arrived at a political decision. Rose earned this outcome not by dying, but by having a friend in the highest possible place. His reinstatement is a blight, and now the league needs to hold its breath to see if a small group of Baseball Hall of Fame electors does not make the result even worse by inducting him to a spot of eternal glory.

What changed after all these years? Manfred would tell you it was Rose’s death that prompted a reconsideration of the MLB’s approach to his case. There is no particular reason to believe him, though, when a far simpler explanation sits right in front of us and puts Manfred in league with dozens of technology executives, law firm managing partners, and businesspeople: Trump likes Pete Rose, an apparent supporter of his who once signed a baseball for him with the message “Please Make America Great Again.” The president has supported Rose’s reinstatement in public and private, not just promising “a complete PARDON” for Rose (for what, who knows) but lobbying Manfred in a recent meeting to excuse him. Manfred would prefer to be in Trump’s good graces. J.D. Vance, once an Ohio kid, taunted Joe Biden in January over an unrelated matter, telling the outgoing president, “Hey Joe if we’re doing fake shit on the way out can you declare Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame?”

The fact that Vance thinks Rose should be in the Hall of Fame is a sufficient rebuttal in itself, but it’s a terrible idea:

Given the extent to which Rose spent decades lying about his gambling and showing a lack of contrition even after he was banned — to say nothing of the allegations of statutory rape that surfaced in recent years — Manfred’s decision is a bitter disappointment, perhaps even a shock. While his decade-long tenure as commissioner has produced no shortage of grounds for criticism, he appeared to be hyper-conscious when it came to drawing a distinction between Major League Baseball’s recent embrace of legalized gambling, and the lines crossed by those who flouted Rule 21. Last June, Pirates infielder Tucupita Marcano was placed on the permanently ineligible list for making 387 baseball bets totaling $150,000 through a legal sports book, while in February, an arbiter upheld the firing of umpire Pat Hoberg for sharing legal sports betting accounts with a professional poker player who bet on baseball, and for impeding MLB’s investigation. Rose’s gambling, via bets placed through bookies, was illegal at the time as well as completely out of bounds given his role within baseball.

[…]

Beyond the makeup of the committee, the rules for election still read that “voting shall be based upon the individual’s record, ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contribution to the game.” In the Hall’s eyes, PED users don’t meet the standards of that so-called character clause, so I don’t see how a voter could believe that Rose or anyone else who was banished for decades for committing baseball’s lone capital crime demonstrated the integrity, sportsmanship, and character expected of a recipient of the game’s highest honor. If committee voters did elect Rose, they would effectively be declaring the character clause a dead letter. The panels do change from election to election, so the likes of Bonds and Clemens would be considered by a different group, but it would be impossible to argue in good faith that unlike Rose — who broke a rule that has been posted in every clubhouse in professional baseball for nearly a century — their taking advantage of baseball’s lax pre-2004 drug policy was unforgivable.

While I’m not sure that a dismantling of the clause would be a bad thing given the way it has been been weaponized beyond its original intent of rewarding high-character candidates, this is not the way I want it to crumble. Rose spent decades lying about his gambling and dodging responsibility for his actions. Rewarding him now with reinstatement, even posthumously, feels like a surrender, particularly given the extent to which it’s been spurred by a president whose entire modus operandi is avoiding accountability as well. Say it ain’t so, Rob Manfred.

The idea that arguably the greatest player and pitcher respectively in the history of MLB are blacklisted for the Hall of Fame because they used PEDs (different than the ones Willie Mays used) at a time when a majority of players were using them because there was not in any meaningful sense rules against their use but a statutory rapist who repeatedly bet on his old time against very clear and enforceable rules is not just a favor to Trump, it‘s the essence of Trumpism:

Similarly, while Manfred may be literally correct that Rose and the rest of these hungry ghosts now sprung from the ineligible list cannot threaten the integrity of specific games or players in 2025, Manfred’s own example is a threat to the concept of integrity generally. Here is a window being forced open: Until recently, there were a few bright lines upon which Americans could rely. A few: Nazis are bad. It is a crime to attempt to overthrow the government or subvert an election. Bribery is a crime. Americans cannot be deprived of due process of law. Rigorous standards of public health are a benefit to the entire nation. The integrity of baseball is so important to its survival that it vitiates all other priorities. All of those things have been, at minimum, thrown into doubt.

Perhaps worse, whereas the President of the United States had no power to pardon Rose for anything except his conviction for tax evasion, Manfred has demonstrated that the chief executive does have the power to cow Major League Baseball into forsaking a heretofore sacred value, which is to say that whereas Manfred is incapable of enlarging Rose, he did enlarge Trump. He also validated a man who scoffs at personal responsibility by posthumously relieving Rose of a consequence he earned a thousand times over, lie by lie by lie.

It is hard not to see a direct line between Rose getting a plaque and the January 6 guy getting a bust on Mt. Rushmore. If it were only the latter making that argument it could be dismissed as special pleading, but if Rose has been exculpated and sent to Valhalla then surely everyone gets to go. If that’s the kind of vanity Manfred wanted to indulge, well, every royal court has its obsequious flatterers.

Oh, and Joe Jackson at a minimum took money knowing that the World Series was being fixed and did nothing, and it would be crazy to give him baseball’s highest honor too. I wish I could be confident that both wouldn’t get in but who knows at this point.