Or at least until the current commissioner, Rob Manfred, decided to step in. On Tuesday, Manfred removed Rose and 16 other deceased ballplayers, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, from the permanently ineligible list. That means there is now a clear path for Rose’s enshrinement in the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Plaque Gallery (Jackson, too). It’s some room: cold air, oak walls, bronze plaques, hushed voices, all those legends crowded together.
With one signed document, Manfred gave populism a big win. You could say populism is on a hot streak. So is legal sports betting, now permitted in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Baseball fans are bombarded with bet-now messages, courtesy of FanDuel, Major League Baseball’s official bookmaker.
Gambling is a magnet for compulsives and always has been. Manfred is well aware. Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator for the great Japanese slugger and pitcher Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has been sentenced to a nearly five-year federal prison sentence for embezzling nearly $17 million from Ohtani. He needed the money to pay gambling debts from betting on sports, baseball not among them, according to investigators. But compulsion is an open door to desperation.
In the 35 years after his banishment, Rose signed autographs (for a fee) at racetracks, at televised wrestling events and in the quaint upstate New York village of Cooperstown, in the shadows of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. When Rose died last September at his home in Las Vegas at 83, that two-word phrase, permanently ineligible, followed him into his obituaries.
Giamatti delivered his banishment speech on Aug. 24, 1989. Eight days later, he was dead, after a heart attack in his modest summer home in Edgartown, Mass. He was 51. He was a chain smoker and a compulsive eater — and he was drowning in stress. The Rose gambling scandal consumed Giamatti’s days and nights all through his five months as commissioner.
