Pete Rose is making his case to the Baseball Hall of Fame in an effort to get on the ballot 27 years after agreeing to a permanent ban from Major League Baseball for betting on games during his time as a player and manager for the Cincinnati Reds.
On Wednesday, USA Today‘s A.J. Perez shared a copy of a letter Rose’s attorneys, Raymond Genco and Mark Rosenbaum, sent to the Hall of Fame:
We are writing to respectfully request that Pete Rose be treated exactly the same way that every other Major League Baseball (MLB) player and manager has been treated from the start of the National Baseball Hall of Fame voting in 1936 until 1991. We humbly submit to you that Rule 3A should be amended in a limited way, to allow Pete Rose to be treated in exactly the same way as every other player and manager before him had been treated.
This is not the first time Rose has tried to get back into baseball’s good graces. In December, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred denied Charlie Hustle’s request to be reinstated, with this explanation, per MLB.com’s Paul Hagen:
Mr. Rose has not presented credible evidence of a reconfigured life either by an honest acceptance by him of his wrongdoing, so clearly established by the Dowd Report, or by a rigorous, self-aware and sustained program of avoidance by him of the circumstances that led to his permanent eligibility in 1989. Absent such credible evidence, allowing him to work in the game presents an unacceptable risk of a future violation by him of Rule 21, and thus to the integrity of our sport.
In 2015, William Weinbaum and T.J. Quinn of ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported documents showed that Rose bet on baseball games during his playing career after he had insisted for years that the only time he bet came during his time as a manager from 1986 to 1989.
Since the Baseball Hall of Fame is owned and operated by groups separate from MLB, it adopted its own rule in February 1991 against voting for any player on MLB’s permanently ineligible list.
Rose’s first year of eligibility for the Baseball Hall of Fame would have come in December 1991, two years after former MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti and Rose agreed to his ban from the sport.
Since the Hall of Fame has been following MLB’s lead with all of the players on the latter’s permanently ineligible list, Rose’s plea feels like another Hail Mary in an effort to get the all-time hit king into Cooperstown, New York.
Rose was inducted into the Reds’ Hall of Fame in June during a pregame ceremony in which his No. 14 jersey was retired.
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