OK, I’ll write a lot more about this tomorrow … but the news just broke — fairly unsurprising news if you have been following, oh, pretty much everything happening in America the last few months:
It’s official now: Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson are eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This — well, the Rose part, at least — seemed utterly inevitable the minute that President Trump called out MLB for lacking the “courage or decency” to put Rose in the Hall of Fame. At that precise moment, in a pretty wild coincidence, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred apparently started to think that maybe keeping deceased players on the permanently ineligible list didn’t make a lot of sense.
Tuesday, Manfred made it official.
“In my view,” he wrote in a statement, “once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.”
Manfred — and the seven other commissioners, for that matter — didn’t seem all that concerned about the posthumous effects of Rule 21 for the 74 years after Joe Jackson died. Then again, Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t tweet about it.
What this means is that for the 2027 Veterans Committee election — which will be at the 2026 Winter Meetings — Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson (along with Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver and all the Black Sox, plus famed gambler Hal Chase, among others) will be eligible to be on the ballot. I’m pretty confident that we will see Rose and Shoeless Joe on that ballot. And then we’ll see if either or both of them can get the 12 out of 16 votes necessary. I’ve been very skeptical about that. But I do wonder if the tide has turned here. Rose is gone. MLB is now clearly behind his induction. There will be political pressure. He might just make it.
Here’s one game I play sometimes: If I could only put one of them, Shoeless Joe or Pete Rose, into the Hall of Fame, who would I choose?
In the end, I think you have to twist yourself into a pretty twisted logic pretzel to choose Shoeless Joe, even if that’s the player many fans would love to choose. Jackson was a remarkably natural hitter and ahead of his time; Babe Ruth famously copied his swing. He also had the reputation for otherworldly defense — “They said his glove was the place where triples went to die!” Kevin Costner told his child actress daughter in “Field of Dreams” — though a review of the available statistics suggests he probably wasn’t as great as all that.*
*Plus that quote was actually focused on Tris Speaker and NOT Shoeless Joe. Later, Willie Mays’ glove was the place where triples went to die. Both Speaker and Mays, notably, were centerfielders; if triples would go to die anywhere it would be in a centerfielders glove. Shoeless Joe played right and left field.
Don’t get me wrong, Shoeless Joe was a great player, worthy of the Hall of Fame.
But Pete Rose … he was his own thing. I love what Bill James wrote about him: In the 1970s, he was probably the most overrated player in the game, and after that, he became one of the most underrated.
Rose’s greatness as a baseball player was not easily documented or quantified (even if Rose cared more about his stats than perhaps any player in the game’s history). His greatness came down to some little thing he would do every single day. He’d break up a double play one day, take an extra base the next day, make a good defensive player at one of his seven positions the next day, knock four hits the next day, beat a throw by diving head first (no, more than diving, by CATAPULTING himself head first) the next day, take third on a wild pitch the next day, barrel over a catcher the next day, on and on and on and on.
The thing about Rose is that he was ALWAYS present, ALWAYS at the ready, ALWAYS eager to pounce. In a sport of competition super-monsters, he was the most competitive force, the guy who would do anything and everything to beat you. I remember Pat Darcy telling me how he and Rose played Ping-Pong in the Rose family basement one day, and Darcy won like 10 games in a row, and Rose just kept shouting “Again!” and “Again!” They went at this hour after hour, and Darcy came to understand that he would never get to leave, not ever, until Pete Rose beat him.
Which Pete eventually did.
That’s how Pete Rose played baseball, too. He had little power (despite being a “brickbodied $@%@%,” according to writer Scott Raab). He wasn’t a graceful athlete. He was neither fast nor slow, and he really didn’t have a natural defensive position. And he became one of the best baseball players who ever lived by playing every single day, and cracking line drives every single day, and taking all the extra bases, and playing every position, and driving pitchers crazy, and running to first base on walks, and knocking more hits than any player ever had or ever will.
“Tell Derek that the first 3,000 are easy,” he told me once, and that pretty much summed up his opinion on the subject.
As for Pete Rose, the man, well, it’s all been said, and it all will be said again, and every single time I speak somewhere, people will ask me, “Do you think Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame?” I respond by asking the crowd, “By a show of hands, how many of you think Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame?’
Always, and I do mean every single time, half the hands in the room go up. Exactly half.
That was Pete Rose, the man.
Now, for the first time, the Hall of Fame will consider Pete Rose the ballplayer.
It’s going to be interesting.
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