Pete Rose and All Our Halls of Fame

Here are the first five players I would elect to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in alphabetical order:

The very first story I ever got paid to write was a Baseball Hall of Fame story. I didn’t know that I would get paid for it; I just happened to be leafing through a Beckett Baseball Card Monthly magazine when I came across a little box asking for submissions. I was an 18-year-old accounting major at the time, but I knew — even if I couldn’t yet admit it to myself — that I lacked the necessary focus, industry, drive, attention to detail or even basic mathematical skills necessary to—you know—account. I remained baffled by the most basic concepts; debits and credits were mysteries. I couldn’t balance a checkbook.

The bigger-than-life idea of writing about sports — and actually getting paid to do it — was beyond the scope of my imagination then, but the Beckett Monthly box seemed interesting. I owned an electric typewriter, a gift from my mother, and I enjoyed noodling on it the same way lots of people enjoy noodling on a piano. So I went to the typewriter, and I tapped out the first idea that came to mind.

The first baseball story that came to mind was a prediction about which active players would get elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I got paid three cents per word.

In it, I obviously predicted that Pete Rose would go to the Hall of Fame.

Here are the next five players I would elect to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

On Tuesday, the commissioner of baseball, Robert Dean Manfred, Jr., pardoned every deceased player who remains on the game’s permanent ineligible list. His sole reasoning for doing so seems to be that they are dead. If they were alive, the logic goes, he would not remove them from the list. But, you know, with them being dead, he’s good with it. “Obviously,” he says, “a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.”

Obviously. If there’s one thing history has shown us, it is that the dead people — and their memories — cannot represent any sort of threat or inspiration.

There were 17 people on the ineligible list, including the famed Eight Men Out from the 1919 Black Sox and a bunch of guys with classic old-timey baseball names like Benny Kauff, Joe Gedeon, Lee Magee, and Cozy Dolan.

Also: Pete Rose.

There’s nothing left to say about Pete Rose that does not inspire indignation and anger. If you talk about him as a player, people will rail that you’re ignoring his gambling and, more, the shocking accusation that he committed statutory rape. If you talk about his crimes and misdemeanors, people will rail that it’s called the Baseball Hall of Fame and you’re ignoring his singular impact on the game.

When someone becomes that famous, that celebrated, that condemned, we are left with only the capacity to hear what we want to hear and read what we want to read. Everything else becomes static and noise, and that squeak Styrofoam makes when twisted.

You think Pete Rose should have been put in the Hall of Fame years ago.

You think Pete Rose should never be allowed within 4,256 yards of the Hall of Fame.

There is almost zero chance that you do not have an opinion about Pete Rose at all.

Here are the next five players I would elect to the Baseball Hall of Fame:

Why do I love the Hall of Fame so much? Why has this concept of honoring the greatest baseball players who ever lived so grabbed my imagination … and our imaginations? I think it has something to do with the sport of baseball itself. The game is so ordered, so constant, so meticulously chronicled — it demands verdicts. Mantle or Mays? Pedro or Unit? Bench or Yogi? Ruth or Bonds? Judge or Shohei? It is not enough as a baseball fan to say, “Oh, they’re both great.” No! Which one? And why? Defend your position!

The Baseball Hall of Fame offers the ultimate baseball arguments, the ones that fuel and animate and galvanize this strange and wonderful game. Think about a player. Any player. Could be an ultra-famous star from years ago, say, Joe DiMaggio. Could be someone lost to history, like Oscar Charleston. Could be the first name that comes to mind from your childhood, maybe a Bernard Gilkey or Sixto Lezcano. Could be someone in yesterday’s lineup, say, Javy Báez, who went two for four with two home runs and six RBI against the Red Sox.

Think about that player.

Now ask yourself: Does he belong in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

My bet is that one word popped into your head, and that word is either “Yes” or “No.”

There simply isn’t a player ever that I have no viewpoint on. Those views differ in intensity, of course. I strongly believe Lou Whitaker should be in the Hall of Fame, for instance. I hesitantly — but somehow still confidently — believe Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame. I longingly believe Dale Murphy should be in the Hall of Fame.

Those different adverbs reflect the multitudes that the Hall of Fame contains for many of us. We have come to think of it as a living and breathing place, unlike other Halls of Fame. If this was the Football Hall of Fame, Pete Rose would have been elected long ago. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens would have been elected long ago. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Shoeless Joe Jackson would have been elected long ago.

And maybe that’s how it should be, but that’s not how it is, not in baseball. The Hall of Fame contains multitudes, which means that when I think about the 100 greatest baseball players of all time, it’s entirely different from how I think about the first 100 players I would elect into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Do I think Jackie Robinson was one of the five greatest players of all time? No. I think he was exactly the 42nd greatest baseball player of all time.

But do I think he belongs in the first class of five elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame?

I think that with all my heart.

Here are the next five players I would elect to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

When Minnie Miñoso was inducted into the Hall of Fame, his widow, Sharon Rice Miñoso, gave a rousing and emotional, and wonderful speech, one I know Minnie would have loved. In it, she thanked me. I do not mention this to brag — though I’m absolutely happy to brag about any role I might have played in getting Minnie elected to the Hall of Fame; I’m thinking of having T-shirts made — but to say that this is something else I love about the Baseball Hall of Fame.

We, collectively, shape it.

It might not always feel that way. Sometimes a player will get elected, and we collectively will think, “Huh?” Sometimes, a player will not get elected, and we will wonder and shake our heads in disgust. Sometimes, an oddity will happen, like one person will not vote for Ichiro Suzuki.

“If Ichiro isn’t a unanimous choice,” one Boston sportswriter wrote, “then the voters who leave him off had better turn in their baseball writers’ cards as misnomers.”

No, wait, that sportswriter didn’t write that about Ichiro. Gerry Moore wrote that about Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in the Boston Globe … in 1936. Four writers left Cobb off their ballots. Eleven left off Ruth. No one turned in his writer’s card.

But the arc of the Hall of Fame bends toward the will of the fans. At least I believe it does. The view of what makes a Hall of Famer was something very different in 1936 and then 1957 and then 1979 and then 1998, and it’s something very different now. In 2000, just as an example, Bert Blyleven was on the ballot. His statistical record was mind-boggling. He won 287 games and struck out 3,701 batters and tossed 60 shutouts and, we would soon find, compiled 96.1 wins above replacement, 10th on the all-time list. More WAR than Warren Spahn or Steve Carlton or Jim Palmer or Nolan Ryan or Bob Gibson.

Blyleven received just 17.4% of the vote. The Hall of Fame was different then. The Hall of Fame was about gut feelings, and Bert Blyleven did not trigger the gut. He was a minor star at best, a two-time All-Star, a zero-time Cy Young winner, a non-300 game winner. Jack Morris came on the ballot that year and, yes, true, he also never won a Cy Young and he didn’t win even as many games as Blyleven, but Morris definitely triggered the gut because of his world-class mustache and bulldog intensity and Game 7 heroics. Morris leapfrogged over Blyleven in the vote total.

Ah, but over time, slowly, the rhythm changed, the vibe changed, fans made the case for Blyleven, analysts made the case for Blyleven, charts were built comparing Blyleven to the all-time greats, and on and on. After years and years of the waves crashing into the shore, Bert Blyleven got 79.7% of the vote and was elected to the Hall of Fame.

I love that the Hall of Fame is shaped by the years.

Here are the next five players I would elect to the Baseball Hall of Fame:

Kansas City’s Bobby Witt Jr. knocked out 211 hits in 2024, 11 more hits than anyone else in baseball. If he could manage to get 211 hits every single year for the rest of his career, he would break Pete Rose’s hit record … in the year 2043, shortly after his 43rd birthday.

That’s the enduring baseball legacy of Pete Rose.

And because that is the enduring legacy of Rose, you might wonder why the Hall of Fame mattered so much to him. There are lots of people in the Hall of Fame. Harold Baines and Lloyd Waner are in the Hall of Fame. Joe Kelley and High Pockets Kelly are in the Hall of Fame. Bowie Kuhn and Bud Selig are in the Hall of Fame.

What does the Hall of Fame even mean to the Hit King?

Answer: It meant everything. And the reason it meant everything is because Pete Rose was not like other ballplayers. Pete Rose calculated his batting average every single day. Seriously, you could go up to Rose on any random date, say, July 13, 1978, and say “Hey Pete, whatcha hitting?”

And Rose would snarl and say that he’s hitting .303, and it had been a helluva thing getting his batting average over .300, that he needed eight knocks against the Giants over the weekend to push that average up over .300, and then he’d point out that he's always hit the Giants well, that he enjoyed stepping in against Ed Halicki and John Montefusco and Vida Blue and the rest.

“I kick the (bleep) out of Montefusco,” he’d brag, and you’d look it up, and sure enough, he’d be right; he hit .362 against the Count over the years.

That’s how much it all mattered to him. When a baseball game ended, Pete Rose would linger in the clubhouse longer than anyone else because he didn’t want to leave the ballpark. And when he finally did leave, he would drive home, park the car in the driveway, and just sit in there, fiddling with the radio dial, trying to pick up the call of a West Coast game through the static.

That’s how much it mattered to him. When he got the hit that put him over Cobb on the leaderboard — well, it wasn’t the actual hit that put him over, but you can read all about that elsewhere — he stood at first base, and he looked up at the sky, and he always swore that he saw his old man, Big Pete, arm and arm with Ty Cobb himself.

That’s how much it all mattered to him. Pete Rose didn’t know how to live away from baseball. He followed his id wherever it led, and it led to the racetrack, and it led to divorces, and it led to tax evasion, and it led to ugly allegations, and it led to him sitting in a sports store in Caesars Palace writing “I’m sorry I bet on baseball” again and again for tourists who might or might not remember him.

“Are you Babe Ruth?” one woman asked him.

“No,” he said. “I’m not Babe Ruth.”

But then, because she insisted, he signed her baseball “Babe Ruth” anyway. Because, after a while, what difference does it make?

That was life. Pete Rose wasn’t any good at life. But he was damn good at baseball. That was the one thing he knew for sure, the one thing he could cling to, and so you better believe the Hall of Fame mattered to him, it was everything to him, not just because it would enshrine his career, and not just because it would inflate the value of his autograph, but because it would let him inside. He so desperately needed to be inside with Willie and Mickey and Babe and Lou and Joltin’ Joe and the Big Train and Hank and Cy and Ty and Frank and Jackie and all of them.

He could never forgive the bastards who kept him out.

“Who has done more for baseball than me?” he would bark out, challenging whoever happened to be sitting in front of him. He did not wait for an answer.

“Nobody,” he would say. “That’s who.”

Here are the next five players I would elect to the Baseball Hall of Fame:

We all have our personal Baseball Halls of Fame. Some are small — they are the Willie Mays’ Halls of Fame — and some are enormous. Some are filled with personal favorite players, and some are meticulously curated to only include those who meet a certain statistical threshold. Some point back to the distant past, to Cy Young and Christy Mathewson and Old Hoss Radbourne. Some begin only when our own baseball consciousness began.

Out there, in the multiverse of Halls of Fame, there are thousands of players.

Duane Kuiper is in somebody’s Hall of Fame. I know that for sure.

Many of you are SCREAMING about the order I put in my Hall of Famers. I know that for. sure too.

But there are only a few players who are in all of our Halls of Fame.

When Baseball Commissioner Robert Dean Manfred Jr. opened the Hall of Fame door for Pete Rose (and Shoeless Joe Jackson), he was quick to say that he would issue no official opinion about Rose’s actual Hall of Fame worthiness. “It is not part of my authority or responsibility to express any view concerning Mr. Rose’s consideration by or possible election to the Hall of Fame,” he said.

This was a typically silly and spurious Manfred statement since, by making Rose eligible, he was OBVIOUSLY expressing a view about Rose’s consideration and possible election to the Hall of Fame. But the point remains: Rose is eligible now, and he will go on the ballot for sure, and I’ve had five hundred people ask me if he will get elected. I’ve made many more wrong predictions than right ones in my life, but I’d predict, yeah, he will get elected next December.* If you had asked me three days ago, I would have told you that Rose would never get elected, that there just isn’t any group of people where 75% would vote for him.

But the political winds have shifted, and now I would guess Rose will get the vote, and he might even drag Shoeless Joe Jackson with him into Cooperstown.

And I wonder: If that happens, what changes? And the answer: Not much. Because, looking back, I realize that Pete Rose didn’t so much want to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He played baseball with all the ferocity and rage and joy and spirit and fearlessness he could muster so that he could get into ALL of our Baseball Halls of Fame. And that, alas, will never happen.

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