by Tommy Gimler
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred couldn’t give two fucks that Pete Rose is his sport’s all-time hit leader.
According to The New York Times, Manfred denied Rose’s third appeal to be reinstated into the game that he once played harder than a 19-year-old at a tit bar Monday afternoon, saying Rose’s inability to admit that he bet on baseball as both a player and a manger along with a notebook he obtained that contradicted some of Rose’s statements at their meeting led to his decision to keep Rose’s lifetime ban in place.
But according to damn near every poll we’ve looked at, somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of the general public thinks Rose has served his time and deserves to be reinstated. Obviously, the Pete Rose Saga is touchier than a Persian stepfather, as it’s a case where you could make a plausible argument for either side.
This is our best effort to do just that:
Rob Manfred SHOULD NOT lift the lifetime ban imposed on Pete Rose.
Major League Baseball Rule 21(d) clearly states that any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible. The Dowd Report in 1989 concluded that Rose had bet on games as the manager of the Reds, with some of them being placed on his own team, and Rob Manfred says he has a notebook from 1986 that shows Rose also bet on games as a player.
Rose has had numerous chances to come completely clean and reveal that he indeed did bet on baseball as both a player and a manager, although we’re ecstatic that he didn’t let Jim Gray bask in the glory of getting the truth out of him because Jim Gray is a twat in every sense of the word. Seriously, he looks like a fucking twat. He moves like a twat. And he asks questions like a twat. Or more accurately, he looks like the end result of a middle-aged Italian woman inserting a flesh-colored tampon into her hairy hump hole the wrong way, leaving just a small part of that wrong tip peeking out from her beef curtains:
Yet Rose has gone from denying any wrongdoing to admitting a little wrongdoing to admitting a little more wrongdoing to admitting everything except that he bet on baseball as a player. So why should the game of baseball reward him by welcoming him back when he can’t even respect the appeal process or the game? There was a printed copy of Rule 21 in every clubhouse, and Rose saw that everyday before he placed a bet and still said, “Fuck it. I’ll parlay the Reds, Giants, and who’s on the hill for the Crew, Bill Wegman? That’s a guy who sounds like he’s due.”
If there weren’t consequences for breaking the rules, the game of baseball would resemble the city of Detroit. And nobody wants that. What message are you sending to children and future players if they know they can deliberately cheat the game of baseball and be exonerated for it 25 years later? If you want to send the right message, tell Pete Rose the only way he’s going to be part of an MLB game while he has a pulse is if he buys a fucking ticket…
Rob Manfred SHOULD lift the lifetime ban imposed on Pete Rose.
I mean, Ray Lewis murdered a guy and the NFL let him back in.
Look, everybody makes mistakes. Hell, I once watched an entire episode of Franklin & Bash. It doesn’t get much worse than that, and still, my wife eventually let me choose what we watch on TV again.
The man has been out of the game of baseball for more than a quarter-century, and it’s not like he ever bet against his team or threw games like those shitdicks from the South Side. He has served his time.
Hell, MLB reinstated Reds owner and Rose’s old boss Marge Schott just two years after banning her for life after an employee heard her call outfielders Eric Davis and Dave Parker “million-dollar niggers.” Schott made other racist remarks toward African-American players and employees such as “I would never hire another nigger. I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger.” She also hated Jewish people and was once overheard saying “sneaky goddamn Jews are all alike” and even going as far as saying Hitler was “good in the beginning, but went too far.”
And let’s not forget about the dozens of assholes who cheated the game of baseball by devouring PEDs like they were Stuffed Crust pies from Pizza Hut and then lied about it. What happens to those players these days? You guessed it: They get hired to be hitting coaches.
What message are you sending to children and future players when you allow racists and drug users back into your game yet exile a guy who on occasion had a hunch that the Expos and Braves were going to combine for more than seven runs so he placed a wager on it? If you want to send the right message, tell Pete Rose he can be some kind of ambassador for the Reds this year. Hell, it’ll actually give the people of Cincinnati a reason to go to games this year because let’s be honest: That team is going to suck balls…
Wait, there’s more: Bill Walton Says He Majored In Biology At UCLA ‘On Sorority Row’
You have got to see this shit: