Pete’s an interesting character. Always gave 110% but never should’ve bet baseball. I think it’s long overdue… give the guy some slack now. It’s long enough.
The thing I think about is that when Rose accepted the open-ended ban, it was with the understanding that he'd be allowed to appeal after a year. Giamatti knew full well that Rose would appeal the first chance he could, and he made that a possibility. While I doubt the commissioner would have reinstated him after a year, I suspect he would have been interested in "rehabilitating" Rose over a period of time and with major benchmarks for Rose to hit, but his untimely death essentially made the ban his chief legacy as a commissioner, something no successor has wanted to be responsible for undoing. Another reader emailed me and thanked me for including the bit about Rule 21--the rule is the rule and Rose broke it. There's good cases to be made on both sides, but in the middle is the likelihood that no one involved necessarily intended we'd be here in the place we are, nearly forty years later.
It’s baseball. A kids game adults now get way overpaid. Even murderers get rehabilitated. What he did was illegal but I would hope after all these years he learned his lesson. They say betting is a disease like alcoholism. He needs some slack.
I always, always, ALWAYS hated Pete Rose. I never understood the appeal—a complete jerk from the beginning. Thanks for highlighting his unrelenting self-pity; it goes back farther than I’d even realized.
He's just a fascinating character. I try to view the good and the bad with him, but you are right that self-pity is one of his top-five negative characteristics, though probably not number one.
What I can say I love about him is his tendency to speak in paragraphs, even monologues with the press. Even for that more free-speaking time, Pete talked a lot, maybe the most of anyone, about his feelings, so you end up with a real sense of what's going on in that head, and that's incredibly useful for me as I try to understand what people thought at the time from what they said at the time. Nothing is the same looking back, and I'm interested in the fresher takes, which Pete handed out like candy as a part of maintaining his status and brand.
Betting is like prohibition. It was illegal & now it's on TV, social media, etc., point is you can't get away from it. Still not saying he's betting on his own team was legal but it's time to forgive & forget. What do they want from him... clean the streets to teach him a lesson? I'm pretty sure he's learned.
Thanks for these stories. I love them!
Thank you for reading and the support, I really appreciate it. Lots of great stuff in the queue!
Pete’s an interesting character. Always gave 110% but never should’ve bet baseball. I think it’s long overdue… give the guy some slack now. It’s long enough.
The thing I think about is that when Rose accepted the open-ended ban, it was with the understanding that he'd be allowed to appeal after a year. Giamatti knew full well that Rose would appeal the first chance he could, and he made that a possibility. While I doubt the commissioner would have reinstated him after a year, I suspect he would have been interested in "rehabilitating" Rose over a period of time and with major benchmarks for Rose to hit, but his untimely death essentially made the ban his chief legacy as a commissioner, something no successor has wanted to be responsible for undoing. Another reader emailed me and thanked me for including the bit about Rule 21--the rule is the rule and Rose broke it. There's good cases to be made on both sides, but in the middle is the likelihood that no one involved necessarily intended we'd be here in the place we are, nearly forty years later.
It’s baseball. A kids game adults now get way overpaid. Even murderers get rehabilitated. What he did was illegal but I would hope after all these years he learned his lesson. They say betting is a disease like alcoholism. He needs some slack.
I always, always, ALWAYS hated Pete Rose. I never understood the appeal—a complete jerk from the beginning. Thanks for highlighting his unrelenting self-pity; it goes back farther than I’d even realized.
He's just a fascinating character. I try to view the good and the bad with him, but you are right that self-pity is one of his top-five negative characteristics, though probably not number one.
What I can say I love about him is his tendency to speak in paragraphs, even monologues with the press. Even for that more free-speaking time, Pete talked a lot, maybe the most of anyone, about his feelings, so you end up with a real sense of what's going on in that head, and that's incredibly useful for me as I try to understand what people thought at the time from what they said at the time. Nothing is the same looking back, and I'm interested in the fresher takes, which Pete handed out like candy as a part of maintaining his status and brand.
Betting is like prohibition. It was illegal & now it's on TV, social media, etc., point is you can't get away from it. Still not saying he's betting on his own team was legal but it's time to forgive & forget. What do they want from him... clean the streets to teach him a lesson? I'm pretty sure he's learned.