Howard Bryant:
Yes, I think it’s ridiculous. I think it makes no sense at all. And the reason it makes no sense is because we have told the story of Pete Rose. Pete Rose has not been erased by baseball. Pete Rose has been everywhere. Pete Rose had been brought back. He had been on the national broadcast. Everywhere you went, there was Pete Rose.
Pete Rose is in the national conversation and has been for 35 years. The only thing Pete Rose didn’t get was total victory. He didn’t get a plaque in the Hall of Fame. Why didn’t he get a plaque in the Hall of Fame? Because Pete Rose bet on the game. Pete Rose did the one thing in baseball that every person in baseball has known for 100 years that you cannot do.
And even in the case of Joe Jackson and Happy Felsch and the Black Sox, that, even with those guys, they were acquitted. Then they were banned by the new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. And then, over the course of the last 50 years or so, there has been at least some scholarship that suggests that Joe Jackson was manipulated, that Joe Jackson was illiterate, that there was some case that he was sort of — he was duped into what he did.
And he also played very, very well. There wasn’t a great deal of evidence that he threw the 1919 World Series. With Pete Rose, there’s no argument to what he did. It’s the most open-and-shut case in baseball. The only issue is, is that Pete Rose got into the Hall, or he’s going to get into the Hall because people wanted it that way. Whatever happened to accountability?
You break the law, that’s what happens.
