Cote: Pete Rose wasn’t perfect, but MLB’s endless lack of mercy followed him to his grave | Opinion

As the thrilling finish to baseball’s regular season segues to the MLB playoffs, the sport’s unfortunate eternal scandal is back to make us sadly shake our heads.

The scandal isn’t that Pete Rose bet on baseball. He did. And he paid for it with a life sentence that became a death sentence.

The real shame is not in what Rose did in the late 1980s, but that the sport he loved so dearly and mastered so well in a batter’s box never found the heart, even toward the end, to show him mercy.

Pete Rose — “Charlie Hustle,” whose 4,256 hits set an all-time record that might never be equaled — died Monday night at age 83. He died still ostracized, some 35 years into the life sentence only death would end.

I don’t know what his family might put on his tombstone, but a fitting epitaph comes to mind:

They Never Forgave Him

“I’ve been suspended over 30 years. That’s a long time to be suspended for betting on your own team to win,” Rose said a few years ago. “And I was wrong. That mistake was made. But time usually heals everything. It seems like it does in baseball, except when you talk about the Pete Rose case.”

Well, time hasn’t healed the sport’s animus against all-time great Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, at least not yet. But they cheated the game literally, on the field, via performance-enhancing drugs. But they were allowed on the Hall of Fame ballot just the same, and it was voters who denied each of them Cooperstown for 10 straight years.

No such cloud of PEDs taint ever touched Rose, who earned everything he got between the baselines. A gambling problem got him instead.

And so Rose, immortal on the field, with a bat, was judged immoral off it by the saints who guard baseball’s gate. He was never even allowed on the Hall of Fame ballot. The voters were never even given the chance -- at least while he lived -- to override the sport’s sanctimoniousness by collectively declaring, “What this man did decades ago was wrong but did not merit a life sentence.”

Yes, he agreed to the lifetime ban. Sometimes the worst of criminals are given a lifetime sentence, too. But sometimes parole is warranted. Sometimes mercy and forgiveness are.

Rose one was asked on the Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz his thoughts on being denied during his lifetime but maybe at last getting into the hall posthumously.

“I wouldn’t want to go in the Hall of Fame [like that],” he said. “It doesn’t help me when I’m 6 feet under.”

To be plain, Rose could be cantankerous, irascible, not especially likable. He made money trading his autograph, and his notoriety, for cash. I guess spending half of your life being systematically denied the Hall of Fame honor you had earned can make a man cranky.

Through the years he asked commissioners Fay Vincent and Bud Selig for reinstatement. Denied. As recently as 2022 he sought benevolence from current commissioner Rob Manfred. Denied.

I am a member of the BBWAA and a Hall voter. I have voted for Bonds and Clemens, for naught, believing their greatness overrode their relatively brief use of steroid-type drugs. I would have voted for Rose, tool, had he been allowed on the ballot.

One should not need to be a saint to get into Cooperstown. I have always advocated that the mere mortals allowed in should have their notable imperfection noted on their bronze plaque, for eternity.

In Rose’s case the plaque might state how his post-playing career issue with gambling was a scandal that denied him Cooperstown for decades. But that placing a bet had zero to do with his collecting any of those 4,256 hits.

It is interesting to wonder: Might Rose’s lifetime ban expire now that his life has? Might MLB be more apt now to lift the ban and forgive Rose in death?

It would be cruel of baseball to welcome him to Cooperstown posthumously. But no more cruel than denying him for the past 35 years.