Sleazeballs

After 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, flags went up on damn near everything. Your local aboveground pool dealer was flying one to rival your local Chevy dealer. People put rows of magnetic flag ribbons on their cars in a patriotic version of the baby-on-board sticker: “If you ram one car today, let it be one whose butt doesn’t support the troops.” 

Despite already having a national anthem ceremony with military color guard, Major League Baseball added “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch, mid-inning acknowledgements of veterans and a nearly constant array of active-duty discount nights — as if we were in danger of forgetting what country baseball was affiliated with.

All things considered, being soaked in branded patriotism is preferable to being stained by the corruption of America’s biggest babyman, but baseball appears to be going whole hog on that last one, too. Donald Trump is a big fan of Pete Rose, and as such, baseball’s commissioner has announced that baseball’s all-time leader in hits and incompetent illegal gambling is now eligible for the Hall of Fame. America’s pastime, like so much else in the country, serves a single customer. You can buy the jersey and pretend to be on the team, but make no mistake: you can only print one name on the back of the shirt. It’s the same as the one on the front, and it isn’t yours.

It would be easy to get angry about the league’s decision for the wrong reasons, and defending the purity of the Baseball Hall of Fame is probably the wrongest. That Rose committed baseball’s one absolute capital offense is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that he lied about it repeatedly for decades and took no steps to remediate his sins. Fans were then spared a lot of hand-wringing about his case amid further revelations about the depth of his gambling habit and general vileness. In 2015, John Dowd, the prosecutor who compiled baseball’s 225-page report on Rose, said that a gambling crony of Rose’s claimed to bring him girls age 12 to 14 for spring training. Two years later, Dowd’s attorneys responded to a defamation suit filed by Rose with a sworn statement from a woman who accused Rose of raping her over the course of a relationship that began in the mid-1970s, when she was 14 or 15. In 2022, the Phillies gave Rose a chance at a rehab outing during a ceremony for the 1980 team that won the World Series, and Rose torched it by responding to questions about the rape allegations with, “It was 55 years ago, babe.” Rose’s personality so thoroughly defied sympathy and the habits of sports hagiography that the four-part HBO documentary about him could have been called “Christ, What an Asshole.”

But we’re talking about the Baseball Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Decency, and this is a world in which Henry Kissinger took home the Nobel Peace Prize. The Hall itself is filled with cretins and monsters, and mortaring the granite no-doubter phenoms of multiple eras are borderline players whose buddies happened to sit on veterans’ committees or whose careers spanned the honeyed youth of sportswriters hidebound by solipsism, nostalgia and neophobia. These latter types meretriciously police the entrance for steroid users, despite the Hall being filled with amphetamine gobblers, white guys whose performance was enhanced by only facing other white guys, and even the immortal Pud Galvin, who injected himself with ground monkey testicles in a Frankenstein attempt at testosterone boosting that is also history’s greatest case of near nominative determinism.

The Hall is a museum, and like all museums, it can’t tell the whole story of its subject. Worse, like all museums run by its subject, it doesn’t want to. If it did, accommodating Rose might be easier. Putting his history of breaking baseball’s cardinal rule on the same plaque as the one honoring his breaking the all-time hit record is a perfectly fitting installation for a museum dedicated to a sport that has produced astonishingly beautiful feats of athletic prowess while being run by racist owners who restrained the trade of their employees, colluded to cheat them (one of whom was awarded the commissionership) and took home plenty of capital from the big-dinger steroid era right before they pivoted to collecting the social capital of pretending to be offended by it all along. At some point, we’re both enshrining God-given talents at the same time that we’re counting fingers at the gates of the Hall of Leprosy, where the MLB-sanctioned kiosk about the evils of gambling is sponsored by FanDuel.

But if it doesn’t much matter if the Hit King enters the Hall — and, as the indispensable Jay Jaffe notes, that’s far from guaranteed anyway — it matters how it happens. One good way would be for MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred to admit that the Hall stands as a sometimes proper, sometimes witless and sometimes craven monument to baseball’s own marketing. It would represent the courage to admit that the sport is its own history, good and bad, as well as the history of its stewards and their prejudices. This week’s announcement, however, is just more caving.

Earlier this year, MLB quietly complied (in advance) with the Trump administration’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion by deleting evidence of the league’s support for the same from its website. Within a month, Manfred was meeting with Trump at the White House and discussing Rose, a subject Trump had posted about on Truth Social in February, promising a “complete PARDON of Pete Rose,” whatever he thinks that means. 

A generous reading of these events would suggest that Manfred is being sincere when he says that a lifetime ban has served its purpose with the death of the banned player. To a career psychopath like Rose, knowing that you’re going to die before you even get the chance to see if you might be inducted, had to be torture. Once the non-metaphorical worms get in his brain, there’s no more psychological diamond for the punishment to play in anymore.

The most smartassed reading of Manfred’s gesture also makes perfect sense. It’s hard to think of a better way of sucking up to an adjudicated rapist who kept Hitler’s speeches for bedtime reading, who went bankrupt running a casino and maintained a years-long bosom friendship with the world’s most famous pedophile, than by enacting his call for the pardon of a guy beloved by a fellow Hitler enthusiast, so bad at gambling that his bookies cut him off, and who was allegedly shipped a new cohort of children to sexually assault at the end of every winter. There’s pandering, and then there’s locating your pandering with the precision of Greg Maddux.

In all likelihood, the decision comes down to baseball’s 149-year most valuable player: money. In a world where the two major parties and most editorial boards have agreed to behave as if any tweet in which Trump uses the word “hereby” is automatically a law, Trump can do whatever he wants to baseball, whenever he wants. That might not seem perilous to most institutions that have been around for a century and a half, but Major League Baseball is a preposterously illegal monopoly made legal by the Supreme Court’s use of the “but it’s baseball, and we like it” clause. It also wants to expand its streaming services at a time when it has been made clear that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s only job, like so much of the administration, is extortion.

Meanwhile, Trump’s history with the United States Football League and friendship with XFL-founder (and fellow accused rapist) Vince McMahon speaks to his enthusiasm for alternate leagues, the obvious next step in whatever campaign of extortion he might want to pursue for MLB. Combine that with Trump’s corrupt relationships with the Gulf states, and the threat becomes clearer. Between wanting to get ahead of any petro-economy collapse and engaging in more “please don’t look at the gore-caked bone saw” reputation laundering, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is already spending billions of dollars to manage a professional golf tour that nobody even watches. Spending the same amount on anti-DEI “Oops! All Ecksteins!” baseball league of paleness, grit, determination and absolutely no dinger-pimping Dominicans would be a mere bagatelle.

It would be nice if there were a different explanation, but it seems the fate of Pete Rose has been determined by the prejudices, enthusiasms and fever dreams of our dullest, wettest citizen. It was exasperating enough to watch the Dubya-era MLB cynically swaddle itself in flags to enhance its position as a kind of national totem, but there is at least some spiritual kinship between the idea of nationalism and a national pastime. Whatever your feelings about the United States, celebrating it at least suggests a commitment to some sort of ethos. Defining the game’s heroes according to one man’s ungovernable impulses just feeds it into his ego. If even baseball can be consumed by it against its will, anything can, and everything will.