MLB Insider: Rose takes another slide away from reinstatement, Hall

A bit of advice to any disgraced athlete who is considering a made-for-TV confession of his sporting sins: Don’t do it, or, if a PR man is pressing for it, tell absolutely everything, right down to cheating in a fifth-grade spelling bee.

Anything less than a full-scale regurgitation of the whole truth will come back to bite in an unpleasant place. In the latest case, the place is the road to Cooperstown, N.Y.

Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, bet on baseball not only as a manager, which he has admitted, but also as a player, according to an ESPN report.

Rose, of course, is no stranger to Cooperstown. He’s made a mint over the past couple decades hawking his autograph during induction weekend. Even inside the museum, Rose has a presence.

Just not in the Plaque Gallery, where he badly wants to be.

And maybe he should be in the Hall of Fame. An argument can be made for and against Rose, just as pro and con debates exist for the Steroid Era stars who account for some of the game’s greatest feats.

I’m no lawyer, but commissioner Rob Manfred is, in addition to being the judge and jury and in the Rose case. The Hall of Fame itself, though, could have a say in the matter.

Manfred and Rose will meet after the All-Star Game next month in Cincinnati, where Rose became a star and the hits leader and a baseball sinner. Manfred will then reconsider Rose’s case for reinstatement into baseball.

What if Manfred is feeling sympathetic and lifts Rose’s ban? The Hall is no guarantee, as, technically, it operates independently from Major League Baseball and might not put Rose on the ballot. Or, if Manfred keeps the ban in place, the Hall could put Rose on the ballot.

If it does, the writers might not vote for him.

I don’t have a Hall vote, yet, and won’t for a couple more years. There are voters who would back Rose and those who wouldn’t, just as there are voters who pick players of the Steroid Era and those who don’t.

The biggest knock against Rose is that he broke Rule 21, which had been posted in clubhouses for, well, almost forever and still is.

Here’s the rule: “Any player, umpire, or club official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year. 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.”

Seems pretty cut and dried, yet Rose could still have a leg to stand on.

There are all kinds of players with less-than-angelic personnel files in the Hall, from racists to users of recreational drugs to sex addicts/legendary drinkers.

Ty Cobb, whose all-time hits record was broken by Rose, and Tris Speaker, another Hall of Famer, were accused of fixing games in 1919, and Cobb even admitted to it but denied that he bet on the game.

Others in baseball have been banned for links to gambling — hello, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays — only to have their bans lifted. Mantle and Mays, though, were retired and simply paid employees of casinos.

Former Texas Rangers right-hander Gaylord Perry, who admitted that he doctored balls en route to 314 wins, was inducted in 1991.

There’s also this: an addiction to gambling is widely viewed as a disease, just as alcoholism and drug addiction.

Baseball has survived with all of those miscreants in the Hall of Fame. Both would be just fine with Rose in there, as they would be with home-runs leader Barry Bonds, seven-time Cy Young winner Roger Clemens and other Steroid Era stars from who, technically, didn’t break any rules at the time while baseball cashed in on their successes.

Rose broke a rule, one that every player had access to every day in every clubhouse of every ballpark. Seems pretty cut and dried, yet Rose could still have a leg to stand on.

But for every step he takes toward reinstatement and the Hall of Fame, he takes about, oh, 10 to 20 further away from it.

This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 4:15 PM with the headline "MLB Insider: Rose takes another slide away from reinstatement, Hall."