BURGER SCOOT

“Without integrity, the game of baseball will cease to exist,” he said. “Without integrity, how will fans ever trust the purity of the game itself ever again? A purity built on the principle of fair play.” – Marcus Giamatti  (son of A. Bartlett Giamatti – MLB Commissioner, 1989)

A couple of years ago, I was at one of the last Oakland Athletics games I would ever see and noticed someone in the row in front of me looking at his phone. If the app looked like a radio station, I would write it off as one of those fans who have to hear chatter during live games, but I noticed the FanDuel Sportsbook icon. I don’t know if he was betting on the game we were all watching, or if live baseball is too boring for the guy, and he was playing Texas Hold’em or some other casino game. I don’t know how online betting works, and I don’t care to know. On the rare occasions I go gambling, it is always to a local tribal casino, and most of the time spent there is at the buffet, where I overeat.

I was reminded of that moment in the Coliseum when I heard of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s announcement that Pete Rose, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and other deceased players who are permanently ineligible to be inducted into the Hall of Fame because they gambled on the game. Manfred ruled that MLB’s punishment of banned individuals should end upon their deaths. So now they are presumably eligible for election into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Did Manfred care about Jackson, the other seven of the 1919 Chicago “Black” Sox that threw the World Series for money? Or did the Black Sox get a reprieve with Rose, so it didn’t look like Manfred was singling out “Charlie Hustle” because President Donald Trump made a fuss after some of Rose’s survivors asked Trump personally to apply pressure to Manfred? The Commissioner thought the optics would look bad by granting Rose’s memory while excluding other players who also gambled on the game, remained in purgatory.

Some baseball fans commented that Rose should have been honored while he was alive. Others thought a lifetime sentence for Rose et al. was enough, and it was a good time to make them eligible. Donald Trump, the Disrupter-in-Chief, thought he should have been honored while still alive. What do you know? That’s one more thing I disagree with Trump and Manfred on.

Here’s Brodie Brazil’s comments on this mess.

And then there is this that just happened.