Pete Rose and Donald Trump Are the Dregs of American Maleness

Thanks to our current misbegotten model of manhood, we are once again arguing about this moral question: Should former Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose be inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame?

In a sane time, the proper answer would be: Are you kidding?

Maybe many of you reading this couldn’t care less.

Unfortunately, you probably should care because the real question in these chaotic times of ours is: What does the Hall of Fame stand for? In the same way, you might now wonder what America stands for and whether, in our moment, Pete Rose — bully, liar, cheat, sexual predator, and fan-favorite superstar athlete — has, in fact, become a sports surrogate for Donald Trump.

Back in my sports-writing days for the New York Times, I must admit that I liked Rose for some of the same reasons I liked that other shady character I covered — Trump. They were accessible, friendly, and could always be depended on for a quick, good-enough story.

That kind of careerism should, of course, be considered shameful in the journalism trade and might, in its own strange way, also be considered one of the reasons we find ourselves in our current crisis.

Though one of them is dead and the other is still all too with us, Rose and Trump are indeed of the same era, so who can be sure which of them gave permission for the deformed growth of the other, or whether both of them are parallel products of the same toxic all-American climate that has changed far too little over all these years? Of course, they both grew up in a time when, for men, bad behavior, especially toward women, was often excused, if not encouraged, as part of a winner’s attitude.

And here we are in the second presidency of Donald J. Trump facing revived interest in forgiving Rose, now falsely glorified as yet another White man trapped in a fantasy conspiracy against White men. Under the circumstances, who could be surprised that Trump has promised to pardon Rose?

Rose was infamously guilty of compromising the integrity of baseball by betting on games he managed. Recently, after meeting with Trump, Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred erased a previous commissioner’s 1989 ruling that banned Rose from baseball for life. And like all too many other American institutions, baseball has good reason to listen to Trump. For one thing, its clubs can’t afford to lose access to international talent any more than Harvard University and other institutions of higher education can. At the moment, in fact, two of its most exciting performers are the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani of Japan and the New York Mets’ Juan Soto of the Dominican Republic. And there are plenty of other foreign nationals in the pipeline. Another vulnerability for baseball would be possible government restrictions on sports gambling.

As Dave Zirin, who writes the Edge of Sports column, points out: “[Commissioner] Manfred may allow Trump to bask in the smell of his own influence, but this decision is rooted in something bigger: the sport’s surrender to the gambling-addiction economy, which could, in theory, be subject to federal or legal intervention… This has been a year when ethical guidelines once held as eternal have been shredded. MLB’s embrace of online betting signals the demise of another principle in a time of abject moral carnage.”

Trump Cleared the Bases

Banning Pete Rose presumably denied his possible election to the Hall of Fame with its bonanza of personal and financial rewards. Rose died last year at 83, thus completing his life sentence. With Trump’s apparent urging, however, the bases have now been cleared for his resurrection.

Betting on sporting events is clearly not in the same league with shredding the safety net, hamstringing higher education, or subverting the rule of law, but it’s still part of the same game: aggrandizing illegal control, flexing power, and making yet more money. Think of it this way: Rose and Trump competed in exactly the same style.

Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins best summed up the case against Rose, writing that he “was a habitual degenerate who never showed remorse for a thing — not for gambling on his own games or malicious cheap shots such as fracturing Ray Fosse’s shoulder in the 1970 All-Star Game. He even showed zero contrition after he was accused in a sworn statement of having sex with a girl who said she was no more than 14 or 15 years old at the time, excusing himself by claiming he thought she was 16 and ‘who cares what happened 50 years ago?‘ “

Like the presidential vote for Trump in 2024, the polls for or against Rose’s induction (should he make it to a Hall vote) will be close. People are passionate about the subject, especially Rose supporters who point out how gambling on sports, once forbidden except in Las Vegas, is now a welcome partner of the American major leagues, both a fresh revenue stream and a lure for the younger audience that has drifted off to the Internet follies. What was once seen as an existential threat to the sport is now embraced as a savior.

Remarkably, as recently as the 1980s, two Hall of Fame icons, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, were banned from baseball for taking part-time jobs as gambling-casino greeters. Ironically, it was Mantle and his Yankee teammate Whitey Ford who gave the young Pete Rose the snarky nickname “Charlie Hustle” for how hard he played the game.

Give Rose credit, however. He was a gamer who made the most of less-than-elite skills with hard work and intensive play. As with Trumpers, there is indeed something cultish about his boosters. To them, he represents more than record-breaking statistics — his lifetime count of 4,256 hits has never been matched — and passionate competition (he slid hard, careless of an opponent’s bones). He was a blue-collar digger, distinctly a symbol of merit in its latest Trumpian definition.

In his off-field life, he was also a symbol of manhood, again as Trump would understand the term. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine Pete on that flying clubhouse the Qataris recently gave our president. He was always full of vulgar stories and bro cheer. His style of life and play had the vicious exuberance now so politically recognizable.

Admittedly, covering Rose in the 1960s and 1970s was always fun, though tinged with that cringey touch of guilty-pleasure-discomfort that’s so recognizable today. Sportswriters are conditioned to excuse that very feeling as part of a boys-will-be-boys creed. At his core, Rose was distinctly a bad boy and stories about, say, his awarding an extracurricular paramour an expensive ankle bracelet that spelled out “my rookie of the year” trapped sportswriters into being his accomplices.

I remember with retrospective shame my own early cluelessness about Rose. One time, a teenage girl, writing for her high school newspaper, was roughly shunted aside by the sportswriter pack before a Cincinnati Reds game. Rose noted what was going on, took the girl aside, and gave her an exclusive interview. Sometime after, I used that incident as an example of his decency. I got the side-eye from a seasoned sportswriter who then explained that Rose was simply practicing what, years later, would be called “grooming.”

Giamatti and Rose

Like Trump, Pete was canny without appearing particularly intelligent. (Of course, of the two of them, only Rose has been in prison so far — five months for tax evasion.) But he was also stubborn in ways that would prove self-destructive. In 1989, newly elected Baseball Commissioner A. Bart Giamatti, a retired Yale University president and English Renaissance literature scholar, banned Rose for life after an investigation that proved painful for both men. Then managing the Reds, Rose refused to tell the truth about his gambling, though he finally confessed to it in his 2004 autobiography and began — yes! — selling autographed baseballs with “Sorry I bet on Baseball” on them. Giamatti, who loved baseball, found it hard to put the sport through such an ordeal. He eventually brokered a settlement, allowing Rose to voluntarily accept banishment for life in return for no further punishment.

Eight days after announcing the decision, Giamatti died of a heart attack at 51. Over the years, despite his record as a fair-minded humanist, that story has been spun into a symbolic tale of class warfare — elite Ivy Leaguer versus popular working-class model player — that only helped solidify the continuing pro/con split on reinstating Rose.

Recently, sportswriter Michael Bamberger brought the essence of the story right up to our own time with this anecdote:

“Anything populist is smack-dab in Trump’s wheelhouse. Years ago, during an interview, he turned the tables and asked me how I felt about the 50-game suspension that the prodigious home-run hitter Manny Ramirez had received for violating baseball’s rules on performance-enhancing drugs. I gave a high-minded, bag-of-wind answer of support. Trump smirked and said pleasantly, ‘I do not care. I just want to see them hit the long ball.’”

Not that Rose ever hit many home runs, but Trump’s allusion to the 1999 Nike commercial, “Chicks dig the long ball,” captured the sentiments of both men. The power and cash that came with it were shamelessly recognized as the reigning currency of sports and politics. Manhood was what you could get away with. Standing up for fairness, decency, and equality was weak and silly. As Trump would remind us, it was for suckers.

The Hall of Famers Weigh In

Current members of the Hall of Fame on a “veteran’s committee” will be able to vote on Rose’s membership in 2027 and, based on what’s currently known about the opinions of such players, it looks as if he’ll stand a good chance of making it. The players just can’t seem to understand their fans’ sense of betrayal at Rose tipping the balance of games. They tend to focus on him instead through the lens of their own careers.

Rose’s teammate on the Phillies toward the end of his playing career, all-star third baseman Mike Schmidt, typically said: “I see both sides. I see that he squandered so many opportunities to change his life and go forward… There wasn’t remorse there. He didn’t show any atonement for his admission to betting on baseball. But at the same time, Pete Rose is one of the greatest players in the history of baseball, without question. Statistically and for what he did in his career, he would be a unanimous Hall of Famer.”

Jim Palmer, an upstanding and righteous pitcher and broadcaster, may understand the hypocrisy of baseball’s new embrace of gambling, but it’s still a narrow issue for him. He said: “Every time I do my broadcast and our opening is sponsored by [gambling site] Draft Kings, I go, ‘And Pete’s not in the Hall of Fame.’”

Even pitcher Jim Kaat, among the smartest of major leaguers, sees it through a boys-eye view of other boys who could be the collateral damage of a Rose reinstatement. “If I were on that committee,” he said, “the first question would be, ‘Do we just look at Pete for what he did on the baseball field?’ And if that’s the case, that’s a no-brainer. [But] you can only vote for three, so what do you do about Tommy John and Dale Murphy and guys like this who have never been [accused of] anything like that off the field. Then it’s going to hurt their cases.”

And what about the rest of us? You know, the ones conditioned to believe that honesty, fairness, and yes, the rule of law pertain to everyone and that sports should be the crucible of good character that defines us forever? When did those precepts of manhood become rules for losers? When did Pete Rose get a pass because he was so good at hitting a baseball and Donald Trump because he was so good at — what was that? — entertaining some of us? And what should a Hall of Fame, a shrine, or for that matter a presidency stand for? Forget about his criminality and his alleged sexual misconduct — as if that shouldn’t be enough to cancel your admission to a shrine (or the White House) — his betting on his own baseball games with its obvious at least minimally subliminal effect on their outcomes should be considered a treacherous act by one of the game’s faithful. It may not have been felonious enough to demand civil punishment, but it certainly required banishment from the game and from any of its rewards.

So here we are and, of course, I can’t help wondering why I’m even discussing something as seemingly trivial and, yes, even soft, at a time when our lives are threatened. In response, let me offer this possibility: Maybe it’s because Pete Rose was another of the thugs who mugged us on the dark road to dishonor and — yes, in Donald Trump’s case — even possibly tyranny. So stopping his beatification is just the sort of thing we need to do if we hope to put his version of manhood into the Hall of Shame and transform ourselves into the patriotic beast that will strike Donald Trump out.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Pete Rose and Donald Trump Are the Dregs of American Maleness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.