IF TRUMP TURNS MANFRED INTO ZELENSKY, PLEASE USE MY SUPPORT OF PETE ROSE
The commissioner is woefully antithetical, cutting deals with sportsbooks while maintaining Rose’s lifetime ban for gambling — as he considers a change with a family petition while Trump presses him
Is Rob Manfred prepared to be the next Volodymyr Zelensky? I would watch. The MLB commissioner said no to Pete Rose until the day he died last fall, rejecting his repeated primal screams for reinstatement. Even posthumously, the sport’s lifetime ban means Rose won’t appear on the Hall of Fame ballot, due to a ruling by Cooperstown’s board 34 years ago.
Gambling on games destroyed the all-time hits leader.
Until Donald Trump won back the presidency and said baseball “should get off its fat, lazy ass,” demanding Manfred issue “the courage or decency” to have mercy. Which came one day before Manfred suddenly announced he is weighing a petition filed by Rose’s family, a crotchety way of avoiding Trump in the Oval Office. Who is running the sport? Not Manfred, apparently.
“Over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. “He never betted against himself, or the other team. He had the most hits, by far, in baseball history, and won more games than anyone in sports history.”
I happen to agree, though Trump didn’t explain what he’ll pardon and didn’t mention Rose’s false tax case and the five months he served in prison. If he’s chasing the men who run the game? Consider what I wrote the day Rose passed at 83, when I abandoned my long-established belief that he wasn’t worthy of the Hall: “Baseball cannot cash in on gambling and keep banning Rose. If Manfred had remained true to a non-betting window, sure, continue to outlaw him. But in trying to save the sport from falling so disturbingly behind football in America, the commissioner carried on with FanDuel and DraftKings while gambling malfeasance was in full display at ballparks. That includes venerable Wrigley Field, where Rose once tied (Ty) Cobb’s hits record.”
Those sentences should be presented to Trump. His stance must be presented in the context of how Manfred has been woefully antithetical. He can’t cut gambling deals and insist on banning Rose, knowing the Baseball Writers Association of America won’t vote for players who are permanently ineligible. When the boss wants to make money from gaming companies, he must lift the ban. Manfred did not, just as Bud Selig and Fay Vincent did not.
Here comes the President of the United States, who wants to end the war in Ukraine and invoked Russian President Vladimir Putin as he sat with Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Maybe Trump has no appropriate time for Manfred, but you never know. He told Zelensky he is “gambling with World War III” and said, “You see the hatred he’s got for Putin. It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate; he’s got tremendous hatred. It’s going to be a tough deal to make up because the attitudes have to change.
“This is going to be great television, I will say that.”
The world has seen it. Many people are disgraced. Many are not.
“You have (a) nice ocean and don’t feel (it) now, but you will feel it in the future,” Zelensky said.
Vice President JD Vance suggested Zelensky should stop “thumping” his chest, telling him it was “disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”
Would memories of Rose bring some sort of similar outrage? Would the media also be invited? Would Trump launch the World Series, if not World War III, in the White House? Manfred should come up with new material, discarding this: “We’ve always approached the issue of gambling from the proposition that players and other people who are in a position to influence the outcome of the game are going to be subject to a different set of rules than everyone else in the world. Pete Rose violated what is sort of rule one in baseball, and the consequences of that are clear in the rule, and we’ve continued to abide by our own rules. It’s just the rules are different for players. It’s part of the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being a major league player.”
So it’s OK for the commissioner to make money from gambling when a player cannot? How about if both parties stopped gambling vices? “Since the (2018) Supreme Court decision opened the door to legalized sports betting, we have worked with licensed sports betting operators and other third parties to put ourselves in a better position from an integrity perspective through the transparency that a regulated sports betting system can provide,” Manfred said. “MLB will continue to invest heavily in integrity monitoring, educational programming and awareness initiatives with the goal of ensuring strict adherence to this fundamental rule of our game.”
He also said, with barfing noises: “I think people believe we make more money off gambling than we actually do.”
In the past, I’d ask a president to avoid sports when he’s immersed in combat. Oddly, I welcome it today. Trump might remind Manfred of his contradictory ills and try to fix, if possible, what’s left of baseball.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.