Pete Rose is still not in the Hall of Fame. His MLB ban was permanent, not “lifetime”

Pete Rose still won't be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

While the career leader's expulsion from baseball 35 years ago was often described as a lifetime ban, and his death this week led some to believe that would be the end of it, Rose agreed to a permanent ban from Major League Baseball following an investigation into his betting on the Major League Baseball to play.

Anyone on the permanently ineligible list cannot be considered for election to the Hall due to a rule adopted by the Hall's board of directors in 1991. Rose's status did not change then He died on Monday at the age of 83 of natural origin in Las Vegas.

That certainly won't stop the debate over whether the 17-time All-Star with 4,256 hits deserves induction or should now be inducted posthumously.

“The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the greatest baseball players to ever play the game. He paid the price! “Major League Baseball should have inducted him into the Hall of Fame many years ago,” former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, repeating a similar plea he made four years earlier had expressed. “Do it now, before his funeral!”

The Hall of Fame board adopted the rule a year and a half after Rose agreed to the ban, and the same year he would have been eligible for the ballot for the first time.

“It was obviously aimed at Pete Rose, and from that day and to this day my position, the position of millions of others, is, yes, we get it, he broke the cardinal rule. He should be banned from baseball for life because of this rule,” longtime broadcaster Bob Costas said Tuesday on ESPN’s “Get Up!” morning show. “But someone got those 4,256 base hits and those three batting championships. Put him in the Hall of Fame and write on the bottom of his plaque: “1989 Lifetime Ban from Baseball.” It’s part of the record, but he should be there as a player.”

Baseball's longstanding Rule 21 on Misconduct, prominently displayed in every MLB clubhouse, states that any player, umpire, club or league official or employee who “acts on a baseball game in connection with which the bettor is under a duty of performance.” has, must bet.” declared permanently ineligible.”

An investigation for MLB by attorney John M. Dowd found Rose has made numerous bets about winning the Cincinnati Reds from 1985 to 1987 while he played for and managed the team. Rose applied for reinstatement in 1997 and met with Commissioner Bud Selig in November 2002, but Selig never ruled on Rose's application.

Current MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred in 2015 denied Rose's request for reinstatementand concluded that Rose continued to play and would pose a risk to the integrity of the sport if she were allowed to return to play.

“Pete Rose broke rule one in baseball, and the consequences of that are usually clear, and we continued to play by our own rules,” Manfred told the Baseball Writers' Association of America in 2023. “It are just the rules that are different for players. That’s part of the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being a major league player.”

Manfred plans to retire when his current term ends in January 2029. Therefore, it is possible that the next commissioner will reconsider Rose's ban.

When the ban agreement was announced, then-Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti said, “It is solely up to Mr. Rose to reorganize his life as he sees fit.”

Rose repeatedly denied betting on baseball until he made an admission in his 2004 autobiography, “Pete Rose: My Prison Without Bars.”

“The ultimate tragedy is what he experienced, because he had all sorts of blessings, advantages and talents, and to live a life so frustrating and abysmal for the last 35 years must have been a terrible sentence for him. ” Former Commissioner Fay Vincent told The Associated Press this week.

“In the end, how can one not have great pity for a man who suffered from a kind of human failing, namely an excessive belief in his infallibility, and he tested that again and again? ….He was constantly punished and never got a lesson,” he said. “The lesson was to stop doing what you’re doing.”

Rose appealed directly to the Hall in 2016 to have his eligibility restoredHe argued that the lifetime ban he agreed to was never intended to keep him from Cooperstown.

Although the 1963 NL Rookie of the Year, 1973 MVP and 1975 World Series MVP are not in the Hall of Fame, Rose's accomplishments can be found throughout Cooperstown. The museum has the bats of its 3,000th. and 4,000. hits and the helmet he wore when he surpassed Ty Cobb's mark of 4,191 hits on September 11, 1985. There's also a Montreal Expos cap that Rose wore when he appeared in 1984. The record for games played – he finished 24 seasons with 3,562.

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AP Baseball Writer Ronald Blum contributed to this report.

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