If Pete Rose had played in the era of this week’s Torah reading, in the world of biblical justice, he would have been stoned to death. Our Torah reading concludes with the tale of a man who commits a high crime in the Israelite community – a m’kallel, a blasphemer of the name of God – a public desecration of the highest order. His sentence is swift and final: “Let all who were within hearing lay their hands upon his head, and let the whole community stone him.” (Leviticus 24:14) The public trust has been broken, an example must be made, and what better deterrence? Not just a public execution but an execution by the public. “An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” declares one of the next verses. Harsh? Unquestionably. Clear? Absolutely. A sacred boundary has been defiled and consequences must follow. No exceptions. Nobody is above the law. Mishpat ehad, “one standard,” states the text, “for stranger and citizen alike.”
For those of who don’t know – meaning our Israeli-born cantor and anyone visiting from Atlantis, Narnia, or Wakanda – Pete Rose was one of the greatest baseball players ever to play the game. He finished his career with a lifetime batting average of over .300, a record-setting 4256 hits, seventeen All-Star appearances and three World Series victories. He was the National League MVP in 1973, World Series MVP when the Cincinnati Reds won in 1975, led the National League in batting three times, and had a forty-four game hitting streak in 1978. “Charlie Hustle,” the hit king, the face of the Big Red Machine – Rose’s achievements, without question, make him worthy of admission into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Pristine as Rose’s Cooperstown resume is, so too the venality of his sin. On August 24, 1989, three years after Rose had retired from playing, the late baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti banned Rose from the game for violating the sport’s prohibition on gambling, Rose having placed bets on the Cincinnati Reds while managing the team. The evidence was overwhelming, including testimony, phone records of calls from the clubhouse to bookies, financial records, betting slips with Rose’s signature and fingerprints. The rule, colloquially known as “Rule 21,” is clear. It is actually posted in every major league locker room: the prohibition against betting on ball games with a penalty of permanent ineligibility. Rose had bet not just on sports, not just on baseball, but on his own team. He had violated an essential rule of the game and a public trust. In biblical speak, he was a m’kallel. Rose signed a document accepting the ban but not admitting any guilt, a point to which we shall return. Permanently ineligible, Rose’s pariah status held firm through his passing last September at the age of 83.
However, given the news of the week, it would seem that permanent is not quite as permanent as we believed it to be. Last Tuesday, the current Major League Baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, removed Rose and sixteen other deceased individuals from the “permanently ineligible” list. And while the limitations of my time and your interest prevent me from doing a deep dive into the other players and their violations – most famously Shoeless Joe Jackson of Black Sox fame – the practical result of Tuesday’s decision is that Rose’s name could be up for entry into the Hall of Fame as early as a December 2027 vote.
As for what prompted the posthumous policy reversal, while some point to Manfred’s December meeting with Rose’s daughter, a more sure bet (forgive the quip) is his meeting last month with President Donald Trump, who – believing Rose to have been treated unfairly – has long called for Rose’s reinstatement. Their conversation reportedly ranged from the impact of immigration policies on international athletes to the future of the MLB and, yes, to Pete Rose. Manfred’s Tuesday’s announcement, as morally slippery as a Gaylord Perry fastball, asserted, “In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.”
Even if you don’t care about Pete Rose, the Hall of Fame, or even – heaven forbid – baseball itself, the questions the case raises are well worth considering. Rose’s banishment, recent reinstatement, and potential entry into Cooperstown matter not only for what they say about one deeply flawed individual, but for what they reveal about all of us: our moral boundaries, our appetite for accountability, and the kind of society we aspire to inhabit. The case of Pete Rose is a Rorschach test on the questions of our time.
Distinct as the issues may seem – sin and sinner, justice and mercy, atonement and accountability – they are, in truth, interconnected. In light of this week’s Torah reading, we might begin by exploring the relationship between sin and the sinner, between Pete Rose’s public stature and his personal failings. There are those who argue, as does the medieval commentator Nachmanides in his reflections on the priestly leaders in this week’s Torah reading, that public figures should be held to higher standards. Those in positions of visibility and influence are exemplars and must expect to be subject to heightened moral scrutiny.
Others take a different stance. Pete Rose, they contend, was a ballplayer, not a bishop; a hitter, not a holy man. He should be judged not by his ethics, but by his play on the field. You say he sinned. I say 4,256 – more hits than any ballplayer in history. It is a question not just about sports heroes. It is about the norms we hold for all our leaders: biblical and modern, local and national, incumbents and challengers, Democrats and Republicans. At what point do someone’s personal failings render them unfit to serve the public? Can we critique the sin and keep the sinner? Moses had a temper; King David was no saint. Can the flawed and the noble coexist in the same vessel?
What about the nature of the sin? What is the metric and who is the judge for moral gatekeeping? As the subject of Rose has been renewed this week, this question is probably the most charged. One friend of mine was quick to point out that whatever one thinks about Rose’s gambling, it is his sexual relations with underage women – statutory rape – never mind tax evasion, that renders him unfit for reentry to baseball and the Hall of Fame. We may have turned a corner on cancel culture, but accountability remains a value and at a certain point, the range and magnitude of Rose’s misdeeds disqualify him from the roster of the redeemed.
And yet, Rose was accused of no wrongdoing as an athlete. No performance-enhancing drugs, no stolen signs, no deflated footballs – nothing. And in an age when betting companies like Draft Kings and Fan Duel are major sponsors of Major League Baseball, can the sport really make claim to the moral high ground? Either gambling, like smoking marijuana and other once-taboo behaviors, has become a socially acceptable behavior, or gambling, like other addictions, is a condition deserving of sympathy, not stigma; rehabilitation, not rebuke. Even if you hold that we all have agency over our choices and are thus accountable, the Hall of Fame is about professional excellence, not menschlichkeit. Ty Cobb was a bigot known for his violent streak. Roger Hornsby was not only a gambler but an antisemite. Gaylord Perry openly admitted to doctoring baseballs, and Mickey Mantle was a womanizer and an alcoholic. “Each of us,” wrote Bryan Stevenson, “is more than the worst thing we've ever done.” Those guys are in the Hall of Fame – roses by any other name. Why not Pete?
As I hinted earlier, the Rose debate raises the question of penance, contrition, justice and mercy. Let’s stipulate that Rose did wrong. Don’t we, at least as Jews, believe in atonement? Isn’t that what Yom Kippur is all about? Didn’t Maimonides teach that there is no sin so great that it bars return? Doesn’t it say in the Talmud, “In the place where penitents stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand?” To all this, the answer is yes, of course. Because while there are undoubtedly hurts that we can never forgive or forget, Judaism is decidedly on the side of the penitent, a pro-teshuvah, pro-mercy religion. We might not make you a gala honoree, but sinners are always welcome in synagogue. If this place were reserved only for saints, it wouldn’t be so full.
And yet, for our player in question, Judaism’s generous view of repentance becomes the very lens by which Rose’s failure is most starkly exposed. For from the day of his banishment to the day of his death, Rose refused to admit the full scope of his misdeeds despite evidence to the contrary. I am completely mystified (and more than a little bit cynical) at Manfred’s sweeping posthumous reinstatement of Rose and his sixteen fellow exiles. Absent new facts, such reinstatements should either happen during the lifetime of the offender so as to grant them a sliver of this worldly redemption, or not at all, an exclamation point of deterrence to would-be future offenders. For Rose, it was not just the sin, but his refusal to name the sin, that may well have been his greatest failing and the most tragic dimension of the story.
There is more, much more, to say – which is why we have barstools, blogs, bleachers, and kiddushes – so each one of us can argue our opinion to our hearts content. But it’s the seventh inning stretch, and if you haven’t yet guessed it, let me share where I personally stand. I draw your attention to the coda of Rose’s 1989 banishment. Just days after issuing the lifetime suspension, MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti died of a massive heart attack at the age of 51 –perhaps the strain of the proceedings taking its final toll. If you’re inclined to read just one thing on the matter, let it be Giamatti’s final public statement, of which I share a selection now:
“…baseball is a beautiful and exciting game, loved by millions – I among them – and I believe baseball is an important, enduring American institution. It must assert and aspire to the highest principles– of integrity, of professionalism, of performance, of fair play within its rules. It will come as no surprise that like any institution composed of human beings, this institution will not always fulfill its highest aspirations. I know of no earthly institution that does. But this one, because it is so much a part of our history as a people and because it has such a purchase on our national soul, has an obligation to the people for whom it is played – to its fans and well-wishers to strive for excellence in all things and to promote the highest ideals.
“I will be told that I am an idealist. I hope so. I will continue to locate ideals I hold for myself and for my country in the national game as well as in other of our national institutions. And while there will be debate and dissent about this or that or another occurrence on or off the field, and while the game’s nobler parts will always be enmeshed in the human frailties of those who, whatever their role, have stewardship of this game, let there be no doubt or dissent about our goals for baseball or our dedication to it. Nor about our vigilance and vigor – and patience – in protecting the game from blemish or stain or disgrace.”
The prompt for Giamatti’s speech was Pete Rose. The ostensible subject matter: baseball. Reading his words today, it strikes me that Giamatti was talking about something bigger – about America – about who we are, who we could be, and who we should be.
Sympathetic as I am to human failing, the need for second chances, and the belief that it is our cracks and rough edges that make us human, I also believe that there is right and there is wrong, and that the same free will that leads us astray is the free will that prompts us to admit sin, apologize, and take agency for our future behavior. Pete Rose fell short of that bar. Giamatti was right. Manfred is wrong. The game of baseball is weaker, the fabric of our country further frayed, and the moral credit rating of our nation has been downgraded once again.
As another great American, James Earl Jones, reminded us, in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams”:
“The one constant through all the years . . . has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game – it’s a part of our past . . . It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
On so many counts and for so many reasons, may we continue to locate the ideals we hold for ourselves in our national institutions, and may we endeavor to make our national pastime and our nation good again.