"MLB’s Pete Rose Stance Is a Historic Self-Inflicted Wound | Opinion"
Here’s a rewritten version of your piece with a tone that retains the original’s sharp critique and emotional weight but is more streamlined and slightly more formal in delivery:
Let’s not call this a dark day for baseball—plenty of people are already doing that. But make no mistake: it’s a grim one. A baffling, backward-looking decision that dredges up a sordid chapter best left buried.
Pete Rose is no longer on Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list. Evidently, the path to Cooperstown now runs through the grave, regardless of how much damage one did to the game while alive.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision reeks of executive overreach, bordering on tone-deaf leadership. His tenure—set to stretch nearly 15 years—has been checkered but recently showed signs of progress. The pitch clock has improved game flow, and his efforts to usher baseball into the streaming era, while rocky, have been earnest.
But this? This is a massive self-inflicted wound.
Manfred’s justification—couched in legalese and aimed at deflecting responsibility—argues that no harm can come posthumously, and that A. Bartlett Giamatti’s banishment of Rose was less a moral stand than a legal maneuver. It’s a paper-thin rationale that echoes the defensiveness of his response to the Astros’ cheating scandal, when he went out of his way to shield ownership from blame.
It didn’t play well then. This won’t either.
For decades, MLB insisted that betting on baseball was the cardinal sin—one that undermined the very integrity of the sport. That line held, even as sports gambling became legal and pervasive. MLB couldn’t stop the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling, but it could control the Rose legacy. For nearly 40 years, it did so with conviction.
Until now.
With this move—coming just two months after former President Donald Trump publicly floated a Rose pardon and Cooperstown induction—Manfred has handed Rose’s defenders the narrative they’ve long craved. Never mind the felony tax charges, the unchallenged allegations of statutory rape, the defiant refusal to own his gambling violations. All of it now gets papered over in a push to canonize a deeply compromised figure.
In two years, a committee will decide whether Rose belongs on the Hall of Fame ballot. If he does, just 12 of 16 votes would enshrine him. The circus is back in town, and it’s going to stay.
Baseball will continue—games played, odds calculated, bets placed (hopefully not by players on the sport itself). But the integrity MLB spent decades defending has taken an unnecessary hit. A wound reopened. A legacy muddied.
The worst part? It didn’t have to be this way.