Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb and Cleveland's Shoeless Joe Jackson stand near each other, each holding multiple baseball bats.

Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe Jackson Reinstated—And Really Different

In Commentary And Analysis by andcounting40 Comments

Commissioner Rob Manfred throws a bone both to fellow trash former human and to a different guy who probably actually loved baseball

On Tuesday, Rob Manfred sent a letter to a lawyer to let lawbreakers loose after leaving the land of the living, leaving lifetime bans limited to the length of the lives against whom they are levied by the league.

My apologies for the silly nonsense summary, but nonsense begets nonsense. Manfred gave some ridiculous explanation for doing this that did not include a single word about boot licking, ring kissing, ass smooching, or fellating, which is clearly the only thing going on here. But I’m not really hear to talk about that.

Pete Rose has never appeared on a HOF ballot. Joe Jackson, who will join his fellow Eight Men Out co-stars in eligibility, had appeared on the ballot long before the 1991 rule that declared all lifetime banned brethren ineligible from HOF consideration. Now both men could conceivably be considered for the hall when the Classic Baseball Era Committee meets in December to vote on the eight names to be proposed by the Historical Overview Committee. But I’m not really here to talk about that either.

Pete Rose dives headfirst into what I can only assume must have been first base after a walk.
Pete Rose takes first after a base on balls. (Source: ESPN)

The Difference between Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson

Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe have more in common than being banned from baseball. Joe Jackson married a 15 year old in 1908. Pete Rose committed statutory rape in 1973, and allegedly more frequently than that. I don’t know how to comment on the circumstances of Joe and Katie Wynn Jackson’s wedding, but for what it’s worth they stayed married up until the time of his death in 1951. That is to say, I don’t know that it makes their early relationship okay, but it definitely shows one of the ways Jackson and Rose were undeniably different.

Another key difference is that Pete Rose wasn’t a great hitter. Joe Jackson was. Joe Jackson’s career was cut short. Pete Rose’s career was ridiculously extended—his last seven seasons, he was a net -1.3 WAR player. When Joe Jackson was banned from the league, he continued playing under pseudonyms. When Pete Rose was banned from the league, he campaigned relentlessly for the only person who really mattered to him: Pete Rose.

When Joe Jackson was involved in gambling, it was part of a multiplayer rogue mission to game the system, and it’s still fairly unclear what role if any Jackson actually knowingly played in the entire affair—he set a World Series record for hits, after all. When Pete Rose gambled on baseball, he did it presumably for the same reason he did just about everything he did: to make himself feel like a winner, a grand ole great one. It was all him. Of course it was. And it certainly wasn’t a one-time thing. He gambled for years, as a player and as a manager.

That seemed to be the running theme in the life of Pete Rose: Hey everybody, look how great Pete Rose is! See! Do you see him running to first on a walk? Do you see him diving into home? Do you see him trying to kill the catcher in the All-Star Game? See how dirty his uniform is? See how mean everyone is being to him? See how much the Hall of Fame anthropomorphically yearns for him to enter into it and make his greatness known all the more?

And then you have this story about Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose hitting prowess inspired Babe F. Ruth to imitate his technique. Ty Cobb entered the liquor store owned by his former peer, intending to reconnect with him decades after they last shared the same field. But Jackson ignored him, or at least treaded the Hall of Famer as he would any other customer. Finally, Cobb forced the issue.

“Don’t you know me, Joe,” Cobb asked him.

“I know you,” Jackson replied, no longer shoeless but altogether unassuming. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to speak to me. A lot of them don’t.”

I won’t presume to tell you what to think about Pete Rose or Joe Jackson or how to rate them as players or human beings. All I’ll say is that I wish Pete Rose had allowed himself to explore humility for even a millisecond. And I wish Joe Jackson would have found a greater opportunity to be proud.

I guess you could say, I wish the baseball world knew more about Shoeless Joe. And I wish we knew less about Charlie Hustle.

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  2. berselius

    A stand-up guy, that Pete rose

    A motion filed in Dowd’s defense contained a sworn statement from a woman who said that Rose had engaged in a sexual relationship with her in the 1970s, when she was a minor and he was in his mid-30s. Rose later acknowledged the relationship, defending himself by saying that he did not know that the girl, between 14 and 15 years old at the time, was a minor under Ohio state laws and that he did not have sex with her outside the state. Rose claimed he thought she was 16, which was the age of consent in Ohio at the time….When questioned about it by a female reporter from The Philadelphia Enquirer, Alex Coffey, in August of 2022, Rose replied, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”

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  10. Author
    andcounting

    berselius,

    I can see an argument (a poor one) for suing someone for saying you committed statutory rape because you’re finding out several decades later you were wrong about one person’s age. Wouldn’t agree on the merits, but ok.

    I can also understand someone saying, “It was 55 years ago, and I don’t have strong feelings about what I did back then.” Again, I wouldn’t wave it off dismissively, but ok, I would expect as much.

    But saying, “Who cares, what I did was half a century ago and therefore no big deal” AND suing someone for saying you did it? Nope. Now you’re admitting you did it AND you know it’s a big deal.

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  14. Author
    andcounting

    dmick89,

    Thank you. The thing I like about that story is that it came out before Ty Cobb’s reputation got tanked by his biographer.

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  24. Rice Cube

    Via MLBTR

    Roberts said that Roki Sasaki reported some arm soreness coming out of his start on Friday (via Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic). The team has not decided whether it’ll require an IL stint. Sasaki has gotten out to a rocky start to his MLB career. He has only completed six innings in one of his first eight outings. He has yet to record more than four strikeouts in a game and carries a 4.72 ERA with very poor strikeout and walk rates.

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