Historic Decision: Rob Manfred Removes Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson from the Ineligible List
In a momentous decision, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has taken a step that will mark a turning point in the history of the sport. On Tuesday, Manfred announced the removal of Pete Rose, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and other deceased players from the ineligible list of Major League Baseball.
This decision opens the doors for Rose and Jackson, emblematic figures in baseball, to be considered for inclusion in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Both players, tarnished by scandals related to gambling, now have the possibility of being honored for their legacy.
Manfred argued that the punishment imposed by MLB on banned individuals ends with their death. “A person who is no longer with us cannot pose a threat to the integrity of the game,” Manfred wrote in a letter to lawyer Jeffrey M. Lenkov, who requested Rose’s removal from the list on January 8. “Furthermore, it is difficult to conceive of a sanction that has a more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime without pardon. Therefore, I have concluded that permanent ineligibility ends with the death of the sanctioned individual, and Mr. Rose will be removed from the permanently ineligible list.”
Manfred’s decision ends the suspension Rose accepted in August 1989, following an MLB investigation that determined the 17-time All-Star had bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds. Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox players were banned in 1921 by then-commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for their involvement in the fixing of the 1919 World Series.
According to current rules, Rose and Jackson could be eligible for the Hall of Fame in the summer of 2028, if selected. Manfred’s decision affects a total of 16 deceased players and one deceased owner who were on MLB’s ineligible list.
The so-called “Black Sox Scandal” is one of the darkest chapters in baseball history, the subject of books and the 1988 film, “Eight Men Out”.
In 1991, the Hall of Fame’s board of directors decided that any player on MLB’s ineligible list would also be ineligible for election, which became known as “the Pete Rose rule.”
Rose believed his banishment would be lifted after a year or two, but it became a life sentence. For “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who died in 1951, the ban became an eternal sentence, until Tuesday.
Jackson was considered by voters for decades, but Pete Rose’s name has never appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot. Rose died in September at the age of 83.
Almost a decade ago, Lenkov began a campaign to have Rose reinstated. On December 17, Pete Rose’s eldest daughter, Fawn, and Lenkov appealed to Manfred and MLB’s communications director, Pat Courtney, during a one-hour meeting at MLB headquarters in midtown Manhattan.
“This has been a long journey,” said Lenkov. “On behalf of the family, they are very proud and pleased and know that their father would have been very happy with this decision today.”
Jeffrey M. Lenkov
Lenkov said that he and Rose’s family intend to apply for Hall of Fame induction as soon as possible. Hall officials did not immediately comment.
“My next step is to respectfully confer with the Hall and discuss… Pete’s induction into the Hall of Fame,” Lenkov said. The lawyer said he and Rose’s family will attend Pete Rose Night on Wednesday at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati.
“Reds Nation will not only be able to celebrate Pete’s legacy, but will now be able to look optimistically towards the possibility of Pete joining other baseball immortals,” Lenkov said. “Pete Rose surely would have been cheered by the outpouring of support from everyone.”
The candidacies of Rose and Jackson will be decided by the Hall’s Classic Baseball Era Committee, which considers players whose careers ended more than 15 years ago. The committee is not scheduled to meet again until December 2027. Rose and Jackson would need 12 of 16 votes to earn induction.
Jackson had a career batting average of .356, the fourth-highest in MLB history. Following his death, Jackson’s fans, including South Carolina state lawmakers, launched numerous public and petition campaigns arguing that Jackson deserved a plaque in the Hall of Fame. Despite accepting $5,000 in cash from gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series, Jackson batted .375, committed no errors, and hit the only home run of the series.
Over the decades and among millions of baseball fans, especially in Cincinnati, where Rose was born and played most of his career, the clamor for the expulsion of the legend from baseball and the Hall of Fame grew louder, angrier, and increasingly impatient.
Few players in baseball history had more notable careers than Pete Rose. He was an exuberant competitor who played with aggressive abandon and relentless effort. Rose, whose lifetime batting average was .303, is the major league leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215), and outs (10,328). He won the World Series three times: twice with the Reds and once with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Rose often said, and statistics experts agree, that he won more regular season games (1,972) than any Major League Baseball player or professional athlete in history. He also won three batting titles, two Gold Gloves, the Most Valuable Player award, and the Rookie of the Year award.
In 2015, shortly after Manfred succeeded Bud Selig as commissioner, Rose requested his reinstatement to MLB. Manfred met with Rose, who first told the commissioner that he had stopped betting, but later admitted that he was still legally betting on sports, including baseball, in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas.
Manfred rejected Rose’s request for readmission after concluding that he had failed to “reconfigure his life,” a requirement for readmission set by Giamatti. Allowing Rose to return to baseball was an “unacceptable risk of a future violation… and, therefore, to the integrity of our sport,” Manfred stated on December 14, 2015.
Rose often complained that the ban prevented him from working with young hitters in minor league parks. On February 5, 2020, Rose’s representatives submitted another petition for reinstatement, arguing that the commissioner’s decision not to impose any punishment on the players of the World Series champion Houston Astros for electronic sign stealing was unfair to Rose. “There cannot be one set of rules for Mr. Rose and another for everyone else,” argued the 20-page petition.
But Manfred, who did not meet with Rose again, chose not to comment on that second appeal before Rose’s death on September 30, 2024.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that he planned to posthumously pardon Rose. “I will be signing a FULL PARDON for Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have bet on Baseball, but only bet to WIN HIS TEAM,” Trump wrote on social media on February 28.
Trump didn’t say what the pardon would cover. Rose served five months in federal prison for filing false tax returns in 1990.
During a meeting in the Oval Office on April 16, Trump and Manfred discussed Rose’s posthumous petition for readmission, among other topics. Manfred later declined to discuss the details of their conversation.
On Tuesday, Manfred called Trump, who was on a state trip in Saudi Arabia, and Jane Forbes Clark, chair of the Hall of Fame’s board of directors, about his ruling, multiple sources told ESPN.
John Dowd, the former Justice Department lawyer who conducted MLB’s investigation into Rose, told ESPN in 2020 that he believes Jackson belongs in the Hall, but recently said he disagrees with Manfred’s decision on Rose. “There’s no difference with him being dead: it’s about behavior, conduct and reputation,” Dowd said.
Dowd’s investigation found that Rose had bet on 52 Reds games and hundreds of baseball games in 1987 while serving as Cincinnati’s manager. Giamatti then banned Rose for life from baseball on August 23, 1989.
When asked at a press conference whether Rose’s punishment should keep him out of the Hall of Fame, Giamatti said he would leave that decision to the baseball writers who vote each year on eligible players for induction.
“This episode has been, in many ways… taking responsibility and taking responsibility for one’s own actions,” said Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar and former Yale president. “I know I don’t need to point out to the baseball writers of America that it is their responsibility to decide who goes into the Hall of Fame. It’s not mine.”
A. Bartlett Giamatti
In his Tuesday letter, Manfred referred to Giamatti’s quote and said that he agrees that “it is not part of my authority or responsibility to express any opinion regarding Mr. Rose’s possible election… to the Hall of Fame. I agree with Commissioner Giamatti that the responsibility for that decision rests with the Hall of Fame.”
Giamatti had said that Rose’s only path to return to the game was to “reconfigure his life,” a not-so-subtle hint that if Rose continued to bet on baseball, he had no chance of returning to the game.
Just eight days after announcing the ban, Giamatti died of a heart attack at age 51. His deputy and successor, Fay Vincent, strongly opposed Rose’s reinstatement, both during his tenure as commissioner (until 1992) and until his death three months ago at age 86.
Rose was his own worst enemy. For almost 15 years, he denied ever making a single bet on baseball. In the early 2000s, then-commissioner Bud Selig offered Rose an opportunity, but with conditions, including admitting he bet on baseball, not making appearances at casinos, and stopping betting. Rose refused.
In January 2004, he admitted in his book, “My Prison Without Bars,” that he had bet on baseball as the Reds’ manager. But he insisted that he only bet on his team to win. In 2015, ESPN reported that a notebook seized from an associate of Rose showed that Rose had also bet on baseball while he was still a player, something he would not acknowledge.
Rose’s illegal gambling and prison time are not the only blemishes on a legacy that could be weighed by Hall of Fame voters, a group instructed to consider integrity, sportsmanship, and character.
In 2017, a woman’s affidavit accused Rose of statutory rape; she said they began having sex when she was 14 or 15 and Rose was 30. Rose said he thought she was 16, the age of consent in Ohio at the time. Two days later, the Philadelphia Phillies announced the cancellation of Rose’s induction into the Wall of Fame.
In January 2020, ESPN reported that, for all practical purposes, Manfred considered the baseball blacklist to punish players for their lifetime, but that it ended with their death. However, Hall of Fame representatives have said that a player who dies while still on the blacklist remains ineligible for consideration. With his 2020 application for reinstatement on Manfred’s desk, MLB granted Rose permission to be honored at a celebration of the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies World Series championship on August 7, 2022.
In the dugout before the fans gave Rose a long standing ovation, a reporter asked him about the 2017 accusation and if his participation in that day’s celebration sent a negative message to women.
“No, I’m not here to talk about that,” Rose replied. “I’m sorry about that. It was 55 years ago, babe.”
The public reaction to Rose’s comments was swift and severe. MLB sources said his comments derailed his campaign to be removed from the ineligible list.
In recent years, some fans have become more insistent that MLB should pardon Rose and include him in the Hall of Fame. One reason is America’s love affair with sports betting. As MLB has embraced legal gambling through sponsorships and partnerships, like all U.S. professional sports, some fans and commentators have complained that Rose deserves a second chance, echoing an argument Rose often made.
“I thought we lived in a country where you get a second chance, but not when it comes to gambling,” Rose said in a 2020 interview with ESPN. He estimated that the ban cost him at least $80 million in earnings as an MLB manager.
Rose, who signed baseballs and jerseys for years in souvenir shops inside Las Vegas casinos and in Cooperstown on Hall of Fame induction weekends, legally bet on sports almost every day for the rest of his life.
When asked how much money her bets had cost her, Rose said she didn’t know, although she acknowledged that she lost much more than she won. “Nobody wins with bets,” Rose said.
“I’m the one who lost 30 years,” he told ESPN in the 2020 documentary “Backstory: Banned for Life.” “Just taking baseball out of my heart penalized me more than you can imagine. Do you understand what I’m saying? … I don’t think there’s been a player, I could be wrong, I don’t think there’s been a player who loved the game like I did. You could tell I loved the game, the way I played the game.
“So then you take that away from somebody. I can hide it on the outside, but it’s eaten me up on the inside, all those years. Hell, you’d think I was Al Capone. I’m Pete Rose: I played more games than anybody, I hit more than anybody… Okay? I got more hits than anybody. I’m the all-time hit leader in the history of the sport.”
Last September, in his last interview 10 days before his death, Rose told sports commentator John Condit: “I’ve come to the conclusion, I hope I’m wrong, that I’ll get into the Hall of Fame after I die. Which I totally disagree with, because the Hall of Fame is for two reasons: your fans and your family… And it’s for your family if you’re here. It’s for your fans if you’re here. Not if you’re 10 feet under. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“What good will it do me or my fans to be put in the Hall of Fame a couple of years after I die?” Rose told Condit. “What’s the point? What’s the point? Because they’ll make money off of it?”
