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By Christopher Witflee
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At some point, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig will have to realize that Pete Rose isn't going to go away. For every move Selig makes to distance Rose from the game, he unwittingly places Rose above the game -- and nothing short of a newly brokered truce will discontinue this trend of two or three episodes per year in which Rose's exile upstages observances of the game's greats.
Last weekend, the Reds endeavored to honor the 25th anniversary of their 1975 World Championship club. In pregame ceremonies on June 3, the Reds inducted Sparky Anderson and Davey Concepcion into their Hall of Fame. Along with Anderson, Tony Perez and Marty Brennaman are soon to be enshrined at Cooperstown. Yet, the most gripping observances were those on behalf of the missing man. It won't be any different next month on the steps of the national shrine.
At the World Series last fall, Selig gave in to sponsorship pressure, enabling the conditions by which Rose upstaged all the other greats during introduction of the all-century team. Outrage on Rose's behalf subsequent to a contentious interview upstaged the remainder of the World Series.
The episode provoked thought that Selig might be willing to reconsider Rose's status, but it proved to be all about sponsorship money. So much for taking a stance on principle.
When the legendary Big Red Machine regular lineup took the field during the June 3 ceremony, third base was left empty until Barry Larkin ran out to place a rose on the bag. Fans dropped roses on the warning track. Replicas of Rose's jersey hung all around Cinergy Field. Brennaman and John Allen both alluded to Rose. Any reference to Rose guaranteed the loudest applause.
Such observances are for the fans, who have made it clear over and over again that they wish to honor Rose's achievements as a player in the appropriate settings. Fans don't much care if Rose is allowed back into the game, but they want to honor him and see him in the Hall of Fame.
The basics are unchanged in the last 11 years. The evidence that Rose bet on baseball is strong, but it hasn't been tested and there is no official finding that he did. It's certainly damning to Rose that his legal advocates haven't campaigned hard against the evidence publicly, but that doesn't constitute a finding.
Oddly enough, it's intimated by insiders that Rose would considerably enhance his chance for reinstatement were he to "admit" betting on baseball, in which case he could be returned to the game at the moment all doubt he broke the cardinal rule has been erased.
Shortly after becoming baseball's permanent commissioner, Selig said, "Controversy is good," by way of setting the tone for his administration. But this isn't just controversy -- it's lunacy, and it needs to be resolved.
At this point, it isn't necessary, and probably isn't even possible, to retry the case. But both sides have been extremely stubborn, and they ought to negotiate for the good of everyone.
If Rose isn't going to actively refute the evidence against him, then he has no chance of changing the commissioner's mind and has to deal from the reality that his gambling has compromised his position. And Selig has to deal with the reality that the public perceives heavy-handedness in MLB's disposition toward Rose.
Precedent shouldn't be a concern here. This is a unique situation. Unlike the Black Sox scandal, it has nowhere been suggested that Rose ever threw a game, though there's no denying he compromised his position even if he went into huge debt with bookmakers just by betting on football.
With every passing ceremony from which Rose is excluded, the spectacle becomes more inevitable and tiresome, whether he's next door or 3,000 miles away. It's even questionable if the suspension is necessary to keep Rose from managing a Major League club. After all, who would put a fellow with his gambling history in a position to win or lose games?
Gambling undercuts baseball's credibility and should be dealt with seriously. It isn't in the game's interests to legitimize gambling. But we don't view gambling as entirely the same problem we saw 80 years ago. Gambling isn't simply a flaw of scurrilous character.
The notion that gambling, alcoholism and drug abuse are diseases is repulsive to stern advocates of personal responsibility. Cynics are right to question if treatment programs timed to last until the expiration of health insurance benefits really accomplish anything. But it's remarkable that Selig would trash baseball's traditional competitive order in the name of the times, then turn a blind eye to truly serious social change concerning attitudes about gambling.
MLB's handling of the Rose matter has been petty, mean-spirited and hardly just. But if Rose wants baseball to make concessions, he has to make concessions. He should be allowed into the Hall of the Fame even if he doesn't lift a finger -- but he wants more than that, so he'll have to do more.
Just the gambling to which Rose has admitted is sufficient to put MLB on very shaky ground with respect to bringing him back into the game. If he doesn't want to renounce his gambling and admit, at the very least, that he placed the game's credibility in severe danger, that's up to him. If he doesn't want to be treated for gambling and accept some kind of zero tolerance measures along the lines accepted by Bobby Knight, it's his life.
But, then, MLB can't be blamed for refusing to reinstate him. If Rose really and truly didn't bet on baseball, then his life has been savaged by false inferences and injustice of Olympian proportion. But, then, Rose needs to either attack the evidence or deal constructively with the fact that MLB rests on its conclusions. He can't do neither and expect reinstatement. And it's probably too late to attack the evidence.
Why Selig doesn't meet with Rose is incomprehensible. If Selig believes the commissioner's office is so exalted that he can stand in aloof judgement and diminish Rose's status by simply ignoring him, events have shown otherwise. It's time for both sides to wake up and work out a satisfying resolution to this mess.
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Even the worst enemies of interleague play have to admit that it has created a number of interesting rivalries. But that's only because MLB's retention of the same structure for interleague play over the last four years has made it not even seem like interleague play. It's more like a fourth division for each club.
In other words, the Reds play in a four-division league made up of the NL East, the NL West, the NL Central and the AL Central. Because interleague divisions aren't rotated, the arrangement has gone nowhere toward fulfilling the promise that all the markets will see all the players and clubs. But fans can live without such fulfillment, so long as MLB aligns its divisions sensibly.
It's a famously tricky problem. The commissioner's plan for a four-division National League without a wild card and a three-division American League with a wild card upsets small-market NL clubs who want the wild card as an avenue to the postseason.
Furthermore, either the Reds or the Houston Astros would come up a big loser. One of them would be in a Central division with St. Louis, Milwaukee and the Chicago Cubs, while the other would go into a Southeast division with Atlanta, Florida and Tampa Bay. It's geographically advantageous both for the Reds and Houston to be in the NL Central.
The players' association advocates a simple plan by which the Astros would move to the AL West, creating two 15-team leagues of three even divisions and a wild card in each league. But that would simply intensify a problem well-known to baseball fans in Texas, who would have to watch both their clubs play too many road games on West Coast time. It would also remove an NL presence from Texas.
Here's an idea: Simply move the Texas Rangers to the AL Central and the Arizona Diamondbacks to the AL West. The result would be three divisions and a wild card in each league. Each league would have a five-team East division, a six-team Central and a four-team West. Then, don't rotate the interleague divisions.
The scheduling details would be a little bit tricky, but the alignment maintains integrity of geography and time zone, along with existing rivalries. That built in, it's flexible enough to accommodate whatever other values are prioritized.
It could be worked out, for example, that each club plays 60 games against the other clubs in its division, 72 games against the remaining clubs in its league -- or vice versa -- and 30 games against the sister division in the other league. Or it can be worked out that the western clubs play one kind of schedule, the central clubs play another kind and the eastern clubs play still another.
The imbalance of the divisions is an obvious imperfection because each West division club has to beat fewer clubs to finish on top and each Central club has to beat more. But the wild card mitigates against this imbalance.
Under the constraints against which MLB works toward a new alignment, it's simply impossible to accommodate every value. Baseball has to decide on the most important characteristics for its alignment and live with the rest. Under this proposal, each club has the rivals, geography and time zones it wants. Each league has a wild card. And the schedule can be imbalanced in an attractive manner for each division while giving every club a fair shot at the postseason.
