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It's a bloody shame that it turned out to be Bug Selig who led the overthrow of Vincent, considering the unmitigated disaster Selig has been, but if it hadn't been him it would have been, likely enough, someone else.

You're probably right on both counts, but I think I'd take Vincent over Selig any day of the week. Selig and his policies (as well as the obduracy of the Players Union) will be the death of baseball, literally

I would ask how on earth merely betting on one team is more perfidious than accepting a payoff in a plan to fix and throw a World Series.

But as you mentioned, Shoeless Joe was a naif and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And practically a victim himself. Rose's antics over 20 years has been, in aggregate, shameful, IMO (and others). At least I , personally, don't miss him.

But as you mentioned, Shoeless Joe was a naif and not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He was a functional illiterate, strictly speaking. But he was not entirely unaware of game fixing (it had, in fact, run rampant in baseball and such other professional sports as existed in the 1910s and 1920s). And he was certainly aware enough of the motive which animated the fix in the first place, namely: the Risberg-Gandil faction of White Sox who'd felt (rightly enough) burned to a crisp by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey's perfidious ways with money. (As a matter of fact, it may have been so that the actual impetus for the fix was Comiskey's attempt to cheat pitcher Eddie Cicotte out of a bonus his contract called for paying him if he should win 30 games in 1929; Cicotte was benched with 29 wins and told by his manager he was being rested for the World Series; Cicotte was silently outraged. As it turned out, it was Cicotte's confession which broke the silence a year after the 1919 World Series and broke the scandal open at last.)

Jackson probably did have second thoughts about the fix in the end - his play in the World Series leaves it a very open question. But the fact that he did know of and participate in the fix's beginning (third baseman Buck Weaver, the eighth man out, never accepted a payoff but got banned because he knew of the fix and said nothing), and that he did accept at least the initial $5,000 envelope early in the Series, is what attached the black marks to him. It is a sad story; Jackson otherwise seems to have been a decent enough fellow. (He certainly doesn't come across to be even half the sleazebags Risberg and Gandil seem to have been.)

Now, I'm sure nobody is exactly prepared to call Pete Rose a saint. I'm certainly not calling him a saint. But however much one sympathises with Joe Jackson personally and might condemn Pete Rose as a person, it's not their persons which got them in trouble, it was their actions, to whatever level. And as distasteful a person as Pete Rose can be, it yet remains so that being accused of just betting on your own team (remember: it is proven that Rose was a chronic bookie gambler on sports; it is not proven conclusively that he bet on baseball in general, his team in particular, or both) is something very far short of being accused to trying to fix the outcome of a game which is designed to yield up a winner in fair and unvarnished competition of skill and intelligence.

I assure you that I spoke with regret when I spoke of Fay Vincent; it was only recently that I became aware of much of the detail involving both his mal-handling of the Steve Howe/Yankee situation and that it had been he who pressed Dowd on Ueberroth/Giamatti.

All things considered I would have to say I, too, given the absolute choice, would choose Vincent over Bat-head Bug Selig. But that does seem - sadly enough, given Vincent's intelligence and his genuine love for the game - a bit like having to choose absolutely between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.