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And as distasteful a person as Pete Rose can be, it yet remains so that being accused of just betting on your own team .. 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.

You write very well and I respect your opinion. And I guess you could argue that there are many characters in the Hall with similiar qualities of character. Yet , in some ways I'm nostalgaic; nostalgiac for the days when a rule was a rule and standards of behavior were enforced mercilously. But maybe there never really was such a day, was there (particularly in Baseball )?

Yet , in some ways I'm nostalgaic; nostalgiac for the days when a rule was a rule and standards of behavior were enforced mercilously. But maybe there never really was such a day, was there (particularly in Baseball )?

There may never have been, really, such a day in any organised team sport, never mind baseball. And, for that matter - and this is something too many of today's fans either forget or never really knew - the so-called "good old days" weren't exactly such good old days, in too many ways. Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth may be only the very best known of the old-time baseball stars whose play was as exemplary as their characters were not.

This is perhaps the most compelling reason why we tend, on the rare enough occasions when we find such people, to make such amplified fuss over that creature who is at once a magnificent athlete and an exemplary person; why, for example, Sandy Koufax - who was so much a gentleman that even when he pitched he resorted to a knockdown pitch only when it was imperatively necessary ("Sandy," Allen Barra has written, "preferred to intimidate by domination") - to this day is considered on his own plateau. In case you were curious, Koufax these days works as a free-lance pitching coach - he did work in that capacity for the Dodgers from about 1978-1990 or thereabouts, then became a freelance, though he does work with the Dodgers each spring training. And my understanding is that, though he could command a phenomenal fee for his teaching, he accepts only his basic expenses being paid for each such gig. "I just like to teach," he is quoted as saying.

Koufax apparently was the same way when he did pitch. Don Sutton has been quoted as saying, "A lot of people like to keep everyone else down when they get to the top; Sandy wanted to bring everybody else up there with him." There's another story about Koufax which I found even more telling about the man: in these pre-free agency days, when the minimum rookie salary was $8,000 a year, Koufax was chatting in the Dodger clubhouse with a couple of teammates when he noticed a rookie outfielder named Jim Barbieri in a corner of the clubhouse. This was in 1965, as the pennant race began heating up in earnest. Thinking ahead to the World Series, Koufax, reportedly, said without provocation, and indicating Barbieri, "You know, if I can just keep pitching the way I'm supposed to pitch, I can double that man's income."

I suppose a lot of it is a human level version of the old saw that a plane crash is news but the millions of safe flights from takeoff to landing are routine. We're so accustomed now to learning the most scandalous among professioal athletes that we could follow a particular player his entire career and not know how basically decent he was as a person even as he was good or great as a player, unless he's playing in a high-media region. We know, for example, that Derek Jeter of the Yankees and Al Leiter of the Mets are as decent as people as they are as baseball players. But now think of someone like Curt Schilling, the Arizona pitcher - it's only in the last couple of seasons, even though he has been a front-line pitcher for over a decade, that we've begun to learn that Schilling the man is at least as good and probably better than Schilling the prospective Hall of Fame pitcher.

P.S...And I guess you could argue that there are many characters in the Hall with similiar qualities of character.

We could argue that there are many enough characters in the Hall of Fame with lesser character than Pete Rose. (His idol Ty Cobb comes immediately to mind, though I have elsewhere read that so long as Ty Cobb didn't feel threatened, in any situation, he could actually be and often was a very nice fellow.) But it is as Bill James enunciated: Rose isn't banned from baseball because he was a bad person, he's banned because he broke the rules. For better or worse, many enough behaviours we would deem suspect if not immoral are not against the rules of professional sports but gambling is, and not just in baseball. (Think, for example, of all those periodic point-shaving scandals that hit basketball every few years.)

On the other hand, Pete Rose was never accused of hanging his manager by his legs out the window of a speeding train - as Babe Ruth actually did once do...