With the baseball playoffs in full swing and the US presidential election looming, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the most polarizing figures in America: a serial liar, an unrepentant womanizer, a convicted criminal, and a charismatic hero to millions.
I don’t know who comes to mind for you, but I am thinking of Pete Rose.
For those unfamiliar with Rose, who died this week at age 83, he was one of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field. A hard-nosed, scrappy, winning-is-everything athlete nicknamed “Charlie Hustle,” Rose led his hometown Cincinnati Reds to two world titles in the 1970s and amassed more base hits than anyone else in history. Even today, decades later, he holds the hits record by such a large margin that it will probably never be broken.
But a Major League Baseball investigation in the late 1980s found that Rose had broken the rules by betting on baseball games that he played in and managed. He lied about it and, as a result, was banned from MLB for life. The Baseball Hall of Fame voted to exclude him permanently from candidacy.
Despite calls from many players, fans, and sportswriters to reinstate him – and a clumsy late-life atonement campaign by Rose himself – MLB and the Hall of Fame have never budged.
Which is to say that, unlike the other person my introduction might have brought to mind (and a great many other powerful people in America), Rose ran into something that's too rare in public life today: real consequences for doing really bad things.
It didn’t matter that Rose was one of the greats. Or that he was immensely popular, had a quick bat, a flinty charisma, or an inspiring life story. He still paid the price for his actions.
Imagine if our politics always worked like that. What if undermining the legitimacy of, say, an election – the World Series of any democracy, really – or endlessly telling obvious lies to huge numbers of people carried a real cost? In other words, imagine if messing with the integrity of the game got you thrown out of it.
Instead, we live in a world where we often excuse the offenses of players on our own political teams because the other side is so much worse. It’s always the bottom of the ninth with the future of civilization on the line.
The contrast between the world of Pete and the world of Politics couldn’t be clearer. As Sports Illustrated baseball editor Ted Keith, who supports the ban on Rose, puts it in a superb new documentary about the player, “integrity has to be the basis of professional sports, even if it’s not the basis of public life.”
And yet there is, as with so many things in modern baseball, an asterisk to this story.
*If we want a society where people respect rules and laws, then those laws have to be enforced in a fair and reasonably consistent way.
And that's where the Rose story is an example of what not to do if you want to bolster the credibility of rules and the systems that enforce them. Why, many ask, was Rose banned from baseball for gambling on games when a team that won the World Series after a season of cheating faced no serious sanctions?
Why did the Barry Bondses and the Mark McGwires, who broke all-time records while pumped to the eyeballs with illegal steroids in the 1990s, never get banned?
When baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani was implicated in a gambling scandal earlier this year, why did everyone simply accept the explanation that his Japanese interpreter was the one placing the bets? “Boy I wish I’d had an interpreter,” Rose said of the matter.
And all of this is Cracker Jack stuff compared to what goes on outside of baseball.
People see the way that some countries get support when they kill civilians while others get sanctioned. Or the way that some leaders get booked for sexual misconduct, while others get book deals, or how some rioters get sentenced while others get sympathy. They understand that this is a world where some people get bailouts while others go broke, and some countries kill journalists or dissidents with impunity while others get stern lectures from "the free world." They know that some speech is deemed “violent” while other similar speech is declared “free.” They see all of this and think: The fix is in.
In baseball, and even more importantly in the world outside baseball, either we have a reasonably consistent “rules-based order” or we don’t.
And if not, is it any wonder that our hustlers become heroes?