The bloom is off Rose

Danny Peary, author or coauthor of numerous baseball titles including Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero and Cult Baseball Players: The Greats, the Flakes, the Weird and the Wonderful among many others, was unable to add this comment in response to yesterday’s post, “All he is saying, is give Rose a chance,” about Kostya Kennedy’s commentary piece in The New York Times, so I’m posting it here on his behalf.

Of course it’s self-serving but in Kennedy’s defense, every author tries to get an op-ed in the Times that will help promote a new book.  The indefensible part, however, is his pretense of being objective, saying Rose deserves his day in court.  Who can argue with that except that the reality is that Rose in his own book and whenever he speaks of his ban as if he can’t understand it will never come clean and speak the truth.  The truth would be why Rose agreed to a lifetime ban, admitting to a transgression so horrible that he, who loves baseball more than anyone, would say I’ll go into baseball exile if you, Bart, and MLB won’t ever tell the world what I did.

It drives me crazy that fans equate Rose’s ban with what’s wrong with baseball instead of acknowledging it might be one of the few times MLB got it right and displayed integrity. And I just don’t get why no one thinks Rose must have done something despicable for him to agree to be in the position that he is in.  He won’t share that with us,he wouldn’t really want to go to court and reveal the truth.  So, great player and teammate that he was, we should assume Pete got what he deserved, and his pretending to be an innocent fall guy is one of those “shame on us” things if we don’t remember that he agreed to the lifetime ban in the first place because he didn’t want us to know the truth and have his image ruined.

Tagged as: Baseball Hall of Fame, Danny Peary, Fay Vincent, Kostya Kennedy, Pete Rose