Wednesday, December 11, 2002 :::
Pete Rose apparently has been in talks with the (acting?) commissioner of baseball to have his lifetime ban lifted. His crime was gambling on his own team (though it was betting to win, which seems much better to me than if he had been betting on them to lose); Shoeless Joe Jackson simply knew about gambling on his team, appears not to have acted on that information, and, if his ban was for life, his sentence was completed fifty years ago. There's something vaguely Soviet about excluding a great, famous player from your hall of fame because he took actions that reflect poorly on the sport; regardless of what else Shoeless Joe did, he played baseball, played it fabulously, and belongs in Cooperstown.
::: posted by dWj at 12:13 PM
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