Rob Manfred is the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
As such, he can pretty much do whatever he wants as long as the baseball owners agree with it and the players union can’t fight it.
In recent years, he’s spearheaded rules changes including bigger bases, pitch clocks and limiting throws to first base to hold runners close. Those rules are be working. The length of games certainly has been greatly affected in a positive way.
But his most recent ruling is one he got wrong, and it will ultimately be his lasting legacy.
We have seen smoke coming from the commissioner’s office about Pete Rose’s permanent ban from baseball because of his betting on baseball in the 1980’s.
Much like the smoke coming from the Vatican, it has been nothing but black smoke until last week.
The smoke changed from black to white.
Manfred announced that he was changing the rules of baseball that govern when someone is in good standing with the sport and when they are not.
Specifically, he wanted to institute change for those who were banned from baseball for life.
The two most famous cases that fall into that category are those of Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.
Jackson was a member of the White Sox 1919 World Series team that lost the series despite being favored to beat Cincinnati.
Prior to the series, gamblers convinced several of the key Sox players to intentionally play poorly and were paid a financial kickback in reeturn. The gamblers were going to bet on the Reds, and they needed the Sox players to tank the series to assure their payoff, which they would share with the players.
The Sox lost the series 5 games to 3 in a best-of-nine game series.
Baseball is a funny game, and there is very little that you can count on in the sport. But there were several oddities that occurred during the series, and the rumors about a possible “fix” of the World Series started even before the first pitch of Game 1.
Add to that a strange influx of betters laying money on the Reds in the last few days before the series and the smoke of the rumors became too much to ignore.
Eight players and several others were indicted in the case, but no players were found guilty because state’s evidence was “lost” before the trial. That included grand jury testimony where some of the players admitted to being part of the scheme.
But the fallout from the scandal was that baseball owners appointed a commissioner to oversee baseball from that point on, and Kenesaw Landis banned those eight players from baseball forever.
That eternal penalty stayed in place until last week. Manfred says his perspective is that the ban is a lifetime ban and should end when the person’s life ends.
The punishment, essentially, is that the person who is suspended will never see the day they are cleared from wrong-doing.
Which would most definitely be true about Pete Rose.
Rose wanted to be in the spot light, and he ached for his day in Cooperstown more than life itself.
But when he died last fall, rumors that Manfred was taking a new look at his situation popped up quickly.
Now his death has brought his Hall of Fame hopes back to life.
Maybe waiting for Rose’s death to bring his HOF status was the plan all along.
Why am I so opposed to Manfred on this? Two reasons.
First, Pete Rose was never genuinely remorseful for betting on baseball.
He denied it over and over, decades after the decision came down from the commissioner’s office. He only admitted to it because he had a book coming out where he admitted all the stuff he’d been denying for decades and it would financially benefit him to fess up.
And the second reason is the reason why this is so offensive in the first place—gambling on baseball when you are a member of a major league baseball organization is the ultimate no-no.
And the Black Sox scandal is how we know this is true.
Now, baseball is snuggling up to sports betting, and that means the next big “game fixing” scandal has never been closer to happening. It’s just a matter of time.
The chance of it happening to a top player in baseball is not likely because those players don’t need the money. Joe Jackson admitted to taking $20,000 for not playing his best. Part of why that happened is because players back then made very little money compared to the average American’s salary.
That’s no longer the case in 2025.
Gambling on baseball leaves the integrity of the game in question. But with baseball now in a committed relationship with the gambling industry, Rob Manfred had to appease them and that crowd.
Despite Manfred’s moving of the line of demarcation, Pete Rose is not a stone-cold lock to get into Cooperstown. There are a lot of baseball veterans that will be voting on him some day—former players who never bet on anything, never bet on baseball games and never bet on their own team.
And Manfred can’t change that for Rose.