Manfred rejects Rose plea to lift lifetime ban

Rose was known to use Staten Island bookmakers in his gambling activities, and the S.I. District Attorney’s Office supplied Major League Baseball investigator John Dowd with evidence of Rose’s gambling during the game’s investigation of its wayward superstar.

Rose, whose previous efforts to gain leniency from MLB commissioners were never considered, had earlier this year sent a formal request to have the ban lifted by Manfred, who took over as MLB Commissioner in January. Twenty-six years later, current commissioner Rob Manfred says Rose has not presented credible evidence of a reconfigured life. Manfred released a letter to Rose that was then made public that kept Rose’s lifetime ban intact.

[Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images]Pete Rose certainly has Hall of Fame credentials, yet remains on the outside looking in. The question of how they’d vote for Rose, a great player on the field and an admitted breaker of baseball’s No. 1 rule, is anything but a given. “Those bets may have been permitted by law in the jurisdictions in which they were placed, but this fact does not mean that the bets would be permissible if made by a player or manager subject to Rule 21”. We respect his decision on the matter of Pete Rose and are grateful for his diligence and the amount of time he spent on the matter. Here is a timeline of the events that went down in the Pete Rose gambling scandal which started on February 20, 1989 when the official word got out confirming his gambling on baseball games.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has turned plenty of heads during the election season with controversial comments and stances, and his opinions reached the world of sports Monday. “I was hoping against hope that Manfred would realize Pete did everything he needed to do since he was banished from the game in 1989 and allow him back”.

“It is not at all clear to me that Mr. Rose has a grasp of the scope of his violations”, Manfred wrote in a three-page decision.

While bringing Rose back into good graces would make him eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, it also would allow him to be employed by a team again. A three-time NL batting champion, he had 4,256 hits from 1963-86, topping the mark of 4,191 set by Ty Cobb from 1905-28.

The commissioner noted that he believes Rose has not been completely honest about his gambling, and that, by Rose’s own admission, he continues to legally bet on baseball today, making him an “unacceptable risk” to allow his return.