Perhaps having decided that his strategic upgrade from an
"I never bet on baseball" stance to one of
"Okay, maybe I bet on it a few times a week" did not appear to bring him any closer to the Hall of Fame over the last two years, Pete Rose has now taken a position of quite another name, telling ESPN Radio that
he bet on the Cincinnati Reds "every [freaking] night" while he was managing the team.
Bold move, Charlie Hustle. Not only are you admitting to Bud Selig and Major League Baseball that you were more guilty than perhaps they had even imagined of doing the thing you were banned from the game for doing, you're trying to convince them that the very fact that you did so proves your dedication as a manager and therefore is even
more of a reason that you
should be reinstated.
If that rock-solid rationale should for some reason still not grant you that elusive enshrinement in Cooperstown, may I suggest a fourth, equally reasonable strategy:
Tom Sizemore, who portrayed you in the 2004 ESPN television movie
"Hustle"--which tells the story of how, as a manger, you were always betting on the Reds--
also appeared in the 1993 Wesley Snipes vehicle
Passenger 57, a film most famous for teaching us all the important lesson to "always bet on
black". This constitutes a complete conflict of interest on Sizemore's part, so it's therefore totally his fault that you're not in the Hall of Fame and you should be let in immediately.
(You can just pay me with a World Series ring or something...whatever you used to give to your bookies.)
Just because he didn't ban Pete Rose (or sire Oscar-nominee Paul Giamatti, for that matter) or totally ignore the steroid problem until it was too late, that's still no excuse for me to be able to scoop snarky websites that are supposed to keep track of these kinds of things regarding the news that former Major League Baseball Commissioner (he held the post from 1969-1984) Bowie Kuhn has died at the age of 80.
UPDATE: Dead or Alive? has brought their Kuhn entry up-to-date, but they know as well as I do that it's too late to undo their initial non-killing of the man.
