January 07, 2004

As a life-long Dodger fan, I don't really have a dog in the fight over whether Pete Rose should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame; now that he's admitted to having bet on his own team, the entire issue of whether the Dowd Report was fair to him is moot. It is interesting that the nation's sportswriters, so many of whom were insisting that all Charlie Hustle needed to do was admit he gambled on the sport, have now turned against him after he did precisely that. In any event, Eric Alterman has the best take: "If only Pete Rose had claimed he bet on baseball games and then lied about it because he suspected other teams of harboring ties to Al Qaida and building weapons of mass destruction, then the Washington Post editors would have called him a patriot and supported him down the line, even without that lame apology."

No comments: