President Donald Trump announced late Friday that he will deliver a posthumous pardon to Pete Rose, nearly six months after MLB's all-time leader in hits died.
Despite being MLB's all-time leader in base hits, Rose has been excluded from the Baseball Hall of Fame and was banned from being directly involved with MLB after the league said it caught him betting on games in the 1980s. Rose was managing his hometown Cincinnati Reds at the time that MLB investigated him for gambling.
After being kicked out of MLB, Rose was convicted of falsifying his tax records, a federal crime. He spent five months in prison after being sentenced to seven months.
"A pardon is an expression of the President’s forgiveness and can be granted in recognition of the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction or completion of the sentence. It does not signify innocence," the Department of Justice said.
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For many years, Rose maintained that he did not gamble on baseball. It was not until 2003 that Rose said that he placed bets on baseball, including on the Reds while he managed the team.
In his post on Truth Social, President Trump said that Rose should also be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
"Major League Baseball didn’t have the courage or decency to put the late, great Pete Rose, also known as 'Charlie Hustle,' into the Baseball Hall of Fame," President Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Now he is dead, will never experience the thrill of being selected, even though he was a FAR BETTER PLAYER than most of those who made it, and can only be named posthumously. WHAT A SHAME! Anyway, over the next few weeks, I will be signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING."
Rose had applied for reinstatement, which could have opened the door for inclusion in the Hall of Fame, but those efforts were denied by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.
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Even if Manfred had reinstated Rose, his path into the Hall of Fame would have been challenging. Many players eligible for inclusion, with the bona fides to enter the Hall of Fame, have been excluded, including dozens of players tied to taking performance-enhancing drugs during the course of their careers.
