‘Plain-wrapper guy’ Gunner Stockton suddenly carrying Georgia’s CFP hopes
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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Writer
TIGER, Ga. — Georgia‘s former starting quarterback, Carson Beck, rolled through campus in a sleek Lamborghini, reportedly valued at more than $300,000. The head-turning sportscar was part of a name, image and likeness (NIL) deal with a high-end automotive group.
In stark contrast, the Bulldogs’ new starting quarterback, Gunner Stockton, cruises through town in a 1984 Ford F-150. With a four-speed transmission and odometer that clicked past 300,000 miles long ago, the two-tone truck lacks modern conveniences such as air conditioning, power locks and power windows.
For Stockton’s family and friends in the tiny mountain town of Tiger, Georgia (about 90 minutes north of Athens), the old pickup feels like an appropriate choice.
“I think that sums him up,” said Stockton’s uncle, Allyn Stockton. “He’s just kind of a plain-wrapper guy. He’s really a simple guy.”
On Dec. 7, college football fans were introduced to Stockton in the second half of Georgia’s 22-19 overtime victory against Texas in the SEC championship game. After Beck was injured on the final play of the first half, Stockton came off the bench to rally the Bulldogs from a 6-3 deficit.
With Beck undergoing season-ending surgery this week to repair the elbow on his throwing arm, the No. 2 Bulldogs’ hopes in the College Football Playoff now rest partly on Stockton’s right arm and legs.
The third-year sophomore is expected to make his first career start against No. 7 Notre Dame in a CFP quarterfinal at the Allstate Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on New Year’s Day (8:45 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN+).
Stockton’s family and friends say he has been preparing for this moment for much of his life.
“The people that watched him play in Rabun County aren’t surprised at all,” Allyn Stockton said. “They knew this was coming.”
IT WOULDN’T TAKE someone long to meet all of Tiger’s residents; its population was 422 in the most recent U.S. Census. The one-stoplight town has a still-operating drive-in theater. The roadside attraction Goats on the Roof on Highway 441 used to sell everything from Amish foods and furniture to homemade fudge and ice cream. And, yes, visitors could feed goats that maintain the lawn on the roof.
The Stockton family settled in Rabun County in 1956 and opened a car dealership; Stockton’s dad, Rob, still works there. Gunner was named after his paternal great-grandfather, V.D. Stockton, who was shot down twice while serving as an aerial gunner aboard B-17s during World War II and was known to his friends as “Gunner.”
Both of Rob’s parents attended Georgia and his late father, Lawrence, also graduated from the university’s pharmacy school. Lawrence was an avid Bulldogs football fan and took his sons to many home games and a few on the road over the years.
Rob and Allyn weren’t with their father when Georgia knocked off No. 8 Auburn 20-16 on the road on Nov. 16, 1985. The aftermath of that upset win became one of the most bizarre moments in the history of the “Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry” because Auburn police used water cannons on Georgia fans who had rushed the field. The police also eventually turned the hoses on Bulldogs fans in the stands.
Jack Walton, the Auburn University police chief at the time, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he didn’t second-guess what his officers did. “My only regret is that we didn’t get every one of them,” he said.
Lawrence Stockton was among 38 people who were arrested that night. He told the AJC that he never went onto the field. According to Lawrence, he was handcuffed and taken to a holding area for asking a police officer why they were spraying the stands. He spent four hours in jail until his wife bailed him out.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone down and asked why they were spraying in the stands,” Lawrence Stockton told the AJC. “But you can only watch and take so much before you become a concerned citizen.”
Three days later, Allyn Stockton was sitting in homeroom at Rabun County High when a friend showed him the newspaper article. He didn’t know his dad had been arrested.
“Dad’s rendition of it was probably different from reality,” said Allyn Stockton, an attorney in Rabun County. “His thing was, ‘Hey, it’s one thing to turn the hoses on the people on the field. They turned them up on the people in the stands. There were elderly people up there and they couldn’t get out of the way.'”
V.D. Stockton had been the area’s district attorney for more than a decade, and his son’s charge of disturbing the peace was soon dropped.
Many years later, a stepbrother sent Allyn Stockton another article that included a photo history of the 1986 Auburn-Georgia game, which is still remembered as the “Game Between the Hoses.” He spotted his dad on the field in one of the photos.
“I mean, he’s on the field,” Allyn Stockton said. “One guy’s got a billy stick and there’s about three or four [cops] on him. My understanding was Dad wasn’t on the field, but he’s clearly getting the hell beat out of him on the field.”
On Oct. 30, 2010, Lawrence Stockton died after watching Georgia lose to Florida 34-31 in overtime in Jacksonville, Florida. He walked back to a tailgating area outside the stadium with friends and collapsed from a heart attack. He was 63.
ALLYN AND ROB shared their father’s love of football. Rob was an All-American safety at Georgia Southern and is a member of the school’s athletics hall of fame. Gunner’s mother, Sherrie, a counselor at Rabun County High, was among the all-time scoring leaders in basketball at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. Gunner’s sister, Georgia, played basketball at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina.
But Gunner is the best athlete in the family. When Gunner was about 6 years old, Rob asked Rabun County High assistant coach George Bobo if he’d start working with his son. Bobo had been a longtime high school football coach in Thomasville, Georgia. His son, Mike, is currently Georgia’s offensive coordinator.
George Bobo moved to the north Georgia mountains at the urging of then-Rabun County High coach Sonny Smart, who is Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart’s father.
When George Bobo saw Gunner throw a football the first time, he said, “Holy crap, you need to make him a quarterback.”
Stockton was the quarterback on teams that went 65-0 in the North Georgia Youth Football League. He didn’t lose a game until the seventh grade at Rabun County Middle School. The next season, he played quarterback for the high school JV team as an eighth grader.
Stockton was a four-year starter at Rabun County High. As a senior in 2021, he completed 71.3% of his pass attempts for 4,134 yards with 55 touchdowns and one interception. He also ran for 956 yards with 15 scores. In four seasons, Stockton accumulated 13,652 passing yards with 177 touchdowns and 4,372 rushing yards with 77 scores.
Stockton broke Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence‘s state record for career touchdown passes and Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson‘s state mark for career total yardage.
Stockton ran for seven more touchdowns than current Detroit Lions tailback Jahmyr Gibbs, who had 70 at Dalton High School from 2017 to 2019.
When Stockton wasn’t playing sports, he tended to cattle, hunted deer and bears, and fished for trout in mountain streams. He fished and water skied at nearby Lake Rabun, where former Alabama coach Nick Saban and other coaches had vacation homes. Just before Stockton turned 16, he asked his parents for cows to put on his grandmother’s farm. They gave him four cows and a bull for Christmas.
“The old farm had terrible fencing,” Rob Stockton said. “Everybody in the county helped him and knew that they were his when they got out of the fence. We would get 911 calls and they’d say, ‘Your cows are out, put them up.’ Or people would stop and just put them up.”
Stockton once went gator hunting with a nuisance trapper in Florida, along with his uncle Allyn, Bulldogs safety Dan Jackson and former tight end Cade Brock. He told his family he wanted to beat the Gators in Jacksonville because that’s where his grandfather died.
BEFORE HIS JUNIOR season of high school, Stockton committed to play at South Carolina, where Mike Bobo was working as offensive coordinator. After Bobo left for Auburn, Stockton flipped to Georgia. By the time he enrolled, Bobo was working as an analyst for the Bulldogs.
Stockton redshirted at Georgia in 2022, then attempted 19 passes in four games last season. He had taken the field in only three games before he was thrust into action against the Longhorns.
“He has never stood on the sidelines in his entire life,” Rob Stockton said. “His goal this year was to be the greatest backup and greatest supporter of Carson Beck that he could possibly be.”
Stockton’s time finally came against Texas in the second half of the SEC championship. He led the Bulldogs on a 75-yard touchdown drive on his first possession, then threw a bad interception that helped the Longhorns tie the score at 16 on Bert Auburn‘s 37-yard field goal with 18 seconds left in regulation.
With the Bulldogs trailing 19-16 in overtime, Stockton lowered his shoulder pads at the end of a run at the Texas 4. He was met by Longhorns safety Andrew Mukuba, whose jarring tackle sent Stockton’s helmet flying.
Stockton held on to the ball for a first down, and Trevor Etienne ran into the end zone on the next play to give the Bulldogs a victory.
“It was brutal to watch,” Rob Stockton said. “Watching the replay of it on the scoreboard was worse than watching it live. But seeing him pop back up, it didn’t bother me much.”
Sherrie Stockton hasn’t watched a replay of the hit and “doesn’t intend to.”
The Bulldogs will have had more than three weeks to get Stockton ready to play the Fighting Irish. Regardless of what happens at the Sugar Bowl, his parents don’t expect him to stray far from his roots.
Stockton will still make the 74-mile drive from Athens back to Tiger in the same 40-year-old truck his grandfather once owned. He might even need a few neighbors to push it off when it doesn’t crank.
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David Schoenfield
Pete Rose, Joe Jackson, seven other members of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox”, six other former players, one coach and one former owner are now eligible to be voted on for the Hall of Fame after commissioner Rob Manfred removed them from Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list.
Hall of Fame chairwoman Jane Forbes Clark said in a statement: “The National Baseball Hall of Fame has always maintained that anyone removed from Baseball’s permanently ineligible list will become eligible for Hall of Fame consideration. Major League Baseball’s decision to remove deceased individuals from the permanently ineligible list will allow for the Hall of Fame candidacy of such individuals to now be considered.”
Due to Hall of Fame voting procedures, Rose and Jackson won’t be eligible to be voted on until the Classic Era Baseball committee, which votes on individuals who made their biggest impact prior to 1980, meets in December of 2027.
Let’s dig into what all this means.
Why were these players banned?
All individuals on the banned list who were reinstated had been permanently ineligible due to accusations related to gambling related to baseball — either throwing games, accepting bribes, or like Rose, betting on baseball games.
Most of the banned players, including Jackson and his seven Chicago White Sox teammates who threw the 1919 World Series, played in the 1910s, when gambling in baseball was widespread. As historian Bill James once wrote, “Few simplifications of memory are as bizarre as the notion that the Black Sox scandal hit baseball out of the blue. … In fact, of course, the Black Sox scandal was merely the largest wart of a disease that had infested baseball at least a dozen years earlier and had grown, unchecked, to ravage the features of a generation.”
The most famous player, of course, was Jackson, one of baseball’s biggest stars alongside Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker in the 1910s. While many have tried to exonerate Jackson through the years, pointing out that he hit .375 in the 1919 World Series, baseball historians agree that Jackson was a willing participant in throwing the World Series and accepted money from the gambling ring that paid off the White Sox players.
While the White Sox players were acquitted in a criminal trial in 1921, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned the eight players in a statement that began with the words “Regardless of the verdict of juries …”
If there was an innocent member in the group, it was third baseman Buck Weaver, not Jackson. Weaver had participated in meetings where the fixing of the World Series was discussed, and Landis banned him for life for guilty knowledge.
As for Rose, he was banned in 1989 by commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti for betting on games while he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds, including those involving his own team. While Rose denied the accusations for years, he eventually confessed. He died last September at age 83.
Who else is impacted?
Phillies owner William Cox was banned in 1943 and forced to sell the team for betting on games. Cox had just purchased the team earlier that season. None of the other non-White Sox players are of major significance, although Benny Kauff was the big star of the Federal League in 1914-15, winning the batting title both seasons. The Federal League was a breakoff league that attempted to challenge the National and American leagues.
When is the soonest Rose and Jackson could go into the Hall of Fame?
The Hall of Fame voting process for players not considered by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America — such as Rose and Jackson, who never appeared on the ballot due to their banned status — includes two eras: the Contemporary Baseball Era (1980 to present) and the Classic Baseball Era (pre-1980). The voting periods are already set:
December 2025: Player ballot for the Contemporary Era.
December 2026: Contemporary Era ballot for managers, executives and umpires.
December 2027: Classic Era ballot for players, managers, executives and umpires.
Each committee has an initial screening to place eight candidates on the ballot, so Rose and Jackson will first have to make the ballot. While it’s unclear how a future screening committee will proceed, it’s possible that both will make the ballot. While comparisons to players with PED allegations aren’t exactly apples to apples — since they were never placed on the ineligible list — it’s worth noting that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro were included on the eight-player Contemporary Era ballot in 2023.
Once the ballot is determined — a 16-person committee consisting of Hall of Fame players, longtime executives and media members or historians — convenes and votes. A candidate must receive 12 votes to get selected. In the most recent election in December, Dave Parker and Dick Allen were on the Classic Era ballot.
Which players have the best HOF cases?
Obviously, Rose would have been a slam-dunk Hall of Famer had he never bet on baseball and had he appeared on the BBWAA ballot after his career ended. The all-time MLB leader with 4,256 hits, Rose won three batting titles and was the 1973 NL MVP. And while he’s overrated in a sense — his 79.6 career WAR is more in line with the likes of Jeff Bagwell, Brooks Robinson and Robin Yount than all-time elite superstars — and hung on well past his prime to break Ty Cobb’s hits record, his popularity and fame would have made him an inner-circle Hall of Famer.
Whether he’ll get support now is complicated. Bonds and Clemens both received fewer than four votes in 2023. The committee usually consists of eight former players, and they may not support Rose given the one hard and fast rule that every player knows: You can’t bet on the game.
Jackson, meanwhile, was a star of the deadball era, hitting .408 in 1911 and .356 in his career, an average that ranks fourth all time behind only Cobb, Negro Leagues star Oscar Charleston and Rogers Hornsby. He finished with 62.2 WAR and 1,772 hits in a career that ended at age 32 due to the ban. Those figures would be low for a Hall of Fame selection, although the era committees did recently elect Allen and Tony Oliva, both of whom finished with fewer than 2,000 hits. And again, it is hard to say how the committee will view Jackson’s connection to gambling on the sport.
The only other reinstated player with a semblance of a chance to get on a ballot is pitcher Eddie Cicotte, who won 209 games and finished with 59.7 WAR. While his final season came at 36, the knuckleballer was still going strong, having won 29 games for the White Sox in 1919 and 21 in 1920 before Landis banned him.
For what it’s worth, the top position players in career WAR who made their mark prior to 1980 and aren’t in the Hall of Fame are Rose, Bill Dahlen (75.3), Bobby Grich (71.0), Graig Nettles (67.6), Reggie Smith (64.6), Ken Boyer (62.8), Jackson and Sal Bando (61.5).
Pitching candidates would include Luis Tiant (65.7), Tommy John (61.6) and Wes Ferrell (60.1). John was on the recent ballot and received seven votes. Others on that ballot included Steve Garvey, Boyer, Negro Leagues pitcher John Donaldson, Negro Leagues manager Vic Harris and Tiant.
Other potential pre-1980 candidates could include Thurman Munson, Bert Campaneris, Dave Concepcion and Stan Hack.
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Don Van Natta Jr.
In a historic, sweeping decision, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday removed Pete Rose, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and other deceased players from Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list.
The all-time hit king and Jackson — both longtime baseball pariahs stained by gambling, seen by MLB as the game’s mortal sin — are now eligible for election into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Manfred ruled that MLB’s punishment of banned individuals ends upon their deaths.
“Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game,” Manfred wrote in a letter to attorney Jeffrey M. Lenkov, who petitioned for Rose’s removal from the list Jan. 8. “Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.
“Therefore, I have concluded that permanent ineligibility ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual, and Mr. Rose will be removed from the permanently ineligible list.”
Manfred’s decision ends the ban that Rose accepted from then-Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in August 1989, following an MLB investigation that determined the 17-time All-Star had bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds.
Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox were banned from playing professional baseball in 1921 by MLB’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for fixing the 1919 World Series.
Based on current rules for players who last played more than 15 years ago, it appears the earliest Rose and Jackson could be enshrined is summer 2028 if they are elected.
Manfred’s ruling removes a total of 16 deceased players and one deceased owner from MLB’s banned list, a group that includes Jackson’s teammates, ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte and third baseman George “Buck” Weaver. The so-called “Black Sox Scandal” is one of the darkest chapters in baseball history, the subject of books and the 1988 film, “Eight Men Out.”
In 1991, shortly before Rose’s first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, the Hall’s board decided any player on MLB’s permanently ineligible list would also be ineligible for election. It became known as “the Pete Rose rule.”
Rose believed his banishment would be lifted after a year or two, but it became a lifetime sentence. For “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who died in 1951, the ban became an eternal sentence, until Tuesday.
Jackson was considered for decades by voters, but Pete Rose’s name has never appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot. He died in September at age 83.
Nearly a decade ago, Lenkov began a campaign to get Rose reinstated. On Dec. 17, Pete Rose’s eldest daughter, Fawn, and Lenkov appealed to Manfred and MLB chief communications officer Pat Courtney during an hourlong meeting at MLB’s midtown Manhattan headquarters.
“This has been a long journey,” Lenkov said. “On behalf of the family, they are very proud and pleased and know that their father would have been overjoyed at this decision today.”
Jane Forbes Clark, chairman of the board of the Hall of Fame, said Manfred’s decision will allow Rose, Jackson and others to be considered by the Historical Overview Committee, which will “develop the ballot of eight names for the Classic Baseball Era Committee … to vote on when it meets next in December 2027.”
Lenkov said he and Rose’s family intend to petition the Hall of Fame for induction as soon as possible.
“My next step is to respectfully confer with the Hall and discuss … Pete’s induction into the Hall of Fame,” Lenkov said. The attorney said he and Rose’s family will attend Pete Rose Night on Wednesday at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park.
“Reds Nation will not only be able to celebrate Pete’s legacy, but now optimistically be able to look forward to the possibility that Pete will join other baseball immortals,” Lenkov said. “Pete Rose would have for sure been overjoyed at the outpouring of support from all.”
Rose and Jackson’s candidacies presumably will be decided by the Hall’s 16-member Classic Baseball Era Committee, which considers players whose careers ended more than 15 years ago. The committee isn’t scheduled to meet again until December 2027. Rose and Jackson would need 12 of 16 votes to win induction.
Jackson had a career batting average of .356, the fourth highest in MLB history. After his death, Jackson’s fans, including state legislators in South Carolina, launched numerous public and petition-writing campaigns arguing that Jackson deserved a plaque in the Hall of Fame. Despite accepting $5,000 in gamblers’ cash to throw the 1919 World Series, Jackson batted .375, didn’t make an error and hit the series’ only home run.
Across the decades and among millions of baseball fans, especially in Cincinnati where Rose was born and played most of his career, the clamor over the pugnacious, stubborn legend’s banishment from baseball and the Hall became louder, angrier and increasingly impatient.
Few players in baseball history had more remarkable careers than Pete Rose. He was an exuberant competitor who played the game with sharp-elbowed abandon and relentless hustle. Rose, whose lifetime batting average was .303, is Major League Baseball’s career leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215) and outs (10,328). He won the World Series three times — twice with the Reds and once with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Rose often said — and stat experts agree — that he won more regular-season games (1,972) than any major league baseball player or professional athlete in history. He also won three batting titles, two Gold Glove Awards, the Most Valuable Player Award and the Rookie of the Year Award.
In 2015, shortly after Manfred succeeded Bud Selig as commissioner, Rose applied for reinstatement with MLB. Manfred met with Rose, who first told the commissioner he had stopped gambling but then admitted he still wagered legally on sports, including baseball, in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas.
Manfred rejected Rose’s bid for reinstatement after concluding he had failed to “reconfigure his life,” a requirement for reinstatement set by Giamatti. Allowing Rose back into baseball was an “unacceptable risk of a future violation … and thus to the integrity of our sport,” Manfred declared on Dec. 14, 2015.
Rose often complained that the ban prevented him from working with young hitters in minor league ballparks. On Feb. 5, 2020, Rose’s representatives filed another reinstatement petition, arguing that the commissioner’s decision to level no punishment against the World Series champion Houston Astros players for electronic sign stealing was unfair to Rose. “There cannot be one set of rules for Mr. Rose,” the 20-page petition argued, “and another for everyone else.”
But Manfred, who did not meet again with Rose, chose not to rule on that second appeal prior to Rose’s death on Sept. 30, 2024.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced he planned to posthumously pardon Rose. “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,” Trump wrote on social media Feb. 28.
Trump didn’t say what the pardon would cover. Rose served five months in federal prison for submitting falsified tax returns in 1990.
During an Oval Office meeting on April 16, Trump and Manfred discussed Rose’s posthumous petition for reinstatement, among other topics. Manfred later declined to discuss details of their conversation.
On Tuesday, Manfred called Trump, who was on a state trip in Saudi Arabia, and Forbes Clark about his ruling, multiple sources told ESPN.
John Dowd, the former Justice Department attorney who conducted MLB’s Rose investigation, told ESPN in 2020 that he believes Jackson belongs in the Hall but said he would disagree with Manfred on Rose. “There’s no difference with him being dead — it’s about behavior, conduct and reputation,” Dowd said.
Dowd’s inquiry found Rose had wagered on 52 Reds games and hundreds of other baseball games in 1987 while serving as Cincinnati’s manager. Giamatti then banned Rose from baseball permanently on Aug. 23, 1989.
When asked at a news conference whether Rose’s punishment should keep him out of the Hall of Fame, Giamatti said he’d leave that decision to the baseball writers who vote every year on players eligible for induction.
“This episode has been about, in many ways … taking responsibility and taking responsibility for one’s acts,” said Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar and former Yale president. “I know I need not point out to the baseball writers of America that it is their responsibility to decide who goes into the Hall of Fame. It is not mine.”
In his letter Tuesday, Manfred referred to the Giamatti quote and said he agrees “it is not part of my authority or responsibility to express any view concerning Mr. Rose’s … possible election to the Hall of Fame. I agree with Commissioner Giamatti that responsibility for that decision lies with the Hall of Fame.”
Giamatti had said Rose’s only path back into the game was to “reconfigure his life,” a not-so-subtle hint that if Rose continued to bet on baseball, he had no shot to return.
Only eight days after announcing the ban, Giamatti died of a heart attack at 51. His deputy and successor, Fay Vincent, adamantly opposed Rose’s reinstatement — both during his tenure as commissioner (until 1992) and until his death three months ago at age 86.
Rose was his own worst enemy. For nearly 15 years, he denied having placed a single bet on baseball. In the early 2000s, then-commissioner Bud Selig offered Rose a chance, but with conditions, including an admission that he bet on baseball and a requirement that he stop gambling and making casino appearances.
Rose declined.
In January 2004, he admitted in his book, “My Prison Without Bars,” that he had gambled on baseball as the Reds manager. But he insisted he only bet on his team to win. In 2015, ESPN reported that a notebook seized from a Rose associate showed Rose had also wagered on baseball while still a player, something he would not acknowledge.
Rose’s illegal gambling and prison time aren’t the only stains on a legacy that might be weighed by Hall of Fame voters, a group instructed to consider integrity, sportsmanship and character.
In 2017, a woman’s sworn statement accused Rose of statutory rape; she said they began having sex when she was 14 or 15 and Rose was in his 30s. Rose said he thought she was 16 — the age of consent in Ohio at the time. Two days later, the Philadelphia Phillies announced the cancellation of Rose’s Wall of Fame induction.
In January 2020, ESPN reported that for all practical purposes, Manfred viewed baseball’s banned list as punishing players during their lifetime but ending upon their death. However, Hall of Fame representatives have said that a player who dies while still on the banned list remains ineligible for consideration. With his 2020 reinstatement application sitting on Manfred’s desk, Rose was granted permission by MLB to be honored at a celebration of the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies World Series championship on Aug. 7, 2022.
In the dugout before fans gave Rose a lengthy standing ovation, a newspaper reporter asked him about the 2017 allegation and whether his involvement in that day’s celebration sent a negative message to women.
“No, I’m not here to talk about that,” Rose replied to her. “Sorry about that. It was 55 years ago, babe.”
The public backlash to Rose’s remarks was swift and severe. MLB sources said his comments derailed his campaign to get off the ineligible list.
In the past several years, some fans have become more insistent that Rose should be forgiven by MLB and inducted into the Hall of Fame. One reason is America’s love affair with sports betting. As MLB has embraced legalized gambling through sponsorships and partnerships — like all U.S. professional sports — some fans and commentators complained that Rose deserves a second chance, echoing an argument Rose often made.
“I thought we lived in a country where you’re given a second chance, but not as far as gambling’s concerned,” Rose said in a 2020 interview with ESPN. He estimated the ban cost him at least $80 million in earnings as an MLB manager.
Rose, who signed baseballs and jerseys for years in memorabilia stores inside Las Vegas casinos and in Cooperstown on Hall of Fame induction weekends, gambled legally on sports nearly every day for the rest of his life.
Asked how much money his gambling had cost him, Rose said he didn’t know, though he acknowledged he lost far more than he won. “No one wins at gambling,” said Rose.
“I’m the one that’s lost 30 years,” he told ESPN in the 2020 documentary “Backstory: Banned for Life*.” “Just to take baseball out of my heart penalized me more than you could imagine. You understand what I’m saying? … I don’t think there’s ever been a player, I could be wrong, I don’t think there’s ever been a player that loved the game like I did. You could tell I loved the game, the way I played the game.
“So then you take that away from somebody. I’m able to hide it on the outside, but it’s ate me up inside, for all those years. Hell, you’d think I was Al Capone. I’m Pete Rose — played more games than anybody, batted more than anybody … OK? Got more hits than anybody. I am the biggest winner in the history of sports.”
Last September, in his last interview 10 days before his death, Rose told sportscaster John Condit: “I’ve come to the conclusion — I hope I’m wrong — that I’ll make the Hall of Fame after I die. Which I totally disagree with, because the Hall of Fame is for two reasons: your fans and your family. … And it’s for your family if you’re here. It’s for your fans if you’re here. Not if you’re 10 feet under. You understand what I’m saying?”
“What good is it going to do me or my fans if they put me in the Hall of Fame a couple years after I pass away?” Rose told Condit. “What’s the point? What’s the point? Because they’ll make money over it?”
ESPN’s William Weinbaum and John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
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