Ban on Pete Rose shouldn't be for life ...

I’m on a listserve with sports journalists who enjoy the give and take of talking sports. Maybe that’s putting what we do too politely, because our discussions can be lively as an Ohio State-Michigan football game. We often wage war over differing points of view.

We aren’t above being irreverent, politically incorrect or downright silly, such has the two or three-day discussions of fried chicken. Popeye’s and KFC didn’t get a mention in this freewheeling chitchat.

One of the listserve’s recent topics was Pete Rose. We kicked around whether Rose was a better leadoff hitter than Rickey Henderson. We never did reach a consensus, though I reminded my comrades that Henderson’s speed made him far more dangerous than Rose. I got nowhere with that reasoning.

Yet what livened the discussion most was the position some people about Rose’s not being in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. One person argued that how can a Hall of Fame hold any credibility if the man with the most hits in the sport’s history isn’t worthy of enshrinement.

Actually, worthiness has nothing to do with the doors to Cooperstown be closed to Rose. He’s absent from baseball’s holiest temple because he flouted its most sacred rule: no betting on the sport.

Evidence that he did brought Rose a lifetime ban, and it looks as if the ban will last his lifetime, which is the pity. Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

There, I’ve said it.

For me, the position is a 180-degree turn. I thought Commissioner Bud Selig, or whoever has kept Rose on the banned list, might rightfully be waiting for Rose to die before lifting the ban. At one point, I agreed with Selig; it made sense.

Now, I believe Selig does baseball and its faithful a disservice by keeping the greatest goodwill ambassador the sport has ever seen ineligible for election to the Hall of Fame. For no player, banned or not, has traveled to more baseball venues, signed more people’s autograph books, shaken more hands and taken more photographs than Pete Rose, yet he remains in baseball’s purgatory.

Selig should commute Rose’s sentence, as Hank Aaron has asked, to the 20 years served. He should do so for the men and women, boys and girls who think keeping Charlie Hustle outside the family of baseball hurts the game more than anything he did when he bet on it.

The commissioner should look at the Rose situation this way: Twenty years is a long time to keep a man in his personal hell.