NEVER make a joke about sex and sports. Men are mad at me for assuming all men like baseball. Women are mad at me for assuming women don’t. What was I thinking? Safer to have fun with Macs and PCs.
One reader who got beyond complaining about my witchiness writes:
The issue is not whether or not Pete Rose gambled on baseball. The issue is that with him now finally admitting it after 14 years of vehemently denying it the door is now wide open for his reinstatement into baseball. Rose has been the main concern for Bud Selig during his tenure as Baseball Commissioner and the belief has long been that Rose was an admission (and perhaps an apology) away from a return to baseball. The most constant and complicated of debates in sports about athletic accomplishments versus ethics and class is seemingly a step away from being decided. Rose’s admission is almost guaranteed to get him back into baseball, into a managerial role and into the Hall of Fame… and it is sure to crush the idea of athletes maintaining an air of respectability and rules… even the ones that they draw up for themselves.
[And there’s much more…] the more than a dozen players who are on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who were the top stars of the ’80s and the epitome of class in sports but who will not get into the Hall of Fame because the sports writers who vote for the Hall have a basic hypocrisy where they like to write and complain about how athletes stand for nothing and are greedy selfish bastards and yet they are entirely unwilling to reward the best athletes – both in statistics and behavior – of an era for doing that which they plead athletes to now do. Pete Rose can commit one of the worst “crimes” of the sport, lie vehemently about it for 15 years and then be handed the keys to the Hall but players such as Ryan Sandberg, Jim Rice and Don Mattingly – men who were the top of baseball in the ’80s and always professionals when doing it – are refused from admission.
And with that, I retire from baseball posts, by the way.