Rose in the News Again

LAS VEGAS, NV - DECEMBER 15: Former Major League Baseball player and manager Pete Rose speaks during a news conference at Pete Rose Bar & Grill to respond to his lifetime ban from MLB for gambling being upheld on December 15, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred on Monday announced that he was rejecting Rose's application for reinstatement. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

It's been decades since Major League Baseball banned all-time hits leader Pete Rose from the league for life. Unfortunately, that ban isn't being removed this year - or anytime soon - much to the disgust of fans.


Speaking to the media this week, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred stated that he believes betting on baseball should keep Rose permanently on the league's ineligible list. However, he does not feel that should necessary exclude him from the Hall of Fame.

"I believe that when you bet on baseball from Major League Baseball’s perspective, you belong on the permanently ineligible list," Manfred said.

Baseball fans are furious at Manfred for taking the position, not just because Rose is baseball's all-time leading hitter, but out of a sense of hypocrisy for the league inviting sports books and gambling into the league now.  READ MORE...

Clevenland Indians

Many, many years ago, long before any of you who are reading this were born, and long, long before Major League Baseball went woke, pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta for not toeing the Left’s line, and made race-baiting Communist agitprop a permanent feature of its website, I learned about a man named Louis Sockalexis. 

Sockalexis, a great baseball name if there ever was one (later announcers would have loved to report about how he “socked” one into the stands), is largely forgotten today, although he has made a few headlines in the last few days because the Cleveland Indians, a team that bore that name in his honor, has now dishonored him by changing its nickname, so as not to insult Indians. Yes, friends, it’s a topsy-turvy world, and it isn’t getting any saner.

Have you heard of Louis Sockalexis? Some of our great-grandfathers marveled at his feats. He was a Penobscot Indian from Maine who became a major league player in 1897, hitting .338 in 66 games for the old National League Cleveland Spiders. He generated a great deal of fan enthusiasm, but indifferent to or unable to overcome stereotypes, he succumbed to alcoholism and had washed out of the major leagues by 1899. 

The Spiders amassed the eye-watering record of twenty wins and 134 losses that year, and went out of business right after the season’s end, opening up an opportunity in 1901 for the new American League. It was not until 1915, however, that Cleveland’s American League team began calling itself the Indians in honor of Sockalexis. He hadn’t played in the major leagues in a decade and a half, but was newly recalled to fans when he died an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1913. 

The Society for American Baseball Research notes that in January 1915, Cleveland team owner Charles Somers, “perhaps recalling the all-too-brief period of excitement that Louis Sockalexis had brought to Cleveland in 1897, dubbed his team the Indians.”  READ MORE