Fansided

Pete Rose will have role at Cincinnati All-Star Game

By Phil Watson

facebooktwitterreddit

Pete Rose, banned from baseball since 1989, will reportedly have a role in July when the Cincinnati Reds host the 2015 All-Star Game at Great American Ball Park.

Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini said Thursday at a question and answer session that former Reds great Pete Rose would “definitely” be at the All-Star Game in July.

Rose has been banned from baseball since August 1989, when he accepted an agreement with then-Major League Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti after evidence was found that Rose had bet on baseball games while managing the Reds in the 1980s.

That banishment has kept Rose off the Hall of Fame ballot despite his status as the all-time leader in hits with 4,256 in a 24-year career that spanned from 1963-86.

He spent parts of 19 of those seasons with Cincinnati, earning Rookie of the Year honors as a second baseman in 1963 before winning Most Valuable Player honors as a left fielder for the Reds in 1973.

More from Cincinnati Reds

He was an All-Star at four different positions for the Reds, also earning nods as a right fielder and a third baseman.

Rose left the Reds after the 1978 season, signing what was then a gigantic four-year, $3.2 million deal with the Philadelphia Phillies that briefly made him the highest-paid athlete in the history of team sports (man, have times changed).

He remained with the Phillies through the 1983 season, but was released on Oct. 19, 1983—three days after Philadelphia lost the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles.

He signed with the Montreal Expos in January 1984 and, in August of that year, was traded back to Cincinnati, where he was named player-manager.

He remained in that role through the 1986 season. He was dropped from the active roster in the offseason, but remained on as Cincinnati’s manager until he agreed to the ban on Aug. 24, 1989.

Rose was honored by MLB in 1999 as a member of the All-Century team and finally, after more than 14 years of denials, admitted in December 2003 that he had gambled on the game and had admitted doing so to commissioner Bud Selig in 2002.

Rose, who will be 74 in April, still wants to be reinstated and said last year he has mixed emotions about being involved with the All-Star Game.

“Does that mean I get to go to the All-Star [Game] and do the festivities, then the next day I go back to jail?” Rose told ESPN in July. “It’s wearing and tearing on me.”

It’s been an issue that has worn on many people over the years—Giamatti, the commissioner who administered the ban, died eight days after Rose agreed to the punishment from a massive heart attack.

Rose would have appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time in 1991, but the Hall of Fame’s board of directors voted unanimously to keep his name off unless he was reinstated by December 2005, the last of the 15 years he would have been eligible to be on the ballot.

He received 41 write-in votes that year for the 1992 induction class.

Were he to be reinstated at any point in the future, his name would be considered by the Veterans Committee of the Hall of Fame as part of the Expansion Era (players whose greatest contributions came in 1973 or later).

The next time Expansion Era players will be up for review is in December 2016.

More from FanSided

Home/Cincinnati Reds