sometimes it is advantageous to lose one and save the players for another day.

imagine the 1998 Yankees, who I believe went 3-8 in their last 11 games because they had already clinched the pennant and were looking to set their rotation, and rest their lineup, for the playoffs.

If someone was going to have a standing bet to win everyday, then why would that cause them, subconciously or not, to manage differently? If you knew you were going to bet to win everyday, then there is no incentive to want to win one day or any other day. You’d want to win as many games as possible, which should be want you’d want anyway.

Ty Cobb, the erstwhile ALL TIME HIT LEADER is in the HOF, and he was widely considered the biggest #!*##*@$%!! that ever played the game – HOF is based on your stats, not on how many people invite you for dinner (and how many of the old-timers, Ruth and others, went out drinking and carousing after a game? how many times did Mantle show up hungover? what about gambling on OTHER sports, like boxing or NFL or whatever, is that allowed? where do you draw the line without it being totally arbitrary?)

well, we know the answer to that: you draw the line (and arbitrary it is indeed) by banning a player, then a quickie rule that says banned players can’t get into HOF – apparantly, however, it’s perfectly fine to TAKE STEROIDS and CHEAT by using DRUGS, but betting ON YOUR OWN TEAM *TO WIN* is “over the line – yeah, right)

If you’re going to have a rule that says, ‘nobody can bet on baseball’, then that’s it — you enforce that rule, or you accept that the rule will eventually contain so many caveats and exceptions that it’ll become toothless and impotent.

The other point I feel the need to make, since it’s come up time and again, is the question of Pete Rose’s ‘lifetime’ ban from baseball. Pete Rose doesn’t have a ‘lifetime’ ban from baseball (with one caveat). Pete Rose is on the Permanently Ineligible list, which is something that baseball does to restrict players who have committed egregious sins against the sport from continuing to participate in and/or profit from the sport. Players are not automatically removed from the Permanently Ineligible list when they die; otherwise, George Bechtel, Richard Higham, the Black Sox, and others still on the list would no longer be there.

Since MLB does not own the Hall of Fame (it’s a museum incorporated under New York state law, and thus everything in the Hall is effectively the property of the state of New York), the penalties involved for being on the Permanently Ineligible list could not cover induction into the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame itself, however, decided to make a rule that any player on MLB’s Permenently Ineligible list could not be inducted into the Hall — in February of 1991 (see below for one reason why this date is significant).

Since the passage of that rule by the Hall of Fame, the only way that Rose (or Jackson, or anybody else on the list) can be inducted into the Hall is to be taken off the list. Plenty of players have been put on the list and then removed — the most famous recent example would probably be when Bowie Kuhn put Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle on the Permanently Ineligible list in Feburary of 1983 for taking jobs as greeters at an Atlantic City casino. Peter Ueberroth took both men off the list in March of 1985.

The caveat, and the reason why most people think of Rose as having a ‘lifetime’ ban, is that allegedly Rose agreed to a ‘lifetime’ ban in exchange for being allowed to appeal the ban after one year. Rose’s agreement was with then-Commissioner Bart Giamatti, but it’s not clear how enforceable that agreement actually is — whoever is Commissioner of MLB at the time of Rose’s death may not feel obligated to abide by an agreement made between two men, one of whom will have been dead for years by then.

Bill James remarked in his book “Whatever Happened To The Hall of Fame?” that Rose’s best chance to be reinstated might well be to take the matter to the courts: two players (Fergie Jenkins and Steve Howe) have been removed from the list via arbitration decisions, and James’s opinion seemed to be that Rose would have a much easier time convincing an arbitrator that he was treated unfairly by MLB (specifically given the paucity of actual evidence presented by the Dowd Commission justifying the ban) than he will trying to convince a later Commissioner of Baseball that he was treated unfairly by every previous Commissioner.

As I understand it, Pete has a life time ban from baseball. So he can go into the Hall of Fame after he dies. And if there is any justice in baseball, he will be in the same HOF class as Shoeless Joe Jackson.

MLB is a good ol’ boys network in many respects. Let’s say Rose’s team is playing against a friend’s team that is out of contention. That manager might be inclined to give in a bit to save his buddy $4000. Does that not affect the integrity of the game.

I voted no for everything except the first rotisserie question, which I interpreted to mean a free rotisserie league.