Out

 Pete Rose.

I'll let you mull on that one for a moment. 

He went to the big diamond in the sky on Monday. He was eighty-three. He goes to his eternal rest with four thousand two hundred fifty-six hits in the Major Leagues. Second place on that list is the late Ty Cobb. Then the late Hank Aaron. As a matter of fact, there are only two players still alive in the top ten when it comes to hits in the Major League, and both of them have retired from the game. Which means that it will probably be some time, if ever, for that record to be broken. 

Most of you know that this kind of distinction should put a player in the Hall of Fame, but somewhere along the line Pete fell off that list to be inducted into Cooperstown. He had to do something equally as bad in baseball as he had done good. 

But first, a digression: When I was a kid in baseball-free Colorado, I watched the Big Red Machine of the 1970s. The team from Cincinnati dominated the National League of my youth. Pete Rose was a large part of that. So was Johnny Bench. While I was told to respect and admire the ferocity with which Pete played the game, earning him the nickname "Charlie Hustle," I preferred the more self-effacing Johnny Bench. Johnny played his entire seventeen year career with the Reds. Pete played for the Reds, then moved on to the Philadelphia Phillies before finishing up his playing days in Montreal. He returned to Cincinnati to manage the Reds from 1984 to 1989.

And that's where the trouble appeared. Pete Rose was declared permanently ineligible for consideration for the Hall of Fame because while he as a manager he was betting on Major League baseball games. Including his own team. 

Johnny Bench never did that. His rough and tumble teammate was the one caught up in one of baseball's biggest scandals. The "hustle" in Charlie Hustle began to take on a new meaning. From the time of the ban in 1991, Pete Rose declared his innocence. In 2004, he confessed to the gambling issue, perhaps with an eye toward making himself available once again to be enshrined in Cooperstown. 

That didn't work. 

And now he has gone. The base paths on which he stomped are only part of the Terra where Pete Rose left his mark. Now we have this cosmic discernment to make: If Pete Rose was given a lifetime ban from the Baseball Hall of Fame, do we feel obligated to let him in now that that lifetime is over?