President Trump said late Friday that he would grant a full pardon to Pete Rose, who was one of baseball’s greatest players before he spectacularly fell from grace for gambling on games while he was a player and manager.
Mr. Trump also repeated his call for Rose, who died last year at 83, to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, sharply criticizing the sport and calling it a “dying” game. Rose had more hits than any player in the game’s history, but Major League Baseball banned him because of his gambling, making him ineligible for the Hall of Fame.
The president promised the pardon close to midnight after an extraordinary day, when he lashed out at President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in a televised confrontation in the Oval Office and abruptly cut short a visit meant to coordinate a plan for peace.
On his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump said that he would sign a “complete pardon” for Rose in the next few weeks and added that Rose “shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING.”
The pardon has nothing to do with Rose’s baseball career or gambling problems. He was sentenced in 1990 to five months in federal prison for filing false income tax returns.
He was banned from baseball in 1989, when he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds, and was later declared ineligible for the Hall of Fame. An investigator had found that he regularly placed bets on sports, including baseball. Rose denied for years that he had bet on baseball but later admitted that he had done so regularly.
More recently, Mr. Rose has faced allegations of having sex with an underage girl. In 2017, a woman testified in a civil case that she had sex with him in the 1970s — when Mr. Rose was in his 30s and a star player for the Cincinnati Reds, and she was 14 or 15 years old. At the time, the age of consent in Ohio was 16. The statute of limitations to bring charges has expired.
Mr. Trump did not elaborate on the offenses he would pardon Rose for.
While Mr. Trump can issue a posthumous pardon for the false tax returns, his presidential powers do not extend to the Hall of Fame’s rules or to the baseball writers’ association and committees that choose Hall of Fame inductees.
“Baseball, which is dying all over the place, should get off its fat, lazy ass, and elect Pete Rose, even though far too late, into the Baseball Hall of Fame!” Trump posted.
Mr. Trump has posted several times in recent years in support of Rose. In 2013, he wrote that the “best thing” for Major League Baseball to do would be to put Rose in the Hall of Fame.
For the rest of his life, Rose remained a hugely popular, if contentious, figure among baseball fans, and he would regularly draw crowds for signings.
But it’s hard to see a pardon having much effect on his standing in baseball.
In December 2015, the Major League Baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, considered an appeal from Rose to lift his lifetime ban. As part of that process, Manfred had a meeting with Rose, where Rose told him that he had continued to bet on baseball, which he was legally allowed to do in Nevada, where he lived. And Rose claimed that he had not bet on baseball when he played — though Major League Baseball had recently obtained evidence that contradicted that claim.
“In short,” Manfred concluded in a report at the time, “Mr. Rose has not presented credible evidence of a reconfigured life either by an honest acceptance by him of his wrongdoing” or “by a rigorous, self-aware and sustained program of avoidance by him of all the circumstances that led to his permanent ineligibility in 1989.”
In 2017, Mr. Trump, newly elected and embroiled in Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, hired the Washington-based lawyer John M. Dowd to represent him. Mr. Dowd had investigated Rose on behalf of the commissioner’s office decades earlier, ultimately writing what became known as the Dowd Report, which was finished in 1989 and led to Rose’s lifetime ban.
That same year — as part of a lawsuit Rose had filed against Mr. Dowd claiming that he had defamed him on a radio show by saying Rose had had sex with “12- to 14-year-old girls” — the woman testified that she had had sex with Mr. Rose when she was underage. In response, the Philadelphia Phillies — the team that Rose helped win a World Series in 1980 — announced that Rose would not be participating in alumni weekend events that year.
In 2022, the commissioner’s office gave Rose special permission to attend a celebration commemorating the Phillies’ 1980 World Series-winning team. At the event, a female reporter asked Mr. Rose about the allegation that he had had sex with an underage girl.
“I’m not here to talk about that,” Mr. Rose said. “Sorry about that. It was 55 years ago, babe.”
Asked later by another reporter, he said: “I’m going to tell you one more time. I’m here for the Philly fans. I’m here for my teammates. I’m here for the Phillies organization. And who cares what happened 50 years ago? You weren’t even born. So you shouldn’t be talking about it, because you weren’t born.”
