perfidy

Welly, welly, welly! Here's one from the obvious files, kids! Pete Rose bet on baseball. Yup, he said it.

In other news, OJ is thisclose to finding the real killers.

All kidding aside, it sucks that it took Pete this long to just fess up. Everybody in the world knows he did it and not very many folks care (this assertion being the result of an informal poll I just conducted on myself). Hopefully now that he's earned his lesson they'll let him back into baseball with all those other paragons of restraint and Christian virtue like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Darryl Strawberry, Gaylord Perry, Doc Ellis, and David Wells.

It's a pity. Baseball makes heroes and legends of its players, but off the field baseball players usually end up coming off as petty, small people. Rose could have been spending the last fifteen years managing the Reds and burnishing his legend as "Charlie Hustle, king of the baserunners." Instead, we all remember him as a bullheaded player who ran out every single and very stupidly put Ray Fosse in the hospital during an All-Star Game.

Let's get him in the Hall of Fame quick, before he makes matters any worse for himself.

[wik] Eric Olsen, Godfather of Blogcritics and my lord and master, offers this assessment of Pete Rose, man and player:

I always prefer extraordinary talent over the "overachieving slob who doesn't have the talent but achieves on guts" crap, and especially if that overachiever is a swaggering, egomaniacal shit ranch. That turd had/has zero style and he hit like a girl - that's what his HOF plaque should read: "Pete Rose, more hits than anyone in MLB history, but he hit like a girl."

Well. Egomanical shit ranch it is, then. I rather disagree with Eric's "talent over guts" philosophy but I'm pretty sure that this bias isn't what drives his animus against Mr. Baseball. No, I think it's that Eric takes exception to Pete Rose being an egomanical shit ranch and with that I can't disagree.