NO RUSH, BUT ROSE (AND SHOELESS JOE) SHOULD BE ABLE TO SAY IT'S SO...

...EXCEPT, of course, they'll never actually be able to do that, for obvious reasons. 

But Rob Manfred's ruling, regardless of any influence provided by Ye Olde Orange Menace--which opens the door for possible induction into the Hall of Fame for Pete Rose, Joe Jackson and sixteen other folks whose names rarely get mentioned*--is the right one...given the circumstances. 

Shoeless Joe Jackson: tragedy.

Baseball has moved into the 21st century's elevated relativism, ethics-wise (and otherwise-wise). It has taken the first step in realizing that it's better to exorcise its ghosts, because by doing so they remove the squidgy echoes that haunt the game's margins. The legalisms that Manfred contorted into his decision were downright annoying, but fortunately the bald logical facts hold: neither Rose nor Jackson are "threats" to the game's "integrity" at this point. 

And while the sport rightfully needs to keep gambling out of the clubhouse, keeping two players out of the Hall of Fame due to those transgressions is not something that requires the same draconian rigor that seemed necessary in the past. Rose and Jackson have been punished by their lifetime bans from the game and from any honors they might have received due to their on-field play. 

NOW it's up to the Hall of Fame's capricious bureaucracy to determine if/when the two men will make it onto a "Veterans' Committee" ballot and then receive a sufficient number of votes for induction.

This same set of rules--a lifetime ban for gambling--should still be a sufficient deterrent to major league players. Since that is still intact, some posthumous mercy can be leavened for the two players in baseball history who truly deserve enshrinement but whose transgressions were sufficiently serious to deny them such an honor while they were still alive.

LET's hope that we won't see some special effort made to expedite this process--it would be unseemly that this matter could accelerate simply because a convicted felon with undue worldly influence whose ethical transgressions dwarf the ill-considered actions of these two players decided to meddle in areas that have nothing to do with affairs of state.

Perhaps this is baseball's way of throwing the "mongrel Menace" a bone to chew on, a kowtow that is more cosmetic than cowardly and cloying. At least we can hope that such is the case.

Pete Rose: farce.

The process can now proceed, but--as noted--there's no rush. Rose and Jackson won't know the difference.

 And the bureaucratic foibles of the Hall should work in favor of a more deliberate pace in rectifying this matter. 

As Jayson Stark noted in his article about the eighteen-player reinstatement, there are ramifications for a group of modern greats who have been blacklisted from the Hall. The limbo those players have experienced for more than a decade will need to be addressed, and it would behoove the Hall to at least start contemplating how they will approach permitting them to appear on Veterans' Committee ballots in the future. (We expect that this won't happen until after Rose and Jackson go through whatever process will emerge.)

DEDICATED readers of BBB probably know that both Rose and Jackson were inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals. The Reliquary's exercise of forgiveness exceeded MLB's, since Rose received the honor while he was still alive. While it seemed a bit like grandstanding at the time, it now looks rather prescient in its acknowledgment that, on balance, Rose deserves to be one of a select group of exceptional baseball players accorded special recognition. 

(Of course, the Reliquary enshrined the tragic Jackson first, as they should have. In addition to a lifetime of shame for his murky actions during the maelstrom of the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe lost at least five more seasons in a time when offense revved up. Ty Cobb hit .401 in 1922 at age 35, and there's every chance that Jackson would have exceeded .400 again in that environment. )

Our view is that Jackson should be inducted first, with Rose in the following year--but the Vet Committee's bureaucracy will probably make that impossible--all of which provides us with a perfect chance to practice our French: plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. 

ALL in all, an odd victory for two ghosts in a strangely macabre time that continues to swirl around us like a shape-shifting whirlwind. We now must consider a course of action we might call "exorcism by enshrinement": it seems to be the fizzy form of fatalism that we might need to embrace, just as we've learned to turn a blind eye to the more odious phenomenon of "failing upward." Tragedy and farce leer at us in tandem: they raise an eternal shroud over us as we gaze upon their cynical, eternally recurring one-night stand...

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*Of the sixteen others, the only name worthy of mention in a discussion of the Hall of Fame is Eddie Cicotte, whose numbers get him within whispering distance of Cooperstown. But he's simply just not great enough to deserve dispensation: there are some folk who really do need to stay in their assigned circle of Hell...