Pete Rose back?

By Jason Wojciechowski on August 13, 2003 at 1:42 AM

I awoke this morning to an email from Baseball Prospectus touting this story (in their free section) that Pete Rose has reached an agreement with baseball that will let him be removed from the ineligible list, and will eventually let him become involved in the day-to-day management of a team (i.e. be their manager).

BP claims it's an exclusive, and I certainly can't find mention of it anywhere else. Google News has nothing, nor does ESPN.

I think the BP articles I've read about Rose have been the most convincing arguments I've heard. In other words, I don't think this is a good idea. Rose has never apologized, never admitted wrongdoing (which now appears to have been a good idea, because baseball probably couldn't let him back in if he admitted he did anything wrong), and committed one of the worst sins a professional athlete can commit: he tarnished the integrity of the games he was involved in by gambling on them.

I'm still a little skeptical about this story. On the other hand, Will Carroll does have sources at various teams, and it wouldn't surprise me if he learned something from the Reds' front office. It'll probably make its way around in the blog world, since I think a fairly huge percentage of us baseball bloggers are avid BP readers. We'll see if/when it hits the major media outlets.

If it is true, though, this is a huge coup for BP. That goes without saying.
If they were publicly traded, you'd want to buy stock in them right now before the rest of the country wakes up and finds out what's going on. Of course, you're taking the risk that it's a prank or false, in which case you almost certainly lose money, but that's what the market's all about, right?