By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… Pete Rose has claimed for years that he never bet on baseball games while he was an active player. That is now being challenged.
He was banned from baseball for life for betting on baseball while he was a manager of a major league club. Paul Horning and Alex Karras were banned from football for a year when they stupidly admitted that they had bet packages of cigarettes on the outcome of games they played in. However, Pete wagered much more than cigarettes on baseball games.
One must wonder why anyone would bet on baseball. It has to be one of the hardest games to handicap. The best team in baseball loses at least a third of its games and often against the worst team in the league. A mediocre pitcher may step up and have a great day. The great hitting team may have a day when everything they hit is at someone. The rule of a successful baseball season is beat the bottom, split with the top. If the best team wins 110 games, it means they lost 54. The odds on picking a baseball game are not very good.
Apparently, Mr. Rose was not very good at picking baseball, horses, football, or any other sport. The money he lost should be punishment enough.
Was Pete Rose’s career a Hall of Fame career? You be the judge. He had the most career hits 4,256; he played in the most games 3,562. He came to bat more than any other player in history: 14,053 times. He had the most singles 3,315, the most total bases for a switch hitter, 5,752, and the most seasons with 200 or more hits: 10.
He also played in more than 150 games a season, more than any other player: 17. In those 17 years, he came to bat 600 or more times, more than anyone else in the game’s history.
He played in the most winning games 1,972. He had five or more hits in 10 games, this too is a record. He is the only major league player to have played over 500 games at five different positions (969 at first base, 634 at second base, 634 at third base, 671 in left field, and 595 in right field). More than seven times, Rose had hitting streaks of 20 or more games; no one is close to that record. He was on base 5,929 times which is also a major league record.
If you move to National League records, you will find he leads in doubles and has the longest consecutive National league game hitting streak: 44. He was the NL MVP in 1973 and the World Series MVP in 1975. He was selected for the All-Star team 17 times at five different positions. Three times, he was the National League batting champion. He was selected for the All Century Team. He had four or more hits in 73 different games. He has the record for the most extra base hits by a switch hitter: 1,041.
In his lifetime Pete Rose scored 2165 runs, hit 160 homeruns, batted in 1,314 runs, stole 198 bases. His lifetime batting average is .303 with an on base percentage of .375.
There is no allegation that he did anything negative to effect the outcome of a game that he participated in. He played every game as though his hair was on fire. But, he bet on baseball and has been banned from baseball forever. If that is the case, and it is, then all of his records should be removed from the books and the name Pete Rose should never again be spoken in baseball circles.
Nor should the names of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemente, Mark McQuire or any of the others who used steroids to enhance their play. These men actually took drugs allowing them to achieve a level of play that changed the outcome of games. Rose, on the other hand, was merely stupid enough to financially ruin himself by betting on baseball.
He now makes a living selling autographs and memorabilia in the gambling capital of America. I guess there is poetic justice in that.
Now let’s talk about Shoeless Joe Jackson.
No one asked me but… The latest fad in America education, the Common Core, becomes more and more curious as it continues to grow.
The newest revelation about Common Core is the means by which it will be determined if a student passes the third and fifth grades. A student can successfully complete all the assignments and pass all the teacher generated tests, but their grade in class will be determined by an end of the year test. Some loser, who cannot find a real job, will decide whether the essay a third grader wrote is worthy of allowing him/her to move on to the fourth grade.
While the end of the year test will be administered by the school, it will be graded by an outside agency. This may sound like a fair deal. If the teacher teaches and the student learns, what difference does it make if the test is graded by an outside agency.
What is this outside agency named? The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (PARCC). It sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
However, in my experience I have found that the longer the name of an organization, the less competent it is. Those reading the essays that will determine the future of our third and fifth graders will surely be people educated in the subject matter. Not so! They are people recruited through website, job fairs, internet job searches, newspaper classifieds, Craig’s List, and Facebook. The readers of the exam are unemployed college graduates hired on a part time basis for 12-14 dollars an hour.
Bob Sanders, a Vice-President of the company’s scoring management division stated they are like McDonald’s in the quality control area. How reassuring is that? McDonald’s and quality don’t often appear in the same sentence.
Over three quarters of the scorers work from their home computer. How comfortable are you knowing that a college graduate who cannot find a real job, sitting in his parents basement, is deciding whether your child will move on to the fourth or sixth grade?
Thought of the week… Whoever said “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” is full of it! Winning makes all the difference in the world. Winning is fun. Losing is not. Losing sucks.
– Pete Rose
