Gamblers & Miscreants

The list at the bottom of this page is the rogue’s gallery of baseball — those players who have been banned. Some have been reinstated, but all were initially banned not just for the rest of their lives, but forever.

Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Ferguson Jenkins have all been on the Major League Baseball Ineligible List. All three are now in the Hall of Fame, having been reinstated.

But should any scofflaws be punished forever? Shoeless Joe Jackson, a truly great player who was banned in 1920 for a major gambling and game-fixing offense committed in 1919, died in 1951. Yet more than half a century later, his induction into the Hall of Fame cannot even be considered, because he remains banned for his involvement in the Black Sox scandal.

One argument for reinstatement of all players is that our national standards have changed, and that gambling in some form is now legal in most states. Habitual gambling and drug addiction is now seen as an illness, worthy of treatment and rehabilitation.

Another argument is that the Society for American Baseball Research and other scholars continually unearth new evidence regarding past scandals; for example, Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox and now a member of the Hall of Fame, incited the Black Sox scandal by grossly underpaying his players to the point of poverty, ignored warnings that the 1919 World Series was fixed, and almost certainly protected several key players or associates who also knew of the fix. Hardly Hall of Fame behavior.

(The term Black Sox predated the 1919 World Series and originally referred to the notoriously low pay of Comiskey’s team. It was said that they couldn’t even afford to wash their socks.)

In 1926 even the immortals Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were accused of fixing a 1919 game in collusion with Smoky Joe Wood. The public was outraged over the accusation and quickly backed Cobb and Speaker; the law-and-order baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, caved in to popular opinion and covered up the persuasive evidence. The damning investigation by the president of the American League, Ban Johnson, was overruled and the three were exonerated. The accuser, Emil “Dutch” Leonard, was discredited and Wood quietly retreated back to his coaching job at Yale University.

Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Kenesaw Mountain Landis are in the Hall of Fame.

So what to do with Pete Rose? He owns one of baseball’s most hallowed records, most career hits. In 2004 he admitted to betting on the Reds, but he denied betting against them. Interestingly, until Pete Rose, banishment was not a bar to election to the Hall of Fame; although no banned player has ever been elected, before Rose there was no rule addressing the issue.

Pete Rose’s case dragged Shoeless Joe Jackson and the ineligible others into purgatory. Had the Pete Rose rule been in place earlier, would Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle have been ejected from the Hall of Fame? And what of the players in the Negro Leagues, where mere gambling was not a cause for banishment?

We suggest that for the sake of the independence of the Hall of Fame Museum and its voters, players who are banned from baseball should still be eligible for Hall of Fame nomination. As a practical matter, the only banned players who could benefit are Pete Rose, and possibly Shoeless Joe Jackson and — far less likely — Hal Chase and Eddie Cicotte.

The “ineligible list” isn’t actually a physical list, but rather a series of decisions made by commissioners and league presidents since 1865. It was more formalized following the 1919 Black Sox scandal, but this all-time compilation is unofficial. It makes interesting reading, for it is gambling and game fixing — not steroids nor drunkenness nor wife-beating nor even murder — that dominates the causes: