Author Topic: Sorry---the Supreme Court doesn't help Pete Rose  (Read 862 times)

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Offline EasyAce

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Sorry---the Supreme Court doesn't help Pete Rose
« on: May 15, 2018, 06:23:36 pm »
By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.blogspot.com/2018/05/sorry-supreme-court-doesnt-help-pete.html

Well, now. It didn't take all that long for Monday's Supreme Court ruling to conjure up thousands (if not more) mentions of Pete Rose, did it? Only the blind or the fool would have said the court could rule one way or the other without Rose's name coming up in the followup discussions. That said, it's wise to consider what the ruling doesn't do for Rose.

It doesn't change his status one. bit. Consider:

1) A 7-2 Supreme Court majority, with Justice Samuel Alito writing for it in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletics Association, struck down a portion of the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, the portion that prohibited "a governmental entity," meaning state governments, "to sponsor, operate, advertise, promote, license, or authorise by law or compact" gambling in their states. That provision, Alito wrote, "unequivocally dictates what a state legislature may and may not do. It is as if federal officers were installed in state legislative chambers and were armed with the authority to stop legislators from voting on any offending proposals. A more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine."

Translation: The PASPA violated the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Uh, oh.

2) The PASPA got to the Supreme Court in the first place because New Jersey's state legislature---following up on voters who elected to amend New Jersey's state constitution, allowing betting at racetracks and casinos---passed a partial repeal of that state's ban. That's when America's professional and amateur sports leagues and bodies including major league baseball went to the mattresses to try blocking New Jersey from legalising gambling. When the U.S. Department of Justice sided with the sports bodies on behalf of the block, it filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to rule against New Jersey.

Not so fast, fellas.

3) While the sports bodies started scrambling to determine how Murphy can be turned to their profit (did you really think they wouldn't scramble for it?), the opinion was barely released when there came a fair explosion of social media commentary regarding Rose. "It's a great day to be Pete Rose," went one tweet, and there were numerous more along the same line, though some such commentators acknowledged being sarcastic, never mind the sarcasm not always being readily apparent.

But then . . . but then . . .

4) ESPN's Jerry Crasnick may not have been the first to open a shaft of reality, but he may have been the most effectively pointed. "To all those folks asking if today's Supreme Court decision should affect Pete Rose's Hall of Fame status . . . umm, no," he tweeted. "Just because states are free to offer legal sports betting doesn't mean MLB is about to issue an edict saying it's fine for managers and players to take part." Crasnick omitted umpires and other club officials as specified in that pesky Rule 21(d), but let's not get technical. Because he is right.

5) There are and have always been all manner of activities the law declines to prosecute but employers decline to sanction among their employees on company time, and sometimes off company time, and for assorted reasons employers generally deem relevant to the performance of their various enterprises. An employee accepting a job agrees voluntarily to abide by his or her employer's rules.

Setting the gambling issue to one side for the moment, baseball players often sign contracts that include clauses barring their participation in certain non-baseball activities because those activities involve the kind of risk that can prevent ballplayers from, well, playing ball.
Just ask Aaron Boone.

Today the Yankees' manager, Boone fifteen years ago hit the bottom of the eleventh leadoff home run that meant game, set, and 2003 American League pennant for the Yankees, to end a surrealistic Game Seven duel with the Red Sox in that American League Championship Series. In the offseason (the Yankees lost the World Series to the Marlins), Boone tore the ACL in his left knee playing basketball. His contract included a clause barring him from playing basketball, and the Yankees invoked it in releasing him a month later.

Gambling could have been legal in every state in the Union at the time of the Black Sox scandal---it wasn't---but baseball was still well within its rights to impose and to decline repealing Rule 21(d) in the decades and almost century since. Yes, children, it's a little over a year from the centenary of the 1919 World Series, and baseball had a gambling problem prior to that which did threaten the sport's very being.

Marijuana is now legal in several states, including my own Nevada, but it doesn't mean employers in those states are prohibited from banning its employees from being high on or even off the job, depending. Those now imprisoned for possessing even a single joint might sooner be released from prison, if their possession was in states that have now legalised pot, but whether they could be re-employed by former employers depends on whether those employers have or haven't rid themselves of their rules against using pot on or off the job.

6) Pete Rose's Hall of Fame status isn't affected by any Supreme Court case relevant to gambling. It's nonsense to think that a Court ruling allowing states to legalise gambling would pave his way to Cooperstown because a) he violated baseball's Rule 21(d); and, b) the Hall of Fame still has a rule in which those on baseball's permanently ineligible list are ineligible, concurrently, to be on a Hall of Fame ballot.

7) No, Rose is not being persecuted. For what seems to be the bajillionth time, Rose isn't banished from baseball and barred from election to the Hall of Fame because anyone was out to "get" him or because he's less than a perfect human being. And, also for what seems to be the bajillionth time, Rule 21(d) doesn't say, ". . . except when the player holds the all-time hits record."

(d) BETTING ON BALL GAMES. Any player, umpire, or club official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year.

Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible. (Emphasis mine.)

"My guess," says Cubs outfielder Kyle Schwarber of the Murphy ruling, "is it will be good for people outside of the game of baseball. Obviously, we're not going to do that, we're not going to be betting on baseball. We also know what happened to good old Pete Rose, there. That's a good example of just not to do it, for us." Schwarber, unlike a good many of Rose's remaining partisans, gets it.
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Offline jmyrlefuller

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Re: Sorry---the Supreme Court doesn't help Pete Rose
« Reply #1 on: May 15, 2018, 11:59:37 pm »
The only thing protecting MLB from a nasty lawsuit from Rose is the antitrust exemption the Court decreed in the 1920s. Otherwise, this could be a landmark case on whether the Eighth Amendment can be extended into the private sector.

Yet the courts, who mistakenly claimed that MLB was somehow not interstate commerce, has so twisted itself to protect its own precedents that, even though no other sport can claim it isn't interstate commerce but MLB can, as if baseball is some anointed activity where the laws don't apply.
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Offline EasyAce

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Re: Sorry---the Supreme Court doesn't help Pete Rose
« Reply #2 on: May 16, 2018, 12:19:07 am »
The only thing protecting MLB from a nasty lawsuit from Rose is the antitrust exemption the Court decreed in the 1920s.
The only thing protecting major league baseball from any litigation from Pete Rose is the fact that---with or without the antitrust contortion---Rose broke the rules by which he and every man who has ever worn a major league baseball uniform agreed to live when he became a baseball player, a player-manager, and then strictly a manager.

Major league baseball is a business that employed Pete Rose, a business having the right to establish its rules for the business itself and for the conduct of those employed by it, and that he broke one of its rules. Everyone who has ever played or been employed otherwise by major league baseball and its franchises agrees to abide by those rules or face whatever penalties the rules call for when broken. He knew baseball's rules against gambling on baseball by its employees, he broke those rules, he was caught breaking those rules. He---not baseball, not the courts---put him in the predicament in which he has been since 1989.

Yet the courts, who mistakenly claimed that MLB was somehow not interstate commerce, has so twisted itself to protect its own precedents that, even though no other sport can claim it isn't interstate commerce but MLB can, as if baseball is some anointed activity where the laws don't apply.
MLB isn't the only professional sport that has rules against players and other employees betting on games in which they are involved directly, and/or betting on the sport itself whether or not they're involved directly in a game. Their lack of antitrust exemption has not enjoined them against setting their rules of conduct by their employees. Whether a business is or is not interstate commerce, any business has a right to decide what is or is not appropriate behaviour by its employees, unless (in theory) their constitutional rights would be abrogated. But this isn't a question of baseball punishing Rose for exercising his constitutional rights. This is a question of baseball having very clearly written rules against betting on ball games, which it had every right to impose, and of Rose having violated those rules. Even if baseball's antitrust exemption were to be revoked, it would not change Rose's status, nor would it mean baseball no longer has a right to decide upon its rules of conduct. Or, misconduct, which is by the way what Rule 21 addresses directly.


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.