This past winter, the forty-nine members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee faced a difficult task: they were asked to reconsider the case of Jim Tyrer. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Tyrer ranked high among the league’s dominant linemen. From his position as left tackle for the Kansas City Chiefs, he protected Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson’s blind side for 180 games straight, a team record at the time. Along the way, he earned virtually every honor that was available to an offensive lineman, and, in 1980, he seemed poised to cruise to the ultimate acknowledgment: election to the Hall of Fame. But then, in the early morning of September 15 of that year, before the Selection Committee could cast ballots, Tyrer shot his wife with a .38 caliber pistol before ending his own life. After that, his case fizzled as the arbiters of football fame were all too happy to pretend that both Tyrer’s stellar career and violent death had never happened.
The murder-suicide was shocking, but in retrospect, there had been signs of trouble. After thirteen seasons using his massive head as a blocking tool—a common technique for lineman in his day—he began suffering from depression and exhibiting evidence of paranoia. According to writer Mark Fainaru-Wadu, Tyrer met twice with a doctor, complaining of headaches and abdominal pain. When Tyrer committed the murder-suicide just two days after the second visit, the football world hadn’t seen anything like it, but today it seems all but certain that Tyrer was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease that, in one study, has been shown to afflict more than 90 percent of former NFL players. CTE would play a decisive role in such future tragedies as star linebacker Junior Seau’s suicide in 2012 and Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher’s murder-suicide that same year. It was the growing awareness of CTE’s effects that led the nine-member Hall of Fame Senior Selection Committee to recommend Tyrer for reconsideration, sending his nomination to the full Selection Committee—a group made up mostly of sportswriters and broadcasters, with each NFL city represented. Pushing for his candidacy, Senior Committee member Ron Borges, a former Boston Globe sportswriter, sent a letter to every voter, arguing that Tyrer was unfairly denied his place in the Hall “because the game he played destroyed his brain and led to a family tragedy. We can never repair that tragedy but we can at least give the man and his family the honor his play on the field earned him long ago.”
In those words, “play on the field,” lies the nub of the issue. Is it only performance that matters? The Baseball Hall of Fame famously saddles its selectors with a character clause that charges them with weighing a candidate’s “integrity, sportsmanship, [and] character” as essential criteria in their calculations. But such considerations have been deemed out of bounds for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In fact, not only are voters not allowed to consider any off-field factors, they’re not even allowed to discuss them. Nonetheless, it’s clear that extra-athletic transgressions can spell doom for a candidate if, like Tyrer’s actions or Packers safety Darren Sharper’s serial rapes, they’re extreme enough. In rejecting Tyrer when there was a strong case his on-field achievements merited induction, the original Hall selectors in 1980 showed that extracurricular concerns were decisive. When they dropped the question of Tyrer’s candidacy, they heightened questions about the very purpose of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and, by extension, halls of fame more generally—questions that the new committee would now pick up again some forty-five years later. Both museum and honor roll, halls of fame serve the related roles of narrating history and singling out the most important individuals who have shaped it. The choices made by the stewards of this history as to whom and what to include—and more significantly who and what not to include—reveal a tangled legacy of biases, cronyism, finger-wagging morality, stats-based techno-optimism, and the desire to shape a certain narrative about the sport in question. The result is a maddening hodgepodge of worthies, decidedly non-worthies, and glaring omissions that call more attention to the player than their election would have. The more you look at the way the football and baseball halls operate, the more you begin to see a familiar difficulty that affects American culture: history is full of disputed claims and judgments. There is no way to fully sanitize our sports stories for the protection of the fans.
Who’s Who
Who is to decide who is truly great? Or how “greatness” is defined? Before the Pro Football Hall of Fame and before the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (and well before the halls of fame for basketball, hockey, boxing, golf, and countless other sports), there was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Hearkening back to European models like the Parthenon, the Temple of British Worthies, and the Ruhmeshalle, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans was the first such institution in the country. The Hall, which opened on May 31, 1901, at New York University’s Bronx campus (now Bronx Community College), was the brainchild of school chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken, who viewed it as a tool to promote American virtues such as patriotism, good citizenship, and heroism.
With Frankie Frisch and Bill Terry dominating the process, they simply voted in all their old teammates, many of whom are now considered among the worst selections in Hall history.
It was an age of heroic thinking. Thomas Carlyle’s theory that “Great Men” shape history was part of the American perspective, widely promoted by schoolbooks that celebrated the nation’s founders and by the tales of Horatio Alger. Without a royal family and an aristocracy, anyone could, at least in theory, become a hero, and an individual’s achievement rather than their birth status was worthy of celebration. As Sheila Gerami writes in her 2024 study of the Hall, “The United States pioneered the implicitly democratic assumption that greatness could be acquired. In the newly founded nation built on egalitarianism and opportunity, rather than the Old World ideals of wealth and aristocracy, new heroes were needed to personify a new type of man.” This belief led, in the decades after the Civil War, to a strong interest in commemoration, with countless monuments erected to honor the nation’s military and political leaders, a development that found its logical endpoint in MacCracken’s Hall.
Designed by starchitect Stanford White in the then-popular beaux arts style, the Hall was an outdoor sculpture gallery in which statues were to line the colonnades of a loggia. The busts of the inductees didn’t appear until 1907, but the leadup to the opening attracted widespread attention. MacCracken encouraged the public to nominate inductees (a practice still followed by the football, but not the baseball, hall of fame), adding to the supposedly democratic ethos of the project. The list was then whittled down by the NYU senate and sent to electors to conduct the final vote. The first class included twenty-nine notables—among them George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John James Audubon—ranging from statesmen to authors, preachers, inventors, and military heroes. The Hall opened with a lavish ceremony and received ample and mostly positive coverage in the press, but there were a few dissenters. Contrary to the Hall’s claims of representing the full flowering of democracy, a writer for the New York Independent found the Hall to be “foreign to our democratic ideas, which let fame and glory take care of themselves,” while a correspondent from the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, School Gazette argued that “the truly great need no monuments to extol their greatness.”
As the twentieth century unfolded, the country’s attitude toward heroes would evolve, both in terms of who qualified for heroic status and whether the concept of heroism itself still had any validity. Over the years, the Hall would attempt to keep up with changing times, scrapping its native-born requirement in 1914 and admitting its first black inductee, Booker T. Washington, in 1945. But by the 1970s, the institution had lost most of its luster and nearly all of its public interest. The last inductees were elected in 1976 to minimal fanfare as, post-Vietnam, the country was more focused on Nixonian scoundrels. Although the Hall still exists today, it has been largely forgotten. Its last gasp of fame was a minor footnote in the recent movement to eradicate Confederate monuments. In 2017, following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the removal of busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the gallery. The City University of New York planned to hold new elections to fill these spots, but funds for the endeavor could not be found.
Double Play
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is pretty much just an honor roll: while a small museum was originally intended to accompany the sculpture gallery, nothing much came of the idea. By contrast, the majority of the open-to-the-public square footage of the country’s major sports halls of fame is devoted to museum exhibits, with only a small portion set aside for the plaque galleries. This dual role—museum and honor roll—offers two ways of looking at history, with the halls’ museums, in theory, serving as a corrective to the galleries. The museums allow curators to shape their own narrative and tentatively highlight unsavory corners of the given sport’s history—steroid use, gambling, racism—that the voters and the governing bodies who make the rules by which those voters are bound would rather overlook.
In reality, though, the story most hall museums tell is light on troublesome asides and heavy on self-congratulation. On a recent trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, I encountered a breezy and welcoming atmosphere that was fully in keeping with this orientation. When I pulled into Cooperstown, New York, on a gusty February morning, it was clear that we were squarely in the museum’s offseason. The majority of the sports memorabilia shops that line Main Street were closed, and parking fees were waived in the mostly empty Doubleday Field lot. During my time at the museum, the guards easily outnumbered the guests, and their conversation betrayed an enthusiasm for the sport you would expect from people who work in a baseball shrine. (Two employees hashed out the Hall case of former Reds outfielder Vada Pinson.) The museum exhibits themselves were full of fascinating artifacts and juicy little tidbits of information. Spread across two floors, they consisted of two concepts: a series of displays that offered a chronological run-through of the sport’s history and a handful of special exhibits, many of which highlighted overlooked areas of the sport, such as women’s baseball leagues, the Latin American game, and pre–Negro-League black baseball.
All of this was entertaining and a pleasing tribute to the sport’s varied history, but there were a few disquieting items mixed in with the uniforms and bats. Among the lot: the presentation binder agent Scott Boras created for his client Alex Rodriguez in 2000. A free agent for the first time, the star shortstop went on to garner a then-record $252 million contract from the Texas Rangers, a widely criticized deal that launched the era of the modern super-contract. The binder itself is little more than a functional blue cardboard thing, an unglamorous piece of Staples-level product thrown in amid the more dazzling artifacts—a rare reminder from the Hall of the game’s real-world economics. In addition, A-Rod’s very presence in the museum stands out because it is a reminder of his absence in the Hall’s other section. Despite an all-time great career with the Seattle Mariners, the Texas Rangers, and the New York Yankees, his year-long suspension in 2014 for using illegal performance-enhancing drugs made him anathema to voters, even those willing to cut other PED users some slack, and his continued omission is one of several in baseball that makes it clear that neither fame nor excellence as an athlete are determining factors in who gets into the Hall.
Also discomfiting, but for a different reason, were a pair of letters displayed in the Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream exhibit. These two bits of contrasting correspondence were sent to Aaron as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record in 1974. During his chase, Aaron received reams of racist hate mail, and the Hall displays one such piece, shocking in its profanity. But the letter is easily dismissed: it is hand-written and barely literate. By contrast, an encouraging piece of fan mail that hangs next to it is typed and articulate. Surely, Aaron received plenty of typed pieces of hate mail, but the Hall, in neatly separating the letters into the low-class and the respectable, invites the viewer to sit comfortably on the right side of history. Only unschooled ignoramuses are racists, the Hall display implies, and, in conjunction with its feel-mostly-good displays on black and Latin baseball, suggests that the racial problems in baseball—and this country—are largely things of the past.
Rigged Selections
No one would care about these displays, however, if they weren’t tied to the Hall’s commemorative function. When National Baseball Hall of Fame mastermind Alexander Cleland came up with the idea of the institution to promote tourism in the Depression-ravaged village of Cooperstown in the mid-1930s, it was largely this function he had in mind. It turns out that the baseball powers that be had been thinking along similar lines. When Cleland approached commissioner Ford Frick with the idea, Frick was particularly receptive, having recently made a trip to the Bronx to contemplate the busts of the country’s most celebrated citizen-heroes. As Frick wrote in his memoirs, “By happy chance I had visited the National Hall of Fame at New York University a few days before Cleland’s visit. I was much impressed, and had a notion that a Baseball Hall of Fame would be great for the game.” At that time, organized baseball had been around for over sixty years, and there was an increasing push to memorialize the no-longer-young sport. In the early 1920s, Major League Baseball approved the building of a $100,000 baseball monument in Washington, D.C., which would list the names of the sport’s greatest players. The idea fizzled, but the sentiment lingered, and so virtually all the interested parties were on board when the establishment of a hall of fame was proposed. The Cooperstown location was particularly appealing, given that it was the very place where Abner Doubleday, a Civil War major general, supposedly invented baseball. That he actually did no such thing—the whole idea had been more or less dreamed up by baseball promoter Albert Spalding to fabricate an exclusively American origin for the game—made the very founding of the Hall an exercise in mythology.
The idea of establishing a place to honor the immortals appealed to history-minded baseball administrators and tourist-minded local boosters alike, but this was the last time anyone agreed on anything having to do with that institution. From the start, there was no clear plan on how to elect players. When it came to selecting the inaugural class, two different groups of voters, the baseball writers and a special Old Timer’s Committee, were each charged with singling out five candidates for election. While the writers came up with a class of worthies—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson—the Committee, whose purview was nineteenth-century ballplayers, couldn’t agree on a single name, and the inaugural class of 1939 turned out to be only half of its intended size. This two-pronged arrangement would define the Hall’s approach to elections well into the twenty-first century. While members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) vote in the regular elections, selecting from a pool of qualified contemporary candidates, various special committees have been constituted to fill in the gaps and consider older ballplayers and non-ballplaying contributors over the years. It’s never been an ideal system, with the Hall often taking an ad hoc approach to committee creation, tinkering with the rules to achieve a desired result, and occasionally infuriating the BBWAA writers in the process. As historian and statistician Bill James puts it, “the Hall of Fame has never really thought through the issue of how to identify the most worthy Hall of Famers. . . . From [its] primitive beginning, all that the Hall of Fame has done . . . is back away from problems.”
This James quote comes from his 1994 book The Politics of Glory: How Baseball’s Hall of Fame Really Works. By turns infuriating and enlightening, it is part history, part polemic on the Hall’s failures, and part in-depth analysis of individual candidates. Some of his suggestions are real head-scratchers, such as his proposal to overhaul the voting system by adopting a convoluted methodology in which elections would be carried out by equally weighted groups of players, fans, the media, and a committee of scholars, but his history lessons are an eye-opening portrait of official cronyism and mutual backscratching. Most of this bad behavior comes from the various small committees that the Hall has convened through the years, most notably the Veterans Committees (now known as Era Committees) that meet every year to recognize overlooked candidates. James is particularly critical of the committees from the late 1960s and 1970s, which featured Hall of Famers Frankie Frisch and Bill Terry. With these two men dominating the process, they simply voted in all their old teammates, many of whom are now considered among the worst selections in Hall history—forgotten men like Chick Hafey and Jesse Haines. Referring to an octet of especially bad selections, James writes that “selecting eight marginally qualified or frankly unqualified Hall of Famers from the same narrow well of talent, clearly defined by its proximity to members of the committee, is favoritism of the ripest, rottenest and most obvious nature.” More recently, the election of the marginally qualified or frankly unqualified designated hitter Harold Baines by a committee that featured several members with strong ties to Baines—such as manager Tony LaRussa, general manager Pat Gillick, and team owner Jerry Reinsdorf—revealed the same kind of cronyism that had long marked this type of specialized voting.
Surveillance Stats
Over the past twenty years, the approach taken by Hall of Fame voters in baseball, and to a lesser degree in football and basketball, has changed dramatically. Among Bill James’s other contributions to the Hall debate—and to the larger debate around player evaluation—is the development of new statistical models to assess the relative merits of players across eras. Writing in 1994 on the longstanding debate about the role of stats in Hall of Fame assessment, James argues that the “emphasis on statistics has been more or less appropriate, but that interpretation of statistics by the Hall of Fame’s various electors and committees has sometimes been shoddy.” As a pioneering statistician, James created countless new stats, which he outlined in his vastly influential Baseball Abstracts, published every year from 1977 to 1988, asking viewers to look beyond the received wisdom that had largely defined player evaluation for the past one hundred years. This approach continues in The Politics of Glory, in which he introduces several new evaluative tools, such as similarity scores and Fibonacci win points. Although these metrics are of varying utility, James’s contribution to the Hall debate challenges voters to look beyond the traditional benchmarks that define Hall qualification (three thousand hits, three hundred wins) and to understand that different offensive climates throughout the game’s history means that simply comparing raw statistics isn’t enough. Batting .300 in 1930 when the league average was .292 is very different than doing so in 1968, when the average had fallen to .237.
In reality, though, the story most hall museums tell is light on troublesome asides and heavy on self-congratulation.
When James was writing, the role of statistics in Hall voting was still hotly debated, but today, it’s pretty much all a stats game, and the most notable development in this regard is the development of the catch-all metric wins above replacement (WAR). Designed to measure a player’s total achievement against the environment in which he plays, WAR takes into account offense, defense, baserunning, and defensive position, assigning each player a single number that represents the total wins they would add to a team’s record as compared to a replacement-level scrub. This stat has been further refined for Hall purposes by Jay Jaffe, a baseball writer who has made hall of fame evaluation his specialty. Jaffe’s metric JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score), which averages a player’s career WAR with the total from his seven best seasons, has become, for many voters, the standard by which a player’s Hall case should be judged. Although a number of old-school voters continue to resist these new metrics, and although Jaffe himself points out that JAWS is not meant to be definitive, his is probably the single most influential metric in contemporary Hall voting, while similarly comprehensive metrics have made their way into other sports, like football and basketball, as well.
Is this a positive development? I don’t think anyone wants to return to the benighted days of totting up batting averages and pitcher wins and calling it a day, and while no one in their right mind would ignore JAWS in their calculations, catch-all metrics can’t help but boil the conversation down to whether a player hits a specific number or not—in the past, it may have been four hundred home runs, but now it’s sixty WAR. Furthermore, the development of new statistics raises a whole new set of troubling philosophical questions. Much of the new data that we have access to is derived from advanced surveillance technology, in particular Statcast, an automated tool that has been installed at every ballpark since 2015 and which captures everything that happens in every corner of the field. Statcast has been particularly useful in developing models for defensive evaluation, but it’s based on an idea that writers like Jaffe embrace all too easily: that knowledge is an inherent good, and technology will help us know everything. It’s the techno-optimist’s dream of perfect objective evaluation in which a player’s performance can be reduced to a single incontrovertible number, but it’s unclear whether these goals enhance either our enjoyment of the game or our existential status as independent beings. Of course, the idea that greatness can be measured by statistics is a retreat from more difficult questions about character and integrity: How is that measured? Should it even be measured at all?
Gallery of the Unsavory
In the end, the voters on the most recent Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee were not impressed by Jim Tyrer’s case. We know neither how individual members voted nor how many votes Tyrer received—the process is notable for its lack of transparency—but we do know that his vote total came in below 80 percent, and that it is all but certain that the murder-suicide weighed heavily in the voters’ minds. Tyrer’s example was one of the first real test cases concerning Hall voters’ commitment to a strict interpretation of the Hall’s guidelines and was a real chance to open a new discussion not only about these rules but about what function the Pro Football Hall of Fame should serve in the 2020s and beyond. As such, it was a significant disappointment that the public discussion of his case was limited and that we don’t have access to individual voters’ thoughts.
We’ll have to wait and see whether Tyrer’s case portends a change in how football Hall voters consider lesser offenders in the future, but for their baseball counterparts, bound by the character clause, such concerns have become an increasing part of the voting calculus over the past couple of decades. This newfound focus on a player’s extra-athletic profile rivals the rise of new analytic tools as the most significant recent development in Hall voting methodology, and these moral reckonings have played out in ways both large and small in recent election cycles. When it comes to domestic abuse, for example, only a handful of baseball writers have publicly ruled out alleged abusers like current candidate Andruw Jones. As in the football Hall, only exceptional cases seem to derail a player’s chances when it comes to off-field transgressions. Slick fielding shortstop Omar Vizquel’s vote total peaked at 52.6 percent in 2020, but revelations emerged soon after about his alleged sexual harassment of an autistic batboy, as well as his alleged assault of his wife, and sunk his case—by the most recent round of voting, that number had fallen to 17.8 percent. I wouldn’t check the box for Vizquel either, but given the severity of his actions and his already borderline case, it’s been easy enough for voters to leave him off their ballots and feel like they’ve done their moral duty.
When it comes to on-field transgressions, though, it’s a different story—and one area of great difference between the baseball and football halls. As Jay Jaffe notes in his book The Cooperstown Casebook, in the last century, the character clause had been invoked, when it was thought of at all, as a reason to include players of exceptional personal merit who might not otherwise warrant election. In fact, with the exceptions of banned-from-baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, no one had ever been denied entry to the Hall for any reason other than on-field achievement, not even alleged Ku Klux Klan members like Tris Speaker or notorious cheaters like Gaylord Perry. This changed when the first wave of players from the so-called steroid era hit the ballot, and to date, only players with soft ties to illegal PED use like David Ortiz have been elected, while all-time greats such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have come and gone without election. (Bonds has also been accused of domestic abuse and Clemens of sexual misconduct with a fifteen-year-old, but their failure to gain entry likely has more to do with their use of drugs.) By contrast, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is far more forgiving. One of this year’s inductees, tight end Antonio Gates, was suspended for four games in 2015 for violating the league’s PED rules. This may have cost him election on his first attempt, but he cruised to induction in his second year of eligibility, a fate that is not forthcoming for baseball suspendees Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, both currently languishing on the ballot.
All of this takes us back to the question of exactly what purpose a hall of fame is supposed to serve. Personally, I can’t see any reason why the best players of the steroid era shouldn’t be enshrined, especially given the hypocritical election of former commissioner Bud Selig, who tacitly encouraged juicing due to the popularity of the home run–driven game. Rule-bending of various sorts has been winked at or even encouraged throughout the sport’s history, and the use of illegal PEDs in the late 1990s and early 2000s doesn’t strike me as terribly different from some of the stratagems employed by earlier Hall of Famers. For later offenders like A-Rod and Manny, both caught after MLB started cracking down, the case is different, but I don’t know what’s to be gained by leaving off two of the century’s best and most prominent players. Is the goal of a Hall of Fame to establish moral purity, or is it to include the most significant (however you define it) players of each era? For that matter, isn’t it time to at least reconsider Pete Rose’s case, given how he was railroaded into accepting a lifetime ban back in 1989 (even if saying so puts you in bad company these days)? [*]
On the other hand, it could be that the idea of a binary system has simply run its course. A straight in-or-out vote does not capture the complicated legacy of Rose, a man who was one of baseball’s most famous and accomplished athletes, but who bet on his own team and then was accused of statutory rape in 2017. One proposal often put forth is to open a separate wing for the cheaters, the dopers, and the wife beaters, a sort of Gallery of the Unsavory. But ghettoizing the Hall’s bad boys does little more than punt the question, dismissing the inductees as not being “real” Hall of Famers. The issue can only really be properly addressed if the two sides of the Hall (honor roll and museum) work together. Along with a relitigation of the cases of the dismissed candidates, an honest discussion needs to take place, and it’s the Hall itself that must lead it. Why not present fans with a historically accurate account of these players and all their complications? The Hall could curate an exhibit highlighting Rose’s baseball prowess as well as his misdeeds. They could create an exhibit dedicated to the complicated stories of Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Halls of fame love to make interactive features; why not get fans involved in a visceral way and make them confront what many voters would rather ignore? Fans would find they couldn’t so easily dodge the questions that vex anyone who thinks about greatness. Are we talking about which athletes were the best performers? Or about which athletes deserve to be remembered with honor and respect?
In the end, it’s easy enough to say that the idea of sports halls in general is a relic, about as relevant as honoring George Washington and Andrew Carnegie in the country’s first such institution. But these halls continue to hold such an enormous sway over the imagination of fans, players, and professional commentators. If we attach any kind of importance to the sports they commemorate, it’s worth at least grappling with who gets in, who should be in, and who should never have come close. Americans are in retreat from honest discussions of history. It’s no longer acceptable to look at the ugly side of things. Surely, any sports hall of fame that dredged up stories of racism, gambling, cheating—and off-the-field immorality—and asked visitors to look at the unsanitized version of sports would be subject to considerable friction. On the other hand, American sports fans tend to be knowledgeable and opinionated. Maybe they could handle the controversy.
A hall vote is a small stab at shaping history, and for those lucky enough to get the chance to cast a ballot, it’s an honor that is taken seriously, even as voters are asked to weigh far more factors than their twentieth-century predecessors. Is a cheater less worthy of consideration than someone whose indiscretions were all committed off the field? Is a player who hits traditional milestones more deserving of election than a candidate whose case rests on a much subtler statistical evaluation? The voters can only muddle through, developing new statistical models and new models of moral calculus to help sort out the confusion. They won’t succeed, of course, but in that failure, in that complete inability to hit on any kind of consensus, lies all the thrill of the game.
[*] Editor’s Note: In a recent and controversial ruling, one player who is, by any reckoning, among the most significant players of his or any era, will now have his bid for immortality judged, for the first time, by the voters. With baseball commissioner Rob Manfred’s May 13 announcement that Pete Rose, (along with Shoeless Joe Jackson and fifteen other deceased baseball figures) is no longer permanently banned, a select committee of sixteen baseball notables will have their first chance to weigh in on the hit king’s Hall worthiness—though, given the institution’s rules, not until December 2027 at the earliest.