President Donald Trump says he plans to issue “a complete PARDON of Pete Rose,” baseball’s late career hits leader who was banned from MLB and the Hall of Fame for sports betting.
Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday night to say Rose, who died in September at 83, “shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING.”
Trump did not specifically mention Rose’s tax case in which Rose pleaded guilty in 1990 to two counts of filing false tax returns and served a five-month prison sentence.
The president said he would sign a pardon for Rose “over the next few weeks.”
As word of Trump’s planned pardon spread Saturday, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has begun reviewing a petition filed by Rose’s family that would remove him from the league’s ineligible list, ESPN reported. Manfred reportedly met with Rose’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lenkov, and eldest daughter, Fawn Rose, at his office in December with MLB spokesperson Pat Courney in attendance.
Lenkov told ESPN that he wasn’t actively seeking the White House’s help to get Rose posthumously removed from the ineligible list, which would allow him to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose had previosuly met with Manfred in 2015 in an effort to be reinstated, but that petition was denied.
MLB and Rose agreed to a permanent ban in 1989 after an investigation determined he had bet on games involving the Cincinnati Reds from 1985-87 while playing for and managing the team. The Hall of Fame board of directors in 1991 adopted a rule preventing people on the permanently ineligible list from appearing on the hall ballot.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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