President Trump said late Friday that he would grant a full pardon to Pete Rose, who was one of baseball’s greatest players before he spectacularly fell from grace for gambling on games while he was a player and manager.
Mr. Trump also repeated his call for Rose, who died last year at 83, to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose had more hits than any player in the game’s history, but Major League Baseball banned him from the sport over his gambling, making him ineligible for the Hall of Fame.
The president promised the pardon close to midnight after an extraordinary day, when he lashed out at President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in a televised confrontation in the Oval Office and abruptly cut short a visit meant to coordinate a plan for peace.
On his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump said he would sign a “complete pardon” for Rose in the next few weeks and added that he “shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING.”
The pardon has nothing to do with Rose’s baseball career or gambling problems. He was sentenced in 1990 to five months in federal prison for filing false income tax returns.
He was banned from baseball in 1989, when he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds, and later declared ineligible for the Hall of Fame. An investigator had found that he regularly placed bets on sports, including baseball. Rose denied for years that he had bet on baseball but later admitted that he had done so regularly.
Mr. Trump did not elaborate on the offenses he would pardon Rose for.
While Mr. Trump can issue a posthumous pardon for that crime, his presidential powers do not extend to the Hall of Fame’s rules, or the baseball writers association and committees that choose Hall of Fame inductees.
Trump has posted several times in recent years in support of Rose. In 2013, he posted on X, then called Twitter, that the “best thing” for Major League Baseball to do would be to put Rose in the Hall of Fame.
Rose remained for the rest of his life a hugely popular, if controversial, figure among baseball fans and would regularly draw crowds for signings.
