Pete Rose and his family have long sought to reintegrate the MLB’s all-time hits leader back into the baseball community, but those efforts had not met with success—until now. On Tuesday, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred made a significant announcement: anyone on the ineligible list would be removed upon their death.
This change means that Rose’s ban is effectively lifted, opening the door for his Hall of Fame consideration.
The announcement came just before Rose’s Cincinnati Reds honored him with a “Pete Rose Night,” a celebration filled with nostalgia for a beloved figure who passed away in September.
During the pre-game ceremony, attended by Rose’s family and fellow Reds greats, his daughter, Fawn Rose, shared her emotional response to the news. “We were flying back from Seattle when we heard the update,” she recounted, recalling how she received a call that brought overwhelming feelings. “I wanted to be up here, expressing how much this means.”
Fawn expressed gratitude to the commissioner, reflecting on a meeting shortly after her father’s passing, where Manfred acknowledged the impact Pete Rose had on the game. “It was a touching moment,” she said, emphasizing how emotional she became at the airport after receiving the news.
“He was so kind and really provided a platform for me to speak about my dad, about what he meant to me and our family, and to his fans in Cincinnati. This felt like a homecoming of sorts for us.”
Right now, there are other players, like “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and members of the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal, still on that ineligible list, totaling 17 players in baseball’s history. Rose himself acknowledged his gambling history in 2004 after denying it for many years, and his death came just days before he predicted he wouldn’t see the Hall of Fame in his lifetime.
In 1991, not long after Rose was banned by then-Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, the National Baseball Hall of Fame voted to exclude him from eligibility for induction. However, it remains uncertain whether Rose will simply be considered now. The decision lies with the committee responsible for evaluating players who’ve been retired for at least 15 years, though their next meeting isn’t until December 2027. For Rose, that meeting may be crucial to his legacy.
