Paroled

 Somewhere in the cosmos today Pete Rose is sliding headfirst into Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that racist old goat. And Joe Jackson is emerging from that literary corn field in Iowa, telling Peter Edward to move aside so he can hit a few line drives at ol' KM's head.

Or, you know, something like that.

Something like that, because yesterday Landis' lineal descendant, Rob Manfred, let Charlie Hustle and Shoeless Joe out of jail. Freed 'em, sprung 'em, paroled 'em, choose your verbiage.

MLB's commissioner formerly decreed that Rose, Jackson and eight others -- including the other seven Black Sox -- were hereby reinstated, which makes them eligible at last to be voted into the Hall of Fame. Manfred did this by wiping out decades of precedence, ruling that baseball's reach should not extend beyond the grave, and that any deceased miscreant on the game's permanently ineligible list thereby is removed from it.

Confirmed cynics like the Blob, of course, will note Manfred broke this new ground because the ground itself has shifted beneath his feet. It hardly seems an accident, after all, that the sudden springing of Rose, Jackson and the Black Sox coincides with baseball's own fervent embrace of online gambling. If you're climbing into bed with DraftKings, BetMGM et al, you can't very well shake an official finger at gamblers anymore. It's that simple.

(It should also be noted, to give credit where credit's due, that Manfred did what he did after our Fearless Leader, Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump, tossed out another of his random social media hiccups, saying, come on, guys, lift Pete's ban. No accident, either, that Manfred almost immediately did so. Maybe he thought Donald John was gonna send Luca Brasi around.)

So does this mean Pete and Shoeless Joe finally will get into the Hall?

Maybe. Probably.

Does it mean the other seven members of the Black Sox will?

Maybe. Not as probably.

I say this because baseball HOF voters are a notably squirrely lot, each driven by his or her own notions of propriety and set of standards. Sometime those notions and standards make sense; sometimes they're just flat-out bizarre. And other times -- let's face it -- they're driven more by personal animus than anything else. 

It's why players who obviously should be unanimous selections frequently aren't. It's why, just this year, some lone bonehead didn't vote for Ichiro Suzuki, while the other 393 HOF voters did.

And so there will be caprice, and flights of tortured reasoning, and all the usual nonsense when Rose, Jackson and whoever else finally appears on the ballot at some future date. Or never appears on the ballot, because some of those cast into outer darkness don't fit the HOF profile anyway.

Me?

I've long maintained that Rose, baseball's alltime hits leader, should never be admitted to Cooperstown until he stopped lying about gambling on the game. And he lied for years. Only when he figured out how to make a buck from coming clean did he finally do so, figuring it would juice book sales if he 'fessed up between a couple of hard covers.

This was perfectly in character (or lack of it) for Rose, who never met a dime he wouldn't stoop down to pick up. He was, to put it plainly, a dirtbag of a human being. Which of course hardly disqualifies him from the Hall, given that dirtbaggery has never kept out anyone else.

If it did, a whole passel of sociopaths, racists and various other degenerates -- most of them from the early years of baseball, when it was not a notably elevated pursuit -- wouldn't be there.

And Joe Jackson?

He's been portrayed, in film and by sympathetic biographers, as an illiterate bumpkin who was slicked by worldly gamblers and assorted other crooks. This is not a wholly inaccurate portrayal, and it partially lets him off the hook that impales some of the other Black Sox. Yes, he took the gamblers' money to throw the 1919 World Series, but he also batted .375 in that Series -- which suggests that perhaps he didn't quite grasp the concept. 

Ignorance, of course, is no defense. But after 106 years, the punishment for that surely has outlived the crime.

Which I suppose is Manfred's point.

One, it says here, that should have been made some time ago.