Ray Ratto, writing for Defector, has the definitive take on the passing of Pete Rose.

He wasn’t complicated as a player, a manager, or in the end, as a self-parodic martyr. Rose had smaller measures of the skills that great ballplayers have but a greater capacity to employ them tirelessly, which is what his admirers always admired. He had one overarching gift, though, that covered by the play and the player—the determination and ability, through sheer persistence, to make you make a stand about him. His was the purest kind of narcissism, one so utterly naked that it never needed a second level. He knew that you were only interested in hearing him speak on the subject of him, and that became increasingly true as he grew from boyhood to late boyhood to middle-aged boyhood to octogenarian boyhood.

The only thing anyone ever thinks about with Pete Rose is his absence in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And now, he is dead, at 83, and in his own magnificently me-centric way, he leaves behind him one final ghoulish debate about the thing that drove him most; his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. For those who postulated that the powers of the game were just waiting for him to be unable to enjoy induction to extend the honor, the question everyone else long ago wearied of has been revived. Now that he’s no longer living and able to leave a final I-told-you-so to all those who didn’t see it his way—about whether his gambling disqualified him from the Hall, about the fine points of what he did or didn’t do—is it finally safe to put him in Cooperstown?

Nope. He will never be included in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Like Shoeless Joe Jackson, he is on the “permanently ineligible” list. Death doesn’t change a thing.

The irony is that every sporting event is now overgrown with commercials for sports betting. This post made me snort.

I won’t do any research to see if there’s any truth to it. I think it’s just satire, but it’s biting satire nonetheless.