The boxing match that this thread has become is leaving me in stitches.
Just to add to the Rose vs. Cobb vs. Speaker vs. other unsavory characters, here is something from ESPN about the Cobb-Speaker resignations from baseball,
1926 - Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were permitted by Ban Johnson to resign from baseball near the end of the 1926 season after former pitcher Dutch Leonard charged that Cobb, Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood had joined him just before the 1919 World Series in betting on a game they all knew was fixed. Leonard presented letters and other documents to Johnson, and Johnson thought they would be so potentially damaging to baseball in the wake of the Black Sox scandal that he paid Leonard $20,000 to have them suppressed. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis exposed the cover-up and the eventual fallout forced Johnson out his job as president of the league he had created. Cobb and Speaker vehemently denied any wrongdoing, Cobb saying that "There has never been a baseball game in my life that I played in that I knew was fixed,? and that the only games he ever bet on were two series games in 1919, when he lost $150 on games thrown by the Sox. He claimed his letters to Leonard had been misunderstood, that he was merely speaking of business investments. Landis took the case under advisement and eventually let both players remain in baseball because they had not been found guilty of fixing any game themselves. It was after this case, though, that Landis instituted the rule mandating that any player found guilty of betting on baseball would be suspended for a year and that any player found to have bet on his own team would be barred for life. Cobb later claimed that the attorneys representing him and Speaker had brokered their reinstatement by threatening to expose further scandal in baseball if the two were not cleared.
from this article about gambling in baseball
https://espn.go.com/classic/s/2001/0730/1233060.htmlI will weigh in and say that although I do agree that Rose's gambling as a Manager was awful and his banning from baseball was a proper action taken by Giamatti, I think he should be in the Hall based on his accomplishments as a player.
Mike
P. S. PATRICKCASSIDY, the reference is to the shrink on the TV show Mash