Let Pete and Shoeless Joe In—But Don’t Clean the Plaque

The story baseball still doesn’t know how to tell.

Below is this week’s paid subscriber essay, which is posted every Thursday morning. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. To entice you, use the button below for 20% off (that’s less than my budget for hair products).

Baseball, like the Church, is in the business of telling stories. It remembers its saints and sinners with equal passion, and its most cherished institutions—whether the cathedral of Cooperstown or the sanctuary on Sunday morning—thrive not because they’ve avoided scandal, but because they’ve learned to reckon with it.

So, when the MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred lifted the lifetime bans on Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, what at first seemed like a PR stunt landed, to some of us, more like a theological earthquake. After all, Rose and Jackson aren’t just players—they’re symbols. One is baseball’s most prolific hitter and most unapologetic gambler; the other is a folk hero of almost mythical talent, cursed to live in the shadow of the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

And now, over a century later, in Jackson’s case, the question is being asked again:

Should they be let in?

From where I stand—half pulpit, half bleachers—the answer is yes. But not because they’ve been exonerated, or because time has washed away the consequences of their choices.

They should be let in because baseball, like the rest of us, needs a better story of truthful redemption—one that doesn’t erase the past, but tells it fully.

But what kind of redemption are we actually talking about—and what does it cost?