Bad things usually happen when politicians stick their noses into the business of baseball.
George W. Bush's antipathy to steroid- inflated sluggers gave us congressional show trials and invasive drug-testing legislation for high school athletes. Joe Biden's hyperbolic shaming of Georgia's mild election reform of 2021 needlessly pressured the MLB to move its annual All-Star Game out of Atlanta. Generations of political ribbon--cutters have squandered billions of taxpayer dollars on private owners' stadium facilities.
But when President Donald Trump in late February announced that "over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON" of the late all-time hits leader Pete Rose—who served a five-month prison sentence for tax fraud in 1990 and more famously was given a lifetime MLB ban in 1989 for committing the unforgivable sin of betting on baseball—it may have been that rare political meddle that could produce a positive outcome.
