“I should have had the opportunity to get help, but baseball had no fancy rehab for gamblers like they do for drug addicts,” [Pete] Rose wrote. “If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block — lifetime ban. Death penalty. I spent my entire life on the baseball fields of America, and I was not going to give up my profession without first seeing some hard evidence. … Right or wrong, the punishment didn’t fit the crime — so I denied the crime.”

Pete Rose is an arrogant, unrepentant dirtbag and deserves his lifetime ban from baseball and the Hall of Fame. Reinstatement for him would further damage an already broken game and cement Bud Selig’s well-earned rep as the worst commissioner of baseball ever.

Comparing his gambling problem that he denied to the drug rehabilitation offered to others is just stupid and his whining about “the punishment didn’t fit the crime” is laughably ironic considering the number of people locked up for ridiculously long sentences for non-violent drug possession offenses. If anything, the druggies should get banned too (the Strawberrys and the McGwires), and be ineligible for the Hall of Fame. That they don’t, however, has nothing to do with him and his case.

Let Rose rot.