Pete Rose is one of the greatest baseball players to ever play professional baseball. He hit over 160 home-runs, stole over 190 bases, won Most Valuable Player, has three World Series rings, and was an All-Star seventeen times. Pete Rose, after spending his entire life dedicated to the sport of baseball, is still not in the baseball Hall of Fame. He was caught cheating in August 1989; for this reason, he was banned from baseball forever, rendering him ineligible for the Hall of Fame. Despite all of this, Pete Rose deserves to have his name in Cooperstown along with the other baseball greats.

  Pete Rose retired as a fan favorite in 1986 and became a manager for the same team he spent over two decades on. He managed for five years before he was caught fixing games. Fixing games as a manager is when a manager or owner handicaps their own team to win bets. The baseball commissioner banned him from anything related to the MLB, taking away all of his rightly earned accomplishments, his batting title, his World Series rings, and so much more. It is always a sad day in any sport when someone is caught fixing games, but when Pete Rose was caught, many people wondered if baseball would not recover. It is unknown how much money Pete Rose won betting on games, but it could not have been worth throwing his whole career away.

  Pete Rose has many accomplishments in baseball. He was the face of baseball along with Nolan Ryan, Robin Yount, and other players of that caliber. All of those players were great, but they never got close to the level of Pete Rose. He broke the All-Time hits record in 1985, he hit his 4,192 hit which put him above Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and everyone else in baseball history. He won three World Series titles and the Rookie of the Year award, but whenever someone mentions Pete Rose, nobody notices. All anyone can think about is his cheating as a manager.

  With baseball in shambles over the Astros cheating scandal, the MLB granted immunity to the players as long as they sold out a few of the managers and coaches involved. The investigation took over four months, and they could not suspend, fine, or ban the players. Jose Altuve was supposedly wearing a wire during the ALCS series against the Yankees where he hit a walkoff homerun to win the series, but he is still going to be in the Hall of Fame conversations. They also won the World Series while they were cheating and gave many pitchers terrible statlines, resulting in ruined careers. Most of the players admitted to cheating, but they did not have any reductions. Pete Rose made his team lose for about a year and cannot even celebrate twenty great years. The Astros ruined careers, won false championships, and hurt baseball for years in the process, but they were barely fined. 

  All in all, Pete Rose cheated for a few years, not as a player, but as a manager. Yes, it is destructive and deserves to have fines or his years as a manager be erased, but the Astros cheated way more as a team. In the years of steroids, hundreds of players cheated and helped their careers; even still, baseball is accused of corking balls and bats so hitters have another advantage. None of these players were banned from baseball, just given fines or suspensions. Pete Rose deserves to have his number in Coopersville, and many longtime baseball fans agree.