Pete Rose now, with his Playboy model wife (he calls his marriage “Tits and Hits”), and as the  player called “Charlie Hustle,” when the fact that he was a low-life didn’t seem to matter.

Baseball season is fast approaching, and with it the usual welter of fascinating ethical issues that sport always generates. Here is an early one, arising out of one of the first signs of Spring Training, the release of the Topps’ baseball cards.

Pete Rose, as every educated American should know, was a wonderful player on the baseball field and a certifiable low-life off of it. Though he is the all-time leader in career hits, the former Cincinnati  Reds icon has been banned from baseball for two decades, the result of defying baseball’s “third rail” by gambling on the game after his playing career, when he was a manager. (Rose also lied about his conduct, helped send a Commissioner of Baseball to an early grave, and has served time for tax evasion…and even without all this, he would still be an insufferable slime-ball. Trivia note: Pete was in the very first group of “Ethics Dunces” in 2004, along with Bindi Irwin‘s dad, and Fox.  See? Nothing changes!) Never mind, though: Rose’s records have never been regarded as anything but legitimate, unlike those of baseball’s other living major miscreant, lifetime home run champ, steroid cheat and ethics corrupter Barry Bonds.

Yet as Aaron Gleeman reports on NBC sports, Topps is now, based on the evidence of its 2013 line of baseball cards, going out of the way to purge Rose’s name from all honor and memory: Continue reading →