[His Own Bad Self]

Originally Posted by RchW

Then get rid of the wife beaters, racists, and drug takers of the past too. If your behavior matters then it should matter equally across the board.

This has nothing to do with "behavior". To borrow from James, the problem wasn't that Rose was a bad person. The problem was that Rose broke the rules that baseball has against gambling.

Being a wife beater has no impact on the integrity of an athletic contest. Neither does being a racist. Being a cocaine user has very little, except that it obviously is to the player's detriment. An athlete gambling on a game does, for obvious reasons.

All the major sports leagues owe the paying fans clean, fair games to whatever extent possible. Any participant who undermines that by gambling on games deserves whatever punishment the league chooses to enforce.

The NBA suffers from a gigantic image problem, in part because the league refuses to address concerns that it actually manipulates games (through the officials) and encourages certain results (and the evidence, though circumstantial, is fairly lengthy). Why give a pass to MLBers who we actually have hard evidence against?