Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
Only way his gambling habit should keep him out is if he bet against his own team. And I can't see someone as competitive as Pete Rose ever doing that.
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There are a lot of reasons why even betting for his own team is sufficient to disqualify him, so I’ll focus on the main one.
Belaboring the obvious, in baseball you play almost every day and even the best team is going to lose a lot of games. Which means that a manager always has to be looking ahead and planning for the next day and the day after that. So, imagine a scenario where the manager has bet a boatload of money on the game in progress which he’s losing badly, but nothing on tomorrow’s game. At some point in a lopsided loss, a manager should focus on getting out of the current game and conserving resources for the next day. If he’s about to lose his shirt, that won’t necessarily be the case; he may be willing to throw everything he’s got into trying to turn around the game. Using up pitchers, making risky plays and so forth. In short, unless it’s the seventh game of the World Series, you can’t be sure that a manager who bets on some games and not others won’t make decisions not in the team’s best interest.