Pete Rose died last September. A petition to reinstate him from his permanent ban from baseball was filed in January. Many people, most notably President Donald Trump, have said it’s time to put him in the Hall of Fame. The petition may very well be successful.

It’s not a surprising sequence of events, to the point that Rose himself reportedly called it 10 days before he died from heart disease. Speaking with sportscaster John Condit on Sept. 20, Rose said he expected his Hall of Fame chances to significantly increase once he was dead:

The mechanics of what Rose is lamenting are not complicated. After decades as a baseball pariah, MLB’s all-time hits leader expected the world to be more ready to forgive and forget, or at least his proponents would become much louder once they had the concept of grace on their side after his death.

Whether or not they actually succeed is almost entirely up to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. Unless a future MLB commissioner is a fan, Rose won’t have a better chance than the petition in front of Manfred right now, and there’s no way this decision is leaving his desk. At some point in the coming weeks or months, Manfred will likely have to say whether or not he’s reinstating Rose.

To do so would fall fully in line with Rose’s most cynical expectations, on a matter where very little has changed, except for the fact that the man involved is no longer with us and the president of the United States is yelling at baseball to “get off its fat, lazy ass.”

The following facts remain:

• MLB Rule 21(d), which goes back to the Black Sox scandal in 1919, states: “(2) Any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible.”

• Ample evidence was found that Rose bet on baseball as both a player and a manager.

• Rose agreed to a permanent — not lifetime, permanent — ban from baseball in 1989, essentially so he could quickly apply for reinstatement without admitting fault.

• Rose was reportedly offered an opportunity for reinstatement as long as he came clean and stopped associating himself with gambling. He declined it.

• After 15 years of repeatedly lying about betting on baseball, Rose finally admitted to betting on his own team while a manager. If hard evidence is to be believed, he continued to lie about betting as a player until his death.

• All of these rules are still in place even after sports gambling was legalized and MLB embraced betting. If anything, they are more stringently enforced.

• Rose was a mainstay in casinos until his death and gave MLB no reason to believe he changed, especially after he was accused of having a sexual relationship with a girl under 16 years old during his playing days.

If reaching the Hall of Fame was as important for his family as Rose says in his above quote, he must have really liked gambling.

For years after his ban, Rose had a path back into baseball. All MLB ever really seemed to want was for him to stop lying and stop associating himself with the thing that got him banned, and that was still too much for him. This was never the case of a league that had it out for him, just a man who seemed to believe he had better things to do than try to reverse a ban he explicitly agreed to.

All of the above is still true after Rose’s death and Trump’s post. For Manfred to disregard it would set a precedent that no matter how little you do to warrant mercy, you will still receive it once you are dead. It would be a fundamental change in how cases like Rose, such as Barry Bonds, are considered. Shoeless Joe Jackson might even have a chance.

Are those extreme examples? Well, granted, Rose betting on his own team to win isn’t as bad as throwing a World Series, as Jackson and the 1919 White Sox did. We’ll give Rose that. The thing is, none of those guys signed a legal document agreeing to be banned from baseball, then expected to be unbanned from baseball after providing no reason to do so (let’s also not forget the end of the last bullet point up there).

Let’s also clarify that betting on your own team to win is absolutely a bad thing that should get a player or coach jettisoned from the game. As manager, Rose controlled every in-game decision, and baseball is the sport where your decisions the previous game most affect what you’re doing now. He could have pulled a starting pitcher early to improve his chances in one game, to the detriment of others, manipulated injury timetables or any number of things. And above all, doing something clearly illegal gave the people he was betting with leverage over him in general. It doesn’t matter whom he was betting on, Rose compromised the game by betting on it.

If Manfred can willfully forget all of that — granting an act of charity to a person who expected it while providing no reason for deserving it — what else will he be willing to forget?