The McGwire-Rose comparisons make no sense

ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski can’t see why, if Mark McGwire is allowed to take a job in the game, Pete Rose is not. Indeed, he spends a couple dozen paragraphs making that equivalency, culminating in this:

Yes, Rose betrayed the game by gambling on baseball. There’s no way around that elephant in the middle of the dugout. But McGwire, Alex Rodriguez and Andy Pettitte -- admitted PED users -- betrayed a similar trust.

Look, we can argue all day about whether McGwire’s or Rose’s transgressions were worse in the cosmic sense, but before we do that, don’t the people in Rose’s corner have to at least acknowledge that, with Rose, there was actually a rule in place that specifically banned anyone who violated it for life? Wojciechowski makes no mention of it whatsoever. At the same time, don’t they have to acknowledge that there’s not, nor has there ever been, a rule doing the same for PED use? Wojciechowski likewise fails to mention that.

Blame MLB for having uneven rules in this regard if you must, but there is no injustice being done simply because Pete Rose is being punished pursuant to the rules he violated and Mark McGwire isn’t being banned pursuant to some retroactive rule that a few sportswriters would like to enact.

Oh, and another thing: Wojciechowski repeats a charge I’ve seen over and over again recently:

McGwire issued a statement to The Associated Press and agreed to a handful of sit-down interviews, but has yet to do a full news conference (the recent six-minute fiasco in St. Louis doesn’t count). Put it this way: McGwire hasn’t gone through the full truth car wash.

McGwire sat for an hour with Bob Costas and did interviews with Joe Posnanski, Wojciechowski’s own ESPN colleagues Tim Kurkjian and Bob Ley, every St. Louis writer who matters and several other members of the media. If Wojciechowski is being serious when he says that’s insufficient, isn’t he saying that his colleagues did a crappy job?