Baseball journalism is bad enough when it reports a trade that is never made or a free agent who is not signed by the team the report says will sign him. It is bad when it says, as The New York Times has done on more than one occasion, that Curt Flood’s losing lawsuit led to the creation of free agency.

Those kinds of errors, however, are minor when compared to the type of error reporters and their websites and other publications made three weeks ago in their reports about Darren Daulton’s brain cancer.

“Daulton cancer-free after two-year battle,” MLB.com proclaimed.

The website Section215.com reported “Darren Daulton is ‘Cancer Free.’”

Philadelphia.com announced “Darren Daulton Cleared of Brain Cancer.”

Macho-Row, a Phillies blog, said “Darren Daulton is beating brain cancer and that is awesome.”

Sportingnews.com’s headline was “Darren Daulton visits Phillies spring training as he moves beyond brain cancer.”

The Daulton story carried the same headline in the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal and the website NBCSports HardballTalk: “Darren Daulton says he’s cancer free.”

As I learned after an extensive search of reports on Daulton’s brain cancer, he said …

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The Pete Rose debate goes on. It will continue to go on. It will outlast Rose. It will outlast Rob Manfred, the new commissioner. It will outlast Bud Selig, the old commissioner, who let Rose’s application for reinstatement languish in a desk drawer for 17 or 18 years. It will outlast Fay Vincent, the former commissioner, who last week contributed to this space a cogent explanation of why it is important for Rose to remain outside of Major League Baseball.

I readily and without reservation agree with Vincent. I haven’t trusted Rose since the day he lied to me in spring training of 1989, about 24 hours after he had appeared in Commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s office in New York to respond to questions from Ueberroth and Commissioner-elect Bart Giamatti about his alleged betting on baseball.

Rose lied in his reply to my question about why he had been summoned to New York, and he continued lying for 15 years. He was not only a gambler, violating baseball’s cardinal rule, but he was also a …

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(Editor’s note: With a new commissioner in office, talk has renewed about the possibility that Pete Rose could gain reinstatement to Major League Baseball. Here, in a guest column, we present the view of the man who was deputy commissioner when Rose agreed to a ban from MLB and later became the eighth commissioner of MLB.)

On the topic of whether Pete Rose should be pardoned by the new Commissioner, Rob Manfred, I begin with two important contentions. One is that the Rose case is not about Pete Rose but is rather about whether baseball should alter the deterrent against gambling that has been so effective. The second is that any commissioner who alters that deterrent then owns the full risks of any future gambling scandals that might occur.

The new commissioner will carefully …

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