Edward Stack, 88, Longtime President of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Dies

Edward Stack, who because the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame conceived the eligibility rule that continues to forestall the election of Pete Rose, the prolific hitter who had been banned from Major League Baseball for playing, died on Sunday in Port Washington, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 88.

His daughter Amy Stack mentioned his dying, at a senior dwelling facility, was brought on by problems of an damage in January that led to the amputation of his left leg.

In 1991, Mr. Stack, who held numerous positions on the Hall from 1961 to 2000 and presided over its annual induction ceremony in Cooperstown, N.Y., confronted a problem: what to do about Rose, a star participant throughout three a long time, whose 4,256 profession hits, probably the most in baseball historical past, made him clearly worthy of enshrinement.

Two years earlier, the baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, had completely banned Rose from the game after an investigation discovered that he had guess on baseball video games, together with these of his personal crew, as a participant and supervisor for the Cincinnati Reds within the Eighties.

Despite the ban, Rose would have been a first-time candidate for election to the Hall in voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America introduced in early 1992.

Early that 12 months, Mr. Stack instructed Fay Vincent, who had been Mr. Giamatti’s deputy earlier than succeeding him as commissioner after Mr. Giamatti’s dying in 1989, that the Hall’s board of administrators ought to disqualify anybody on baseball’s permanently-ineligible record from being thought-about for the Hall.

“Stack said, ‘We should change the rule because there should be a moral dimension to being elected to the Hall,’” Mr. Vincent mentioned by cellphone. “Stack had it right, and I didn’t have to encourage him.”

The rule change was unanimously permitted by the Hall’s board. It didn’t particularly title both Rose or probably the most distinguished different participant on the ineligible record, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who had been banned after he was suspended for all times with seven different members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox for a conspiracy to repair video games in that 12 months’s World Series.

“We’re cleaning up our rules of election,” Mr. Stack mentioned in a news convention after the vote. “This is probably something that should have been done years ago. This is the way it should be.”

In 2022, Mr. Stack reiterated his opposition to letting Rose into the Hall.

“Never,” he instructed Newsday. “He broke baseball’s rules.”

Edward William Stack was born on Feb. 1, 1935, in Rockville Centre, N.Y., and grew up in close by Sea Cliff. His father, additionally named Edward, was a carpenter and residential builder, and his mom, Helen (Leitner) Stack, was a homemaker.

At 14, Ed, as he was recognized, was stricken with polio. He spent a 12 months recovering in a kids’s hospital and the remainder of his life strolling on weakened legs.

After majoring in accounting and graduating from Pace College (now Pace University) with a bachelor’s diploma in business administration in 1956, he started working in Manhattan as an accountant for Clark Estates, a agency that handles monetary administration for the organizations affiliated with the influential Clark household of Cooperstown, together with the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“I graduated Friday night,” he instructed a Pace publication, “and reported to work Monday morning.”

Mr. Stack by no means stopped working for the Clark household’s pursuits in Cooperstown, though he labored there half time whereas preserving a full-time workplace in Manhattan.

He turned the Hall of Fame’s secretary in 1961, president in 1977 and chairman in 1979.

He additionally served on a number of different boards, together with that of the Fenimore Art Museum, housed in a mansion donated by the Clark household. He oversaw renovations there and at Bassett Healthcare Network, which the Clark household funded at its inception, and building of the Clark Sports Center, a health and recreation facility, the place the Hall’s induction ceremony is held.

“I can honestly say that Ed deeply understood my family’s vision for Cooperstown and for the Clark-affiliated organizations,” Jane Forbes Clark, who turned chairwoman of the Hall after Mr. Stack stepped down in 2000 and is the president of the Clark Foundation, mentioned in an interview. “Ed instinctively knew how to honor that vision and bring it forward.”

Mr. Stack additionally oversaw building on the Hall, together with the addition of a three-story west wing in 1980 that created new exhibition area and a subterranean stage to accommodate huge collections of artifacts, in addition to a $7.5 million enlargement in 1989 timed to the Hall’s fiftieth anniversary, which changed a former gymnasium with workplace area, extra room for displays and a theater.

In addition to his daughter Amy, Mr. Stack is survived by his spouse, Christina (Hunt) Stack, whom he met whereas she was a summer season waitress on the Otesaga Resort Hotel in Cooperstown, owned by the Clark household; two different daughters, Suzanne and Kimberly Ann Stack; three grandchildren; and a sister, Barbara Aasheim.

Mr. Stack figured in a dream of Leon Day, a star Negro National League pitcher who, on the day he was elected to the Hall by the veterans committee in 1995, telephoned his spouse, Geraldine, from his hospital room in Baltimore, the place he was being handled for a coronary heart ailment.

“I dreamt that Ed Stack came into my hospital room with this box and told me to open it,” she recalled him saying when she spoke at his Hall of Fame induction months later. “And when I did, baby, inside was the prettiest ring I ever seen”— emblematic of his election — “and I’ve got to get out of here and get up to the Hall of Fame and get my ring.”

He died six days later. He by no means obtained his ring.