Andor Star Wars Story – Season 1: Rogue One was released in 2016. It provided a back story to the original 1977 Star Wars in showing how rebel fighters stole the plans for the Death Star to allow a vulnerability to be found. In the original iconic movie, it was a byline, but was viewed as meriting a more full treatment. They were right, as in my view, Rogue One was the best of the tangental stories to the main Star Wars trilogy and later nine films. It had a good story, the characters were wotyhy of the audiences cheering and praise, despite the fact that we knew the ultimate outcome. Cassian Andor was one of the team who was involved in the stealing of the plans. Felicity Jones was the primary protagonist, as Jyn Erso, whose father was one of the designers of the Death Star, despite his opposing political views. The Empire, it seems, just takes what it wants. I will note that I did not re-watch Rogue One in preparation for this, nor do I have any interest in re-visiting it anytime soon. It wasn’t THAT good.

It was suggested to me to watch this series on Disney +. On a flight I was able to get well into it. I managed to watch eight of twelve of the episodes. It is commitment to watch this as each episode is around an hour in length. For me, it is Disney elongating a story of a relatively minor character. Disney has however put forth some quality actors in roles in this series like Stellan Skarsgard, Andy Serkis and Forest Whitaker. Each of them are good.

There are a few lines of plot to address differing things that are happening before the efforts of Luke and friends to blow up the first Death Star. There is a political story, where characters in the Senate are dealing with Emperor Palpatine who is centralizing his power, and also the background story of Cassian Andor with the people around him on his planet, and then the operations which are untaken where Andor is involved. The second one seems pretty contrived where the larger disruption to the Empire really is meant to be a bank/payroll heist from the Empire to fund the rebellion (I am considering the initial meet up with Skarsgard to move a piece of stolen Empire technology). There are more compelling episodes and some less so. All that to say it takes too long to move it along. For me, the action sequences are better than the scene setting or the character and family development episodes. But with the release of season two, I am not sure whether I need to keep watching this. The production is decent in a Disney way, but it is still forced I think. I’ll complete the first season, but I will unlikely continue with it. It is hard to feel that Cassian Andor is a different version of Han Solo. We saw how Disney handled a Han Solo spin off, and it wasn’t pretty.

Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose: I had read on the news this week that Pete Rose was removed by the Commissioner of Baseball from the Permanently Ineligible List for the Baseball Hall of Fame. I was quite shocked to read this. Rose was known as the player who had many statistical records including the most hits of any player, usurping Ty Cobb’s record of 4189 hits. Cobb was known as an unlikeable player, but a helluva player who was a win-at-all-cost type of player. Pete Rose was a big personality who remained a big leaguer from great skills but more because of his attitude towards the game and competing hard every single game, every single at-bat. His fatal flaw was a life of excess including betting on baseball, which he emphatically denied for decades before later admitting it. Incidentally he finished his career with 4256 hits. When he hit the record breaking single, on September 11th, 1985 he had a nine-minute standing ovation from the Cincinnati home crowd. Rose was a native from Cincinnati.

I decided to watch the four episodes of this HBO series released in July 2024.

As an 82yo guy, Pete Rose back in 2022 was looking to get himself reinstated for consideration for the Hall of Fame. He was aging and didn’t want to be in a situation where he passes, and then a year later he could be then be put into the Hall.

What you see in this documentary is the undisputed talent of the man on the field, but the flaws in his character which continued throughout his life and career off of it. When he was playing and managing, he bet on almost everything. He had a gambling addiction. Apparently he didn’t bet football and basketball games very well and lost money, but he was better with baseball. The problem was, which is obvious, is that Major League Baseball (MLB) had a ban on any player betting on baseball in those days. This is a foreign concept for readers in 2025, where the betting apps are major sponsors of professional sports leagues, and odds for games and on players are listed each day on sporting shows. But baseball after the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the White Sox were found to be given money to throw the World Series (ironically won by the Cincinnati Reds), forced MLB to be extremely harsh on violators to maintain the integrity of the game. One of those players was Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was a player mentioned (and played by Ray Liotta) in Field of Dreams (1989), along with D.B. Sweeney in the movie Eight Men Out (1988). This was well known by all players, both past and present. The MLB Rules under Rule 21(d) speaks directly to “any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee” gambling and its prohibition. In the end it is an interesting and insightful discussion about the life of an iconic baseball player. Rose also was jailed for failing to file income taxes. So off the field, the character of the man just couldn’t match the ability that he brought to the field. So this is a tale of how the mighty have fallen after the cheers of the ballpark are silenced. Ironically a year after a lifetime ban from baseball in 1989, the Reds won the World Series in 1990 without Rose as the manager, but with Lou Pinella instead.

For the record, despite being allowed back into consideration for the Hall of Fame, I do not think that Rose should be inducted into the Hall of Fame.