Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus broke the news that there’s already a signed agreement between Pete Rose and Major League Baseball reinstating him for the 2004 season. As a baseball fan, this story interested me. Personally, I don’t think Rose should be reinstated. I won’t explain my reasons because anyone who’s really interested knows why people on both sides feel the way they do, and it’s just not interesting. The more interesting thing to me is that you’d never expect a story like this, a huge, important story, to be published first by the Baseball Prospectus. BP has always been about analysis, not news, so for them to break what would be the biggest baseball story of the season (to say the least) is shocking. Major League Baseball denied the story, but you’d expect that. For more background into how Baseball Prospectus found itself in the world of news reporting and news making, King Kaufman interviewed Will Carroll, one of the writers of the story, today for Salon.