Rose May See New Hurdle on Path to Hall

Is there a movement under way to keep Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame?

Some members of a committee recently formed to review the Hall’s eligibility guidelines certainly think so. One committee member called the action taken by the Hall of Fame “a little suspicious,” and another said it’s a “thinly veiled attempt to keep Rose out.”

William Guilfoile, the Hall’s associate director, said a nine-member panel of baseball executives and writers will meet in December or January to look at the way the writers’ and veterans’ selection committees choose Hall of Famers.

The timing of the move raised suspicions among the Baseball Writers’ Assn. of America, whose 450 members elect players to the Hall. Rose, the game’s all-time hit leader, is eligible for election in 1992, five years after his last game as a player.

“We’ve been voting since 1935 and there have never been questions about the way we’ve been conducting our elections,” Jack Lang, executive secretary of the BWAA, said Wednesday. “Suddenly, a year before Pete Rose comes up for election, they want to review our process. It makes us a little suspicious.”

Guilfoile said the panel was not being convened exclusively to consider the Rose case. But “if someone on the committee wants to discuss it, I’m sure they will be able to,” he said.

Sportswriter Frank Dolson of The Philadelphia Inquirer, selected by the sportswriters’ group to serve on the committee, disagreed, saying the committee is “just a thinly veiled attempt to keep Rose out.”

Rose is serving a prison term in Marion, Ill., for cheating on his taxes and has been banned from the game for life for gambling.