Rose Left Out After Playing His Way In : Baseball: Former teammate Seaver expected to join Hall of Fame, but banned all-time hits leader left off ballot.

This was the day Pete Rose waited for nearly 24 years. The career leader in hits once said, “4,256 hits, 2,200 runs. That’s all I did. I’m a Hall of Famer.”

No he isn’t.

On a day Rose and Tom Seaver expected to go into baseball’s Hall of Fame together, Seaver was a lock and Rose was locked out.

The doors of Cooperstown slammed shut on Rose last year when the Hall’s directors voted, 12-0, to bar the banned baseball star from its ballot.

Rose would have been on ballot for the first time in 1992, right there with Seaver, Tony Perez and Rollie Fingers. The results were announced Tuesday night and Seaver was expected to be a landslide winner. Rose will have to wait for another day.

While the rule adopted does not specifically mention Rose, the former Cincinnati Reds’ player and manager is the only living person on the permanently ineligible list. Rose can become eligible for the Hall ballot only if the baseball commissioner reinstates him by December 2005. None of the previous 14 individuals banned from baseball were reinstated.

“The directors felt that it would be incongruous to have a person who has been declared ineligible by baseball to be eligible for baseball’s highest honor,” Hall of Fame president Ed Stack said. “It follows that if such individual is reinstated by baseball, then such individual would be a candidate for election.”

Rose was placed on baseball’s ineligible list on Aug. 23, 1989, by the late commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. The commissioner concluded after a six- month investigation that Rose bet on baseball games, including those involving the Reds. Rose, a three-time National League batting champion and its most valuable player in 1973, was considered an odds-on favorite for first-year election--maybe a record percentage--until the investigation that led to his banishment.

However, former AL president Lee MacPhail and current president Bobby Brown proposed the rule to keep Rose off the ballot. No write-in votes are permitted under the rules of election, but some writers did so as a protest over Rose being removed without their approval.

“I had felt right from the start that if someone was ineligible, that person should not be considered for the Hall of Fame,” Brown said.

The Baseball Writers Assn. of America, which votes for the Hall of Fame, said it would announce the number of write-in votes for Rose each year, even though they won’t count. Election to the Hall requires a candidate to appear on a 75% of the ballots.

“We feel a significant number of people will write in Pete Rose’s name despite the decision,” BBWAA executive secretary Jack Lang said. “We feel it is incumbent upon us to make those votes known.”

Rose batted .303 in a 24-year career and set records for hits (4,256), games (3,562), at-bats (14,053) and singles (3,215). He was the NL Rookie of the Year in 1963, the World Series MVP in 1975 and won NL batting titles in 1968, 1969 and 1973.

Because the BBWAA may consider only those players retired for between five and 20 seasons, and because the veterans committee can’t pick post-World War II players who failed to get 60% of the writers’ vote in at least one year, Rose must come off the ineligible list by December 2005 if he is to gain election.

“If he can’t get reinstated in that fifteen-year period, he would not become eligible,” Stack said.

“Sure, I wrote him in,” said columnist Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “What he did was very wrong. Obviously, he is flawed in many ways as a human being. But just think of all the things he did on the field. I checked to make sure it wouldn’t invalidate my ballot.”

“I didn’t vote for him,” Dayton Daily News baseball writer Hal McCoy said. “I don’t think he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame at this point, because of everything he’s been through and what he dragged baseball through that year.”

McCoy said integrity is supposed to be considered for a Hall of Fame candidate.

“Rule 21b says you don’t bet on baseball. From what I’ve read from the (John) Dowd report, I believe that he did.”

Rose will probably ask for reinstatement soon, but its unlikely baseball will do so unless Rose admits he bet on baseball games. That may never happen.

“If I have to admit to something I didn’t do, then I guess I’ll never get in,” Rose told Newsday last year. “It’s not worth it.”