Pete Rose Has Fouled Out for Good

I vote in Baseball Hall of Fame balloting and have for more than 20 years. Up until yesterday, I was willing to vote for Pete Rose -- even though he wasn’t eligible and never has been -- because for the last 14 years I believed him when he said he never bet on his team while he managed the Cincinnati Reds in the 1980s.

Now Rose admits in his latest autobiography that he did indeed bet on his own team. That clinches it for me. The genie is out of the bottle. So even if Commissioner Bud Selig is swayed by Rose’s sudden discovery of the truth and puts him on the ballot for the next election, Rose will get no check-mark next to his name from me.

It’s one thing for a player to be admitted to the Hall of Fame even though he was a lout or a drunkard or, as we’ve found out after the fact about some of the great names, a racist or wife-beater. You can’t throw out a plaque because you’ve learned the player is far from a model citizen.

But we know now, by Rose’s own words, that he bet on his team. That’s unforgivable.

It is disingenuous to suggest that Rose should be elected on the merits of his game. And those merits are mighty: the career leader in base hits and games played, not to mention that his persona was one of the strongest in a sport filled with great American characters.

But know this: As soon as you walk into any locker room in major league baseball and look at the door that just shut behind you, you will see a notice that gambling is banned. No prohibition is posted so prominently against drinking, or swearing or child abuse.

Gambling. The prohibition goes back to the Black Sox affair after World War I. The World Series was fixed in a scandal that rocked the sports world when players threw a game to win a bet.

Baseball banned gambling and hired a commissioner (a former judge) to ensure the game’s integrity, at least in the public’s mind.

Yet, from his manager’s office, Rose called his bookmaker -- who knows how many times? -- to place a bet on his team. Rose claims his situation is not like the Black Sox or any other fixing scandal because he never bet against the Reds.

But of course, in a way, he did.

If he bet his team one day and not the next, then any self-respecting bookie or gambler might figure out that Rose didn’t believe his team could win that day.

Yes, sports these days offers every sort of offender a second chance at rehabilitation. There is the NBA player who takes anger management courses after his arrest on a complaint by his wife. There are repeated drug offenders suiting up this weekend in the NFL playoffs after they have given their usual urine sample to a testing lab.

Rose cites cases like these as a reason to overlook his gambling. In his book, “My Prison Without Bars,” he claims that had he been an alcoholic or drug addict instead of a gambler, he would have been suspended and back on the field in six weeks.

But for baseball, gambling is worse -- it calls into question the honesty of the whole game.

I also know something about athletes’ quotes in their own books. I ghost-wrote Willie Mays’ autobiography, as well as Carl Yastrzemski’s (two Hall of Famers, by the way). So I would take with a grain of salt any claim supposedly coming from an athlete’s own mouth in his or her autobiography. The alleged first-person assertion by Rose that he will not “beg for forgiveness like a TV preacher” smacks more to me of the ghostwriter than of contrition. Perhaps the most honest quote is Rose reporting what he said in a meeting with Selig: “I didn’t think I’d get caught.”

As far as anyone knows, Rose never went into rehab. As far as anyone knows, he might have bet directly against his own team.

And as far as I know, I’m not voting for the guy. He had a chance to come clean for free all these years.

Finally, someone had to pay him a book advance to do it?