Rose merits a plaque in the Hall of Fame

There are those of us who have argued for the past decade that Pete Rose's lifetime banishment from organised baseball and his candidacy for the sport's Hall of Fame should be separate issues.

The Baseball Establishment has successful headed off that mini-revolt at every turn. The ballot I receive in the mail each year doesn't even have a space for a write-in vote. Should I attempt to cast one, it would invalidate the entire process.

Still, the fact remains that in a major league baseball career that spanned the years 1963-1986, Peter Edward Rose accumulated 4,356 base hits - more than any other man who ever played the game.

With the possible exception of Shoeless Joe Jackson (see 1919 Chicago "Black Sox," or the films Eight Men Out and Field Of Dreams), Rose is the most accomplished ex-player not enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York.

His exclusion is the result of a 1989 consent decree Rose signed along with the late Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. Following a protracted and exhaustive investigation, Rose grudgingly accepted his expulsion from the game, but, despite an overwhelming mountain of circumstantial evidence, admitted no guilt in a battery of charges levied against him.

The most serious of these was that, while serving as player-manager of the Cincinnati Reds in the late 1980s, Rose regularly bet on baseball games, including those in which his own team figured.

Even 12 years later, "Pete Rose gambled" should be a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one. Rose enthusiastically admits to having bet on horses, dogs, football, and basketball during his active baseball career, and since his involuntary retirement he has, among other things, hosted radio shows from Las Vegas casinos.

It seems altogether reasonable that a fellow with that sort of gambling Jones would, somewhere along the line, attempt to gain an edge by betting on something he knew a bit about.

Moreover, John Dowd, the former FBI agent hired by Giamatti to investigate the Rose Affair a dozen years ago, came up with telephone records that had Rose making an average of 20 telephone calls a day from his office in the Reds' clubhouse to bookies and runners. The phone record runs from May 1st through to September 1st, the heart of the baseball season. The sports Rose claimed to have been betting on weren't even in season for most of that period.

The entire issue has been revived and moved to the forefront of public debate anew with the publication of a story in the current issue of Vanity Fair, in which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger levels charges that besides betting on (and possibly against) his own team, Rose habitually tried to hedge his bets by cheating (using a corked bat, among other things), and may even have attempted to augment his income by investing in the cocaine trade.

Even though Bissinger's chief informant is Tommy Gioiosa, a punkish, steroid-addled flunkie who ran Rose's errands (and sometimes shared his house) during much of the period in question, the story has the ring of truth. It is, to say the least, far more believable than anything Rose has had to say for himself over the past dozen years.

The other day Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Tim Sullivan, who covered both Rose's active career and subsequent fall from disgrace, described the apparently endless saga as "a Greek tragedy for our times - complete with a fatal flaw, a cruel fate, and a carping chorus."

"I've been accused of everything, but I've never been accused of being a cocaine dealer and a drug dealer," Rose said in an interview with Bloomberg News this week. "All I can tell you is, they better have credible evidence if they start writing that kind of stuff."

Rose, of course, has promised legal action before, but has never followed up on the threats. He knows fully well that pursuing legal redress would be inviting the Commissioner's office to submit the hoard of evidence that has never been presented in a court of law.

Rather, he has preferred to try his case in the court of public opinion, appealing to the sympathetic instincts of the hero-worshiping populace at large.

Following his banishment from baseball, Rose did a short stretch in a Federal prison for failing to report his income from baseball card shows.

Gioiosa refused to cooperate with the government in that investigation, and was punished with a far longer sentence - two years - when the feds brought the hammer down and hit him with both tax and drugs (steroids) charges. (Rose charged that Gioiosa was paid for cooperating with the new Vanity Fair story. Bissinger and the magazine's publisher denied that this was the case.)

The latest spate of allegations will only fuel the Hall of Fame debate. Rose himself claims that current Commissioner Bud Selig (now the third Commissioner to preside over his banishment) is "in too deep" in his endorsement of his two predecessors' charges to extricate himself by forgiving Rose's past sins.

If I'm the Baseball Commissioner, I don't let Pete Rose anywhere near a Major League park, either. The man has adequately demonstrated himself to be, if not altogether dangerous, an embarrassment to himself as well as the sport.

The Hall of Fame is another matter entirely. This should be an open-and-shut case, because we're not talking about beatification here. What Rose accomplished in his playing days should not be tainted by his subsequent conduct, and any way you slice them, his numbers justify his candidacy.

And if you need another argument, one is readily available: If O.J. Simpson can be enshrined in the Football Hall of Fame (which he is), then Pete Rose merits his own plaque in Cooperstown.