Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By Associated PressHits leader says he bet on baseball as a manager, possibly easing path to reinstatement.
NEW YORK - Now the wait begins.
Pete Rose hopes baseball will end his lifetime ban after his first public acknowledgment he bet on games while managing the Reds.
The admission in My Prison Without Bars, his autobiography due out Thursday, will be part of the evidence in Rose's case for reinstatement, commissioner Bud Selig's chief deputy, Bob DuPuy, said Monday.
"The application remains pending, and the commissioner will take all of this into account," DuPuy said.
Whether or when baseball makes a decision is anyone's guess. Selig has refused to rule for more than six years on Rose's bid for reinstatement, which is necessary for the career hits leader to reach the Hall of Fame.
Rose agreed to the lifetime ban in August 1989, and he applied for reinstatement in 1997.
For 14 years, Rose denied publicly he bet on baseball. He fesses up in the book, saying he regrets gambling on the game he loves and then lying about it.
Rose says he started betting regularly on baseball in 1987, the year after he stopped playing, according to excerpts from the book released to Sports Illustrated for this week's issue, which hits newsstands Wednesday. He says he only bet on the Reds to win.
Selig's immediate predecessor, Fay Vincent, read the excerpts and was outraged, concluding that Rose did not deserve reinstatement.
"There's no sense of regret, no sense of shame, no sense of the damage he did to baseball," Vincent said. "I guess I'm really disgusted. I think the whole thing is a sordid, miserable story. It's sort of like turning over a stone: You see a lot of maggots, and it's not very pretty."
Rose chronicles two meetings with commissioners more than 13 years apart. In the first, with Peter Ueberroth in February 1989, the Reds manager denied betting on baseball. In the second, with Selig in November 2002, Rose decided to confess.
"Yes, sir, I did bet on baseball," Rose told Selig during the private meeting.
"How often?" Selig asked.
"Four or five times a week," Rose replied. "But I never bet against my own team, and I never made any bets from the clubhouse."
"Why?" Selig asked.
"I didn't think I'd get caught."
If reinstated, Rose's last chance to appear on the writers' ballot for the Hall of Fame is December 2005. After that, he could be voted in by the veterans' committee.
Rose repeated his admission on ABC News' Primetime Thursday, parts of which aired Monday on Good Morning America.
"It's time to clean the slate, it's time to take responsibility," Rose said. "I'm 14 years late.
"I just never had the opportunity to tell anybody that was going to help me. ... I couldn't get a response from baseball for 12 years. It's like I died and, and they knew I died and they didn't want to bring me back. They were just going to let me rot."
Rose wrote that if he "had been an alcoholic or a drug addict, baseball would have suspended me for six weeks and paid for my rehabilitation."
Rose admitted placing bets with Ronald Peters through Thomas Gioiosa and Paul Janszen, the primary witnesses in the 1989 investigation by baseball lawyer John Dowd that led to the agreement in which Rose accepted a lifetime ban.
Dowd concluded Rose bet on baseball from 1985-87 and detailed 412 baseball wagers between April 8-July 5, 1987, including 52 on Cincinnati to win.
In an autobiography published in 1989, Rose denied gambling. That book, Pete Rose: My Story, was written with Roger Kahn.
"I feel he has embarrassed me," Kahn said Monday. "I must have asked Pete 20 times, "Did you bet on baseball?' He would look at me, blink his eyes and say, "I didn't bet baseball. I have too much respect for the game.' "