Pete Rose hopes baseball will end his lifetime ban after his first public acknowledgment he bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds.
The admission in My Prison Without Bars, his autobiography due out tomorrow, 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 ever 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 baseball commissioners more than 13 years apart. In the first, with Peter Ueberroth in February 1989, the Reds' manager denied ever 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."
After the meeting, Rose came away thinking he would be reinstated "within a reasonable period."
"I've consistently heard the statement: `If Pete Rose came clean, all would be forgiven,'" he writes. "Well, I've done what you've asked. The rest is up to the commissioner and the big umpire in the sky."
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.
But even if he appears on the ballot, he needs 75 percent of the voters to select him, and Hall rules state "voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."
Rose repeated his admission in an interview 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 says in the interview. "I'm 14 years late.
In his first autobiography, published in 1989, Rose denied gambling. That book, Pete Rose: My Story, was written with Roger Kahn.
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