A change in Major League Baseball commissioners did not alter the stance toward Pete Rose’s eligibility for the Hall of Fame.
Rob Manfred, who succeeded longtime commissioner Bud Selig in January, has denied Rose's application for reinstatement, informing baseball's all-time hits king on Monday that he will remain on the outside looking in nearly three decades after his ban for gambling on the sport, and issuing a three-page statement that says Rose has fallen far short of rehabilitating his life in a fashion that suggests he could associate with a major league team.
Manfred cited "new evidence" his staff turned up after Manfred decided in April to reexamine Rose's case and ordered a "comprehensive review" of the case, and found further instances of Rose violating baseball's Rule 21 on misconduct.
Most notably, Manfred said, was a notebook federal investigators obtained from Michael Bertolini in October 1989 that detailed "records of bets placed by Michael Bertolini on his own behalf and on behalf of Pete Rose, including bets placed on Cincinnati Reds games by Mr. Rose during the 1986 championship season when he was the player-manager for the Cincinnati Reds."
Rose met with Manfred in New York three months ago, one month after Rose's representatives submitted a polygraph test Rose took in August to, Manfred stated, "demonstrate the veracity of certain prior statements he made concerning his violations of (MLB's gambling policy."
Manfred said the polygraph results did not enter into his ruling. Manfred said that during their September meeting, Rose acknowledged betting on Reds games in 1987 (a year after he retired as a player), but that he "could not remember" many facts established in the Dowd Report on his gambling in 1985 and '86.
He also "made assertions concerning his gambling habits that were directly contradicted by documentary evidence (the Bertolini notebook) secured by my office.
"And, significantly, he told me he currently bets recreationally and legally on horses and sports, including baseball.
"It is not at all clear to me that Rose has a grasp of the scope of his violations of Rule 21....I am also not convinced he has avoided the type of conduct and associations that originally led to his placement on the permanently ineligible list.
"In short, Mr. Rose has not presented credible evidence of a reconfigured life, either by an honest acceptance of his wrongdoing, so clearly established in the Dowd Report, or by a rigorous, self-aware and sustained program of avoidance by him of all the circumstances that led to his permanent ineligibility in 1989."
