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Pete Rose is a creature congenitally unable to keep arresting things from passing his lips at the least provocation. That gift has long enough defined him as a personality at once engaging and enraging. Ask anyone who overheard him on a turbulence-buffeted team flight.

"We're going down," Rose told the teammate sitting beside him. "We're going down and I have a .300 lifetime average to take with me. Do you?" There are said to be jurisdictions in which you can seat no jury to rule manslaughter unjustifiable in that kind of instance. And Rose has not lost the gift yet, even if what he now inspires has devolved in some eyes to simple battery.

When, in 2002, Pony, the shoemaking outfit, designated Rose as the centerpiece of a billboard campaign, a radio interview question arose as to whether Pony, in billboarding Rose, committed gimmickry and, by the way, Pete, does it not enable you to admit in the breach that you are exhausted for a quiet backchannel toward retrieving what you crave above and beyond all other mortal privilege? He answered, unflinchingly, in the familiar enough voice that is half street alumnus ("They should have named an alley after me, the way I acted in high school," he said at the naming of Cincinnati's Pete Rose Way), half shadow gamesman, making it easy enough to forget he was already 60-years-old.

"It's just that Pony believes in me," Rose said at the time, to ESPN Radio's Dan Patrick. "And Pony don't quite understand why I haven't been given an opportunity to be reinstated ... They believe in me, and I appreciate that. They're a class company. They're a young company, they're on the rise. And I don't think it's any kind of stunt ... When we got in bed with these guys, you know ... We told (them) we do not want no slam against baseball, nothing negative against the commissioner, we want it done in class. And they did everything we asked them to, and I take my hat off to 'em."

The billboard issue showed Rose's unmistakable, if slightly age-inflated, countenance, framed by upper and lower black horizontal strips on which appear white letters spelling, clearly enough, "Why Isn't Pete Rose In The Hall of Fame?" If that is part of everything "we" asked for, then "we" remain about as subtle as a suicide bombing.

That billboard question has an answer simple enough. Pete Rose is not in the Hall of Fame because the Hall made official and formal (in very early 1991) what it long enough established in practise from its birth: if baseball has named you permanently ineligible, you are ineligible for Hall of Fame election and enshrinement. The Hall, an independent institution, had (and has) the right (and was right) to consecrate it in formal code, even if they were moved to do so by the very real prospect that Rose might be elected in spite of his baseball ineligibility.

It is no further the Hall of Fame's business to determine Major League Baseball's governing eligibility rules than it is MLB's business to determine the Hall's. But neither could the Hall brook Rose's election and enshrinement while under MLB ban without emasculating its own credibility, inasmuch as no previous MLB-ineligible player with legitimate Hall of Fame credentials (at least two, actually: Shoeless Joe Jackson and his Black Sox teammate, Eddie Cicotte) had been elected and enshrined.

Rose knows the distinction, even if his least literate partisans and his least forgiving critics forget or fudge. To my knowledge, he has never held the Hall of Fame responsible for his MLB persona non grata. And, as excruciating a prospect as it may sound to enough of his critics, Charlie Hustler may very well have a case to make on behalf of his reinstatement. That prospect must certainly have preyed well enough upon Bud Selig's mind as the commissioner has fox-trotted, for almost a year, as to not whether, but when Rose will be reinstated to professional baseball's good standing.

A question actually arises around the entire Rose affair as to whether baseball government has turned Rose a kind of cryonic: thawing him out once in awhile when it suits their periodic conveniences, returning him to the deep freeze until next time, and otherwise reneging on a critical element in the agreement between Rose and then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti.

"I died. I'm dead," said Rose to Patrick, a comprehensible enough dash of bewilderment lacing his outrage. "But now, if baseball needs me ... then they'll be on the phone calling 15 times a week ... But if we call them, to set up a meeting, they don't even answer their phones. They're unethical, if you want to know the truth."

I know. Accepting lessons in ethics from Pete Rose too often sounds tantamount to taking airline management instruction from Osama bin Laden. This is the man who could have used the hook slide rather than plowing like a hijacked airliner into Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse, to score the winning run in an All-Star Game that was neither meaningless nor of championship import.

Technically (the rule against blocking the plate is never enforced officially), Fosse may have assumed a given risk, but he was more a step or two up and in front of the line, priming for a sweep tag. But deeming a part of town high crime "as a rule" does not grant thugs a right or licence to rob, mug, rape, or murder.

And, this is the man who belched against the ethics and, implicitly, the manhood, of the wile-and-guile relief pitcher (Gene Garber, Atlanta Braves) who stopped his 44-game hitting streak with a darting ninth-inning strikeout. To have heard Rose and his sycophancy, you would have thought he was victim of grand theft.

Hard to tell which was less relevant to them: Rose going 0-for-4 before he faced Garber in the ninth; or, Rose, the 16-year major league veteran, who suddenly forgot how to lay the wood on off-speed breaking stuff, from a pitcher who couldn't throw a better-than-batting practise fastball if he shot the ball from a howitzer.

But this is also the man who made virtue from a kind of vice in breaking the record he lived most to break. Rose indulged the vice of hanging beyond his legitimate field value to his team, just to pass Ty Cobb. Under pressure to hold out, to tie and break the record for the home audience, Rose -- by then a player-manager with his team in a pennant race -- tied Cobb in a road trip finale. Then came the Cincinnati ninth of that game. Reds on first and second, nobody out, Rose due up with power-hitting Dave Parker on deck.

The Book, The Fan, and Rose's own owner (what a surprise: the execrable Marge Schott) said: "Lay down that sacrifice; guarantee the glam knock for the home folks. Rose the manager told Rose the player what the latter knew already: Sacrifice? Leave first base open? Invite them to take the bat out of Big Dave's hands with a free pass? Let the tail-enders do what a future Hall of Famer and a Big Guy are supposed to be doing? When we got a crack at winning this game? I don't think so."

Rose swung away and recorded perhaps the most honorable strikeout of his career. Then the game was suspended, due to darkness (this was in Wrigley Field, before the lights went up), leaving Rose to go home and get the glam knock and the props with no stains attached.

Had Rose but managed his life as a human person as honorably as he managed himself around Cobb's record and for the most part as a player before that, he would not have left himself prone to baseball's official opprobrium. Unfortunately, baseball's official opprobrium seems to have invited behaviour at least as dishonorable as Rose's off-field had too long become.

The Dowd Report proves on serious reading a morass of question marks that want to be exclamation points when they grow up. There is too much left to speculation, hearsay, and incompletion; there is too little left to firm and secure final provenance. About all that yields solidly is that Rose had too much taste for betting sports with bookies; and, that he preferred doing so though flunkies and hangers-on of (we strain to be polite) dubious makeup who could destroy him if ever their relationships went into the toxic waste dump.

It turned out that it was not "if" but "when," over missing and unpaid gambling and loan monies, and it is not impossible that those provoked a hunger among the disenchanted flunkies/hangers-on to bring Rose down that equaled or surpassed any hunger to abet a purportedly professional investigation into Rose's decomposing life. That is the sort of thing that transpires when what you could call underground riches swell among the shady. Nor is it impossible that they had advanced their own baseball bets as Rose's, first to the bookies who wouldn't take their action without Rose's vouchsafe and subsequently to baseball's investigators as a way to hit him back.

Baseball's gambling rules having never been revoked or much altered, its government had to discipline Rose for his actual gambling life. He had to have incurred at least some sort of finite banishment from baseball. And he was neither the first nor the last to earn finite banishment (think Leo Durocher, a scrappy if not superstar player -- and a bad Hall of Fame choice as a manager) for gambling infractions that were not even close to actually abetting or acting on throwing a game.

After releasing his formal statement on the formal ineligibility agreement, Giamatti under press questioning a) said Rose could apply for reinstatement after a year, and b) offered at best his own opinion (citing the Dowd Report as his influence) that Rose had bet on baseball, though not on his own team. The formal agreement on Rose's banishment included no formal finding that he did or did not bet on baseball.

And baseball's rules, as written, order bookie-style gambling or betting on baseball in general to garner a single year suspension, which is precisely what Leo Durocher received for the 1947 season. (Durocher, too, was a less than admirable character, but he, too, may have had a legitimate case against baseball government's hypocrisy: He may have invited his supension explicitly when he exploded in print after seeing Yankee boss Larry MacPhail entertaining at Yankee Stadium the very gambling types against whose association Durocher had been warned.) Had it been proven beyond doubt that Pete Rose had bet on his own team, then he would have incurred a legitimate lifetime banishment. And only then.

You do not absolve Pete Rose of his real enough sins (and if you think baseball's Hall of Fame has a small pocketful of shady characters and even criminal ones, you certainly have not had a look at the NFL lately), when you say that baseball government since Giamatti's death has behaved toward him in ways we would condemn if we saw the government government behaving likewise toward an ordinary citizen. Neither does baseball government's behaviour make Rose innocent or write him an automatic Cooperstown pass. The Pony billboards may have asked why he is not in the Hall of Fame, but Rose knows the answer begins with his own actual misconduct and continues with that of baseball government.

Giamatti, of course, died unexpectedly, short of a week after the Rose decision; Rose, of course, pled guilty to income tax evasion (involving his memorabilia earnings) and went to prison for five months, beginning his sentence before the full year expired. Giamatti's successor, Fay Vincent (who had pressed his friend John Dowd upon the incoming Giamatti for the Rose case) never offered Rose the reinstatement opportunity Giamatti declared Rose should have. Neither had Vincent's eventual overthrower and successor, Bud Selig. That was then, this is...

"Pete Rose isn't banned from baseball because he's a bad person," wrote Bill James, perhaps the Dowd Report's most severe critic, in 1994 (in "The Politics of Glory: How The Hall of Fame Really Works"). "He's banned from baseball because he broke the rules ... the problem with Pete Rose isn't that he gambled. The problem is that he broke the rule against gambling ... (Y)ou don't begin the rehabilitation of baseball's Wronged Man by putting him into the Hall of Fame. That's where you end it."

Rose's Hall of Fame former teammate, Mike Schmidt, yet again predicts the end is nigh and Rose will be reinstated in very short order. Schmidt has made several such predictions over the past couple of years. But Schmidt also confesses a point that cannot much comfort Rose: he may have averaged 200 runs produced per 162 games in a Hall of Fame career, but as a prognosticator, Schmidt's batting quite below the Mendoza Line.

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