Thursday, November 19, 1998

NEW YORK - Pete Rose, angered that Commissioner Bud Selig hasn't ruled on his request for reinstatement, is thinking about suing baseball if he's turned down.

Rose, who agreed in August, 1989, to accept a lifetime ban, applied for reinstatement on Sept. 26, 1997. Baseball's career hits leader is ineligible for the Hall of Fame as long as the ban is in force.

ROSE RIPS BENCH

Pete Rose had harsh words for former Reds teammate Johnny Bench, who said Rose should not be reinstated. "If you listen to Johnny Bench, you'd think he was in on every meeting I ever had," Rose said. "He wasn't in on any of them." He said Bench was angry "that the street outside Cinergy Field is named Pete Rose Way and not Johnny Bench Way."

"They made a big thing out of the fact that I went to one of the Reds' minor league games and talked to the players in the clubhouse - and the Reds asked me to do that," Rose says in the January issue of Sport.

"It took baseball 20 minutes to put out a statement about that, that I may have violated the agreement and they were threatening to fine the Reds a quarter-million dollars, which they never did.

"Yet now I applied for reinstatement under the agreement over a year ago and I don't hear from them. I don't want to have to go to court against them again, and I won't do anything until I'm told one way or another, then we'll see. All I'm telling you is, whoever is gonna say no, they're gonna have to give me and you and everybody else a good reason."

Said Rich Levin, spokesman for the commissioner's office: "We have the application and we will deal with it when we think it's appropriate."

When might that be?

"When we decide it is," Levin said. "The last I'd heard, his lawyers and our lawyers have been in contact and I haven't heard anything since."

Rose said he was angry that he was penalized and Albert Belle wasn't. Belle was involved with gambling, but there were no accusations he bet on baseball.

"Albert Belle is supposed to have written $7,000 in checks to bookmakers during the season," Rose said, "and nobody did anything because he turned the bookmakers in? How does baseball turn its back on that?

Other excerpts from Rose's interview with Sport:

On his son, Pete Jr.: "I'm gonna sound bitter about my son because I am . . . the Reds brought him up late in the year (September 1997), he starts one game, goes 1-for-3, makes a couple of good plays and puts 33,000 people in the stands for a bad ballclub. Then they don't start him and he's not invited to spring training the next season . . . I just think (manager) Jack McKeon didn't like him. Whatever it was McKeon had something against him."

On gambling: "I'm the only guy in the world who, if I go to the Kentucky Derby or the Belmont, or even if I even drive by a casino, I'm doing a bad thing. I relax going to the race track. Went I went to the race track I stayed within my means. I didn't bet my gas or electric money or my house payments."

• Borgman cartoon on Rose
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