When it comes to Pete Rose, I'm an agnostic. I don't believe his denials that he bet on baseball. And I don't believe he should be kept out of the Hall of Fame.

But mainly, I don't believe it matters more than a hill of tiny-print asterisks in the sports pages. You could say I don't care jack about Pete.

I realize this is sacrilege. Pete Rose is a cult religion in Cincinnati, where Catholics, Protestants and Jews are all outnumbered by Rosecrucians who believe Pete is a martyred patron saint of bad calls.

But I'm not the only guy in town without a vein-popping opinion on the Pete Rose Soap Opera that has been running on ESPN since 1989.

Call the witness

"I'd want to hear live testimony and cross examinations before I could make any judgment,'' said Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Norbert Nadel, when I asked if Pete Rose is guilty.

And he's the judge who presided over the circus trial when Rose sued Major League Baseball.

Judge Nadel's office wall is a shrine to the case, with framed front pages of The Enquirer and articles from lesser papers in New York and Washington. He still has an original copy of the famous "Dowd Report'' that accused Pete Rose of gambling. He still has a fat file of letters he received from all over the country. They ran about 60-40 against him, he said.

"Disgraceful abuse of judicial power,'' they said. "A sorry day when a judge takes over control of our national pastime.'' They scorched him for being a "homer'' who wouldn't call a strike on the local hero.

But the judge says he got the case at random and had no choice because Rose and his lawyers had nowhere else to go. "At the time, the issue was that they wanted (Baseball Commissioner Bart) Giamatti off the case because he had expressed an opinion about the credibility of a witness in the Dowd Report,'' he said.

Mr. Giamatti signed a letter to a federal judge, vouching for the character of a bookie who helped with the investigation against Rose.

"I ruled that there was at least a reason to believe Giamatti was therefore prejudiced against Pete Rose,'' Judge Nadel said. That blocked the hearing to punish Rose, and baseball settled out of court.

Cops and robbers

Maybe everyone in Cincinnati already knows all this, but it looks like the best brains of baseball ran outside the base path to tag Rose. They blew it.

Judge Nadel showed me an Enquirer article quoting a college law professor who called him "a hack of the first order.'' He said it was a good example of the personal attacks that failed to offer any argument against his court decision.

"After being criticized by every so-called sports and legal expert on talk radio, that's when I knew I made the right decision,'' he said. "Their criticism was so harsh and one-sided, it gave me pause.''

Judge Nadel says he would rule the same way today. And he still has no opinion on the guilt of Pete Rose.

"We never got to the gambling issue,'' he said. "We never got to the truth.''

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 513-768-8301.