It probably always will feel impossible for anyone truly familiar with the Pete Rose gambling case to find himself turning in the direction of Rose's latest autograph show and bleating, "All is forgiven!" Just too much information, too much history, too much Pete for that.

	It appears now that Pete Rose's worst mistake might have been disputing baseball's findings.

But if Major League Baseball's top officials have just proved anything, it is that "two sides to every story" doesn't even begin to cover things in this case -- to say nothing, suddenly, of the deep, real damage.

And for all the time we've spent insisting that Rose degraded the sport and himself to the point that a lifetime ban was richly earned, it is time now to raise an index finger toward the obvious: MLB, collectively, is every bit as big a rat.

The latest news would be shocking if we weren't talking about baseball, a sport that has managed to surgically remove itself from the hearts of millions of Americans over the past 20 years by its broad-scale ineptitude. An excellent report in the New York Daily News on Friday has the latest hideous parcel of information cold: Baseball officials investigated two umpires in 1989 for gambling, confronted them with the evidence, clearly received admissions of guilt, and took action on their cases.

But here's the kicker: Whereas Pete Rose's association with gamblers cost him his entire affiliation with Major League Baseball, these two umpires received nothing more than probationary status.

Whereas Rose's case bled ink off the pages of every major newspaper in America, these two umpires were allowed to deal with their shame in private.

Whereas Rose was banished from the sport and cast out as a pariah, these umpires, Frank Pulli and Rich Garcia, saw their baseball lives go largely unaffected. Pulli now serves MLB as a supervisor of umpires, and Garcia may soon have a similar title.

And the difference? The difference, in the absence of any formal finding otherwise, is that the lords of baseball simply believed their umpires and didn't believe Pete Rose.

There. Everyone feel better?

Of course, we're not suggesting that Rose wasn't crooked as an oak branch. Anyone who has read John Dowd's investigative report on Pete's gambling habits (or heard any of the seemingly endless rounds of first-person accounts from former Rose gofers) understands that the evidence against Rose was high-stacked and multiple-sourced.

But it's important to go back to the day of then-commissioner Bart Giamatti's announcement of Rose's ban. In the statement Rose signed agreeing to his punishment, the two sides declared that there would be no formal finding that Rose bet on baseball or on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds. No, that conclusion was one reached by Giamatti himself, outside the realm of what was legal or provable.

Bart determined for himself, from the evidence he saw, that Rose bet on baseball, and he had the audacity to use the platform of his announcement of Rose's ban to make that determination public. Many of us feel quite certain that Giamatti came to the correct conclusion, but in no way does it dilute the overpowering strength of the hypocrisy at work here.

The Daily News quoted Giamatti's successor, Fay Vincent, as saying the umpires' case didn't rise to the level of Rose's because there was no proof or accusation that the umps bet on baseball. But understand this: In terms of official finding, there was no proof that Rose bet on baseball, either -- only accusation.

Perhaps only baseball could make such a complete cock-up of such a critical case. Only the lords of baseball could have determined that a case involving two umpires associating with gamblers did not need to be made public at the same time that the sport's all-time leading hitter was going down in a flaming ball of used betting slips, innuendo, investigation and pious denouncement.

The Rose ban, we were told, had to do with the sanctity of the game, but what we've just learned is that it is MLB alone that decides where that sanctity lies. It would have been a horrible shame to see good umpires like Pulli and Garcia lose their jobs, but look where baseball stands today: On a platform of robust self-mockery, its involved parties trying desperately to convince people they did the right thing.

Why? Because Pulli and Garcia didn't lie, that's why. How did baseball's officials know this? Well, they just did, that's all.

In the Daily News story, Dowd praised Pulli and Garcia for cooperating so fully with his 1989 investigation, adding, "They were men about it." The obvious contrast, of course, is with Rose's defiant attitude and legal attempts to challenge baseball's findings, a defiance that continues to this day.

But these aren't cases about attitude; they are cases about gambling. They are cases about baseball's fervent vigilance of its image as a crook-free sport, a sport with virtually a zero-tolerance rule when it comes to association with gamblers. From the Black Sox scandal forward, this has been the case.

And so it continues to be -- unless, that is, someone in baseball's front office decides that it isn't. There were three such cases in the Major Leagues in the late 1980s. We now understand that the lords of the game, and the lords alone, could work up their righteous indignation about only the one.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.