Pete Rose calls it "unethical" for the commissioner's office to ignore his telephone calls and letters, baseball's William F. Bennett leaving us laughing as a self-appointed authority on living right. In the summer of his sport's discontent and disgrace, here comes Charlie Hustle pushing past the steroids and strike, armed with an ad campaign and a belief Bud Selig has never been so susceptible to a coup.

	Pete Rose has made a living from his fruitless pursuit of induction into the Hall of Fame.

This is a forgiving society, with sports icons forever the fastest out of confessionals and back into good graces. Rose always has been too foolish to understand this, too arrogant to make it work for him. The burden isn't on baseball to accommodate its banished and disgraced legend, but on him to spit out these six, long overdue words: "I did it. I am sorry."

An old Marine officer and an accomplished lawyer, John Dowd, Major League Baseball's investigator 13 years ago, has long wondered why it is so much to ask Rose for the truth. Anyone can log on to Dowdreport.com and see for themselves that Rose bet on baseball, anyone can see he's never come clean on his dirty seeds.

"I wish Pete would come to a reckoning," Dowd told me once. "I just wish he'd tell the truth. ... If he'd just come clean, I'd support him. I don't wish Pete any harm. If he did admit to betting on baseball, we'd all support him to get his life straight and get into the Hall of Fame.

"To me, this whole thing is a tragedy."

When Rose is stumping for your sympathy, turning himself into the victim he's never been, just remember: The Dowd Report has tape recordings, fingerprints and testimony of an endless array of associates connecting Rose to betting on baseball. It has telephone and bank records. It has betting slips. It has Rose signing his name to a lifetime ban, refusing to contest the small mountain of evidence. He isn't banned for betting on football and basketball and running with bad characters. Just understand: Rose is banned for betting on baseball, probably including the games he managed with the Reds.

"You've got the betting records, where he recorded the results of the games in his own handwriting," Dowd said. "That's just devastating."

And that's just too easily lost in Rose's relentless rhetoric. The report has been on public file for more than a decade, but since when in sports does sin get in the way of public sentiment? Rose could've been back in baseball a long time ago. That's the thing: Nobody wanted to fight him for the rest of his life. Nobody wanted the lifetime ban to stay just that. Everyone agrees this was a suspension to punish Rose and restore a measure of credibility to baseball, but it can't be lifted without Rose coming clean on his gambling. Baseball believed he would eventually do it. He never did.

Even without letting him work in the game, a lot of people want Rose in the Hall of Fame. Just visit Cooperstown, and you'll see his accomplishments are well represented in the museum with his bats and balls, uniforms and spikes. Rest assured, he'll be working the cobblestone streets of Cooperstown this weekend, on the edge of Ozzie Smith's celebration. Rose has a store with his name on it, there, on the same side of Main Street as the baseball museum. On the outside of the game, he's made a fortune, even stooping so low to sign and sell copies of the Dowd Report itself, the document he swears is a complete work of fiction.

When Major League Baseball's process offered Rose hearings in 1989 to fight the findings in those pages, he never bothered. There were 100 witnesses on call for his attorney to examine, but Rose understood they had him cold. "Show me the slips," he says now. "Show me the phone records. Show me the fingerprints." They tried, Pete. They tried. All of it awaited him at a hearing all those years ago, but Rose wouldn't take on Bart Giamatti and Dowd the way he had Ray Fosse.

Why wouldn't an innocent man fight to hold onto his life's legacy and love? Why wouldn't he want to answer his accusers, use expert analysis to refute the fingerprints and handwriting samples?

Why do you think?

Of course, we've been through this for 13 years now. It's getting old. It's getting tired. Yet, this shouldn't ever be lost. Whatever he tries to make the issue now, just remember: This isn't about baseball's ethics, but Pete Rose's. Always, it's his move.

Adrian Wojnarowski is a columnist for The Record (N.J.) and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPNWoj@aol.com.