First let's get one thing straight. Pete Rose is not a pretty sight.

At 62, Rose remains what he has always been. He is a hustler. Once, when he was a slap hitting, overachieving infielder with the Cincinnati Reds, that character trait served him well. He became the all-time hit king of major league baseball, legging out a major league-high 4,256 hits in a career that far exceeded the gifts God blessed him with because he refused to back down from any challenge, including those his own body created for him.

For many years Rose was praised for this, but an old hustler is not perceived the same way Charlie Hustle was. After Rose was caught gambling on baseball games in 1989 while serving as manager of his beloved Reds, everything that had once been his ally conspired against him. He denied the truth of those bets, just as he once denied the truth of his limited athletic gifts. He didn't see the difference because to him there was no difference. A fight's a fight.

For the past 14 years, Rose has been banned from any association with the sport because he refused to admit his guilt, even when investigators built a powerful case against him. Banned not only from working in the game that defined his life -- in fact was his life -- but banned from the crowning moment of his career.

Say what you will about Rose, no one can deny he earned the right to be enshrined with the game's greatest players in the Hall of Fame.

He earned it by being what he still is. He earned it by being a hustler.

When you hustle on a baseball diamond, it's a glorious thing. When you hustle your way through life by gambling, lying, conniving and selling everything you can sell, including your dignity, to make a fast buck, it is an inglorious thing. Having said all this, what does that have to do with letting the man into a glorified museum he deserves to be part of?

Rose never would have been considered for the Hall of Fame on his managerial skills, and it appears it was only after he stopped playing -- and consequently lost the high that comes from that hearty brew of competition and idolatry -- that he started on the road to becoming a degenerate gambler capable of losing $8,000 to $15,000 a day betting on baseball games. So what he did to get into the Hall of Fame really didn't have much to do with what he did to get banned from it.

This in no way exonerates him, but major league baseball long maintained that if Rose had admitted his guilt, his confession would not only have purged his soul but also would have made him right with the game.

Now Rose has done that, but not with sufficient humbleness to suit a very unhumble man named Fay Vincent. Vincent is the former commissioner of baseball who at the time Rose was banished was assisting then commissioner Bart Giamatti in pressing the case against Rose.

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In the end, Rose would be exiled and Giamatti would suffer a heart attack that took his life. There is no proof the two acts were connected, but a reasonable person could certainly conclude the stress and controversy that swirled around baseball at the time had something to do with the death of Vincent's friend. Does that bitterness and pain have anything to do with his ongoing opposition to Rose's reinstatement? If so, what does that say about Vincent, who was ultimately fired by baseball's owners because he actually thought they wanted him to act like a commissioner and inspired him to write a book unhumbly entitled "The Last Commissioner?''

The larger point is this: Why all the moralizing over whether Rose should be in the Hall of Fame in the first place? This is not one of the great moral questions of our time, such as whether we should go to war over oil. That quaint old museum in Cooperstown is not the Hall of Morality, nor is it the Gate to Heaven. If it were, it would have a lot fewer members. It wouldn't include Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, two of the greatest players ever to pick up a bat but men of somewhat shady character themselves.

The transgressions that ruined Rose's reputation occurred long after he had made his mark as a player. No apology is enough to win back the trust he lost when he first began betting on games he had control over as manager of the Reds, but it is his bat and his glove and, yes, his hustle that won him the right to membership in the Hall of Fame. The two are not really connected, unless you think he was on his way to becoming the next John McGraw.

Rose has apologized, in his way, for his mistake and more importantly he has owned up to it after 14 years of lying. Typical of a hustler, he found a way to turn it into a money-making proposition by releasing a book entitled "My Prison Without Bars'' this week, a book in which he tells the sad story of these past 14 years of lying and living with it and without the game of baseball.

In the book Rose writes, "I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way. So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let's move on.''

As apologies go, it wasn't much. But what did you expect from a jut-jawed guy who made himself into a baseball star by never backing down?

How does the guy who ran out every walk, who ran over catcher Ray Fosse in an All-Star game just to score the winning run, who ran his way past Cobb as the game's all-time hit king, suddenly become as meek as a lamb? How does such a guy, a guy who never gave an inch, suddenly plead for mercy?

And how does a hustler stop hustling when there's a buck to be made?

He doesn't. Pete Rose will remain Pete Rose to the end, alive with all his warts but at least finally telling the truth about his gambling. Baseball wanted him to admit he'd done wrong and so he has. What more do they want? Do they want the leopard to change his spots? Not possible.

Did Rose apologize the way Bart Giamatti would have liked? No, he did not. Is he capable of such a thing? No, he is not. So what does baseball really want from Pete Rose?

They want him to become someone he never was, someone he never could be, because they want the public to still believe baseball is something it never was. It's not a passion play. It's play for pay. Always was. Always will be.

So what baseball needs to do is get off its high horse and make Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame. Then the writers need to vote him in the second time his name comes up. Not the first time if they don't want to, but the next time because it is the last time he can be on the ballot.

They need to do this because it's right.

Baseball needs to say the game's most prolific hitter deserves a plaque in Cooperstown and that plaque needs to list all his many feats, including the final ones that led to his permanent banishment from the game he loved. When fathers walk through the Hall with their sons and daughters they can show them that plaque and tell them the sad story of Pete Rose. Tell of all he overcame to reach this place, then tell them how he threw it all away. There is a lesson there that will do more for kids than watching him hit or watching him sign autographs in exile a few doors down from the Hall each summer during the induction ceremony.

Rose has done what baseball wanted, after all. He's admitted he was lying 14 years ago when he said he never bet on the game. He's admitted he kept lying for all these years. That he found a way to turn confession into profit should surprise no one. Nor should it mitigate against the embarrassment of his confession.

So let Pete Rose in the little museum in Cooperstown because he's earned the right to be there. Then, tell him he will never be reinstated, will never manage another major league team, will never wear a uniform again because he's earned that, too.

Then baseball should do just what Pete Rose suggested. It should move on.