ROSE'S CASINO ACTIVITY NOT THE ISSUE.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

I hate to point this out, because I generally side with the Pete Rose bashers, but lately they're guilty of the one sin Rose himself never committed. They've taken their eyes off the ball.

They've lost their focus on the reason Rose was thrown out of baseball - and barred from the Hall of Fame ballot - in the first place.

Back in 1989 the issue was whether Rose had bet on baseball games, and specifically bet on Reds games, while he was the Cincinnati manager. An official investigator determined that he had. He'd violated a cardinal rule of the major leagues. His offense raised the specter of game-fixing. Which is what every sport rightly fears the most.

It wasn't that Rose had bet on football teams, on basketball teams, on hockey teams, on boxers, on horses, on dogs, or on Gallardo and Achotegui in the 14th game at the Dania jai-alai. It was that he'd bet on baseball teams, in games where he could influence the outcome. And he'd done so with bookmakers, a practice that's illegal as well as dangerous to the kneecaps.

But now there's this news.

Rose's bid to be reinstated by the commissioner's office has been set back by a newspaper report that he was seen in Las Vegas gambling at the Bellagio Hotel and breathing at the Caesars Palace sports book.

Along with an unresolved federal tax lien, the image of Rose in the casinos is held up as evidence he has failed to follow the late commissioner Bart Giamatti's command to ``reconfigure'' his life.

Current commissioner Bud Selig's investigators are said to be seeking eyewitness accounts of Rose's casino activities.

Here's what I say: Unless Rose's casino activities are found to include loan-sharking, money-laundering, past-posting the Breeders' Cup pick-six or phoning Joe Torre to suggest the Yankees tank the season opener, the Captain Renaults of the baseball world should give it a rest.

If Selig and his people think so little of Rose that legal gambling is deemed a sign of his moral decay, then clearly baseball is not ready to admit him to the field or the Hall of Fame.

In which case baseball ought to cut the charade.

The commissioner's office can't seem to decide whether it wants to lock Rose out of the house or put him in a crib and mother him. It hands the game's all-time hits leader a permanent ban for a kind of law-breaking that threatened the integrity of the game. Then it agrees to consider whether to commute his sentence after more than a decade. Then it sets out to tell a 61-year-old man how to live his life.

What's more ridiculous, that baseball officials seemed not to know Rose remains an active gambler, or that they might not distinguish between legal and illicit gambling?

Be clear about something: I've written about horse racing on and off for 15 years, I've spent hundreds of days at racetracks and, not to put too fine a point on it, I enjoy the game. In that light, I tend to be more than tolerant of gambling as long as it is permitted, to say nothing of encouraged, by society's leaders.

But be clear about something else: When it comes to contest-fixing, I'm neither tolerant nor complacent. I think the threat of gambling scandals is so terrible that sports should do everything it can to prevent them.

The question is what will prevent them and what won't.

What will help is educating athletes, threatening nasty punishments for those who would fail to give their best efforts, and making sure the rewards for winning always dwarf the rewards for losing.

What won't help is seeing the Black Sox behind every odds board.

The sports industry will never seek to eliminate sports gambling, of course, because too much of the interest in a game depends on people rooting for the Redskins to cover the 2 1/2.

But it can cross its fingers behind its back and publicly stigmatize sports gambling, even that which is conducted legally in Nevada.

The danger then is that reasonable people will recognize the double talk and tune out more worthwhile warnings.

If Pete Rose is proven to be an out-of-control and desperate gambler, one who might get himself in hock to the mob, one who would risk his sport's integrity and his own freedom to make a buck (or any other ``The Sopranos'' scenario we could dream up), then Selig's men have something.

Otherwise, treat him like a grown-up and give it to him straight.

The hand-wringing over Rose's legal gambling says nothing about whether he's worthy of a welcome back to baseball.

All it says is that baseball isn't about to welcome him back.