The Hall Is Closed to Rose : Baseball: Cooperstown board unanimously backs recommendation that he be kept off ballot.

The Hall of Fame’s board of directors voted unanimously Monday to accept the recommendation of a special committee and exclude players on baseball’s permanently ineligible list from election to the Hall.

The move was aimed at all-time hits leader Pete Rose, who was placed on the ineligible list for his alleged gambling activities while manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1989. Rose would have been eligible for election to the Hall this December.

Of Monday’s 12-0 vote, Hall of Fame president Ed Stack said: “The directors felt that it would be incongruous to have a person who has been declared ineligible by baseball to be eligible for baseball’s highest honor. It follows that if such individual is reinstated by baseball, then that individual would be a candidate for election.”

Rose can apply to Commissioner Fay Vincent for reinstatement at any time but has yet to do so. He is living at a Cincinnati halfway house and fulfilling the community-service portion of a federal sentence for felony tax evasion. That sentence included five months in an Illinois prison camp. None of the 14 men banned previously by baseball were ever reinstated.

Conceivably, if Rose is not reinstated by December of 2005, he would never be eligible for election to the Hall. A player becomes eligible five years after he retires but can stay on the ballot or be considered for it only through his 20th year of retirement.

And the veterans committee is prevented from selecting any post-World War II player who did not get at least 60% of the votes in at least one year.

Cal Levy, a spokesman for the management company that handles Rose, said Rose would have no comment on the vote.

“He feels it’s out of his control,” Levy said. “It was certainly not unexpected.”

And one of Rose’s close friends told the Associated Press that Rose wasn’t surprised or upset by the board vote.

“He wasn’t really depressed over it or anything,” said Jeff Ruby, a business partner of Rose’s. “He feels confident he’s going to be reinstated. That’s the reason why it’s not upsetting him that much.”

The action by the board removes Rose and any other player who is declared permanently ineligible from the jurisdiction of the Baseball Writers Assn. of America, which has screened candidates for the Hall of Fame ballot and conducted the voting for 55 years.

Kit Stier of the Oakland Tribune, president of the writers association, said he is in the process of polling the chapters to determine an appropriate response, but that no action will be taken until the next national meeting at the July All-Star game in Toronto.

“Some members believe we should no longer participate in the Hall voting, but the majority seems to feel otherwise and is unwilling to give up the vote,” Stier said.

Jack Lang, executive secretary of the BBWAA, said he expects Rose to receive a significant number of write-in votes each year, even though they won’t count.

“However, I think it’s incumbent on us to announce the total publicly,” said Lang, who counts the votes.

Four members of the Hall’s 16-member board did not attend Monday’s meeting: Vincent, who is vacationing in Jamaica; Hall of Famers Roy Campanella and Charlie Gehringer and Boston Red Sox owner Jean Yawkey.

Vincent has said he would not have voted even if he had attended the meeting because he does not want to turn the issue into a Vincent-Rose controversy. He has denied that the impetus for the board’s action came from the commissioner’s office, although it is believed that Vincent has not wanted to be put in the embarrassing position of presenting a Hall plaque to a person ruled ineligible because of a commissioner’s investigation.

Voting in favor of the rule were: Stack, American League President Bobby Brown, former AL president Lee MacPhail, National League President Bill White, former NL president Chub Feeney, former commissioner Bowie Kuhn, former Montreal Expo president John McHale, Milwaukee Brewer owner Bud Selig, Detroit Tiger chairman Jim Campbell, former St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bob Broeg, Mayor Harold Hollis of Cooperstown, N.Y., and Stephen Clark, son of the Hall of Fame founder.

Their decision won’t affect the display of Rose memorabilia already in the National Baseball Museum, Stack said.

“There are many artifacts from Pete Rose’s career in the museum itself,” Stack said. “And this is part of baseball history and this will always be, not to be removed or changed.”

In anticipation of Monday’s decision, Ron Lewis, a collector who donated the uniform Rose wore when he broke Stan Musial’s National League record for hits, asked the Hall to return the uniform. His request was turned down by the Hall board Monday.