Pete Rose is all about morality.

Whether you’re for him or against him, no sports figure sparks more passion than Pete Rose does. That’s because he ignites our basic sense of moral values, the tenets we grew up with and by which we, at least partially, have defined ourselves since childhood.

On the field, Rose epitomized the morality of the fan: play to win, give it your all every day, no matter what.

In fact, one of his most famous quotes was, “I never got booed in a white uniform,” because he never mailed it in, never half-assed it, never jogged out a fly ball. If he was on your team, you loved him.

Integrity. Heart. Hustle. Those are the things that defined Pete Rose’s game, Charlie Hustle’s game.

On the field, Pete Rose was sports morality.

Hell, lots of people were willing to overlook his cheap shot on Ray Fosse as a biproduct of Rose’s drive to win.

Just like lots of people are willing to overlook his gambling on baseball. After all, the major leagues’ last player/manager never bet against his own club, never threw a game. Pete always bet on Pete.

So what if, off the field, Rose was a different kind of hustler — trying to hustle the system, trying to hustle you for sympathy, for Hall of Fame entry?

Off the field, Pete Rose was and is a total scumbag.

A degenerate gambler. An ignoramus. A liar.

That’s Pete Rose: Mr. Morality on the field, Mr. Amoral off of it.

I believe in forgiveness. What Pete Rose did was wrong. He broke baseball’s golden rule. It doesn’t compare to what steroid users have done. They truly compromised the game’s integrity. I believe that Rose, the All-Time Hits King, should be in the Hall of Fame.

Like in politics, my beliefs are largely based on my morality, and reasonable people can disagree. I support Rose’s Hall of Fame plea because of his accomplishments and morality on the diamond; you may oppose it because of his mistakes and absence of morality outside the white lines.

Let the debate rage on.

What Pete Rose did was despicable, but there is no evidence he ever bet against his own team or threw games. That wasn’t in his makeup anyway. Not to mention, steroids distorted the landscape of the game far worse than anything Pete Rose did. 

If a single steroid user gets in — like, for instance, Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, who is somehow getting a free pass — and then hard evidence comes out later that he was a juicer, where does that leave baseball? Pete should be reinstated and inducted, and there should be a note about his gambling, and steroid users should get in too, with a general note about the Steroid Era.

But overlooked in all the fanfare were some comments by Joe Torre the other day, when the Dodgers were in Milwaukee and Ramirez hit his 536th career home run, tying Mickey Mantle at 15th on the all-time list.

“Manny’s a special talent, he’s a special player, so was Mickey, obviously,” said Torre, who cemented his own historic legacy with the Yankees. “I know there’s going to be some questions for the rest of his career. I’m not sure you can question how many he hits, it’s how far they go. I think that’s really what affects it more than anything else.”

Not how many he hits, but how far they go?

Torre wasn’t prompted for a response about steroids. He volunteered it, barely pausing after acknowledging Manny’s accomplishment.

Read between the lines, and Torre — an MVP as player, a guy from the old school, forever a Yankee, despite how things ended in the Bronx, and a manager known for “managing personalities” — was taking a shot at his own player.

Torre knows Manny is great, but it turns his stomach that he cheated.

“I never thought anybody would make me look like an altar boy,” Rose said. “I’ve been suspended 18 years for betting on my own team to win. … I was wrong. … But these guys today, if the allegations are true, they’re making a mockery of the game.

“If you’re gonna put these guys that supposedly did steroids into the Hall of Fame, I mean I gotta get a shot somewhere.”

John Dowd, the man former Major League Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti appointed to investigate Rose’s gambling, dismissed Charlie Hustle’s comments. He said Rose “committed the capital crime of baseball” and is the “king of capital crime.”

Dowd just doesn’t get it.

And others who think Rose is in no position to speak out — they don’t get it either.

Gambling, after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, was baseball’s cardinal sin. Obviously, it cannot be tolerated in any sport, because it strikes at the integrity of the game. Outcomes, numbers, record books and the equality of the playing field can’t be trusted if gambling is involved.

Same with steroids, the new capital crime of baseball.

Pete Rose came by all 4,256 of his hits naturally. You can’t say the same about Bonds’ 762 home runs or Roger Clemens’ 354 wins. You can’t even trust that recent World Championships haven’t been the products of synthetic drugs.

You can trust Pete Rose.

No evidence has suggested Rose ever did anything to throw a game, like the Chicago White Sox did in the 1919 World Series. No evidence has suggested Rose ever bet against his own team, and anyone who knows anything about Pete Rose knows he’d never bet against himself. In fact, the evidence is undeniable that Rose epitomized integrity on the field, maybe to a fault (just ask Ray Fosse.)

Steroids are the new Black Sox scandal. They’re even worse. They’re certainly worse than anything Pete Rose ever did to the game.

Under Bud Selig, steroids seeped into every corner of baseball, from perennial All-Stars to utility players to the most remote ouposts of the minors. There has been disparity in the game’s past, from segregation to the height of the pitching mound, but no era has been so disposable as the Selig Steroid Era.

After the 1919 World Series, baseball appointed its first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to restore and preserve the sport’s credibility. Baseball had an unbiased commissioner — not bound by the players or the owners — for more than 70 years. Then, on the heels of collusion and in a virtual coup d’état that forced out Fay Vincent, Selig took over as commissioner in 1992 while still owner of the Milwaukee Brewers.

Baseball was back to the pre-1919 Wild West, setting the stage for the corruption of steroids.

One of Vincent’s final acts on his way out was a hastily thrown-together ban on steroids, but Vincent would not survive his position long enough to expand or enforce it. What baseball needs now is a new comissioner, a real commissioner.

What baseball needs is a new Judge Landis, and subpoenas and sworn testimony in the meantime. That is how dire a state the game is in.

Laugh at Pete Rose all you want, but he’s old news. Just as Selig and the owners usurped the commissioner’s office, steroids and HGH have usurped gambling as baseball’s unforgivable sin.

As anticlimactic, unsatisfying and irresponsible as the Mitchell Report turned out to be, the fact that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens clearly cheated puts an exclamation point on the Asterisk Era.

Baseball numbers are considered sacred by so many people because generations of us grew up with the game. It linked us to our fathers, who were linked to their fathers, who were linked to our great grandfathers. Although other sports have rivaled or even surpassed modern baseball in popularity, baseball — more than any other sport — not only was a seminal component of America’s culture and growth in the 20th century and further back, it was uniquely intertwined with American boyhood.

Imagine if, when you were a kid, you looked back through the numbers and lure of baseball history — as so many of us loved to do — and you saw that Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson had used illegal drugs to make themselves better players. And imagine if speculation, but not hard proof, existed about numerous other players from that general time. Even a child, given the fact that premier players such as Ruth and Johnson cheated, would know such an era had no integrity.

Like our current era.

The Mitchell Report, which was supposed to be definitive and provide a sense of closure to the steroid speculation of the last several years, barely scratched the surface. Commissioner Bud Selig may have had the best of intentions when he requested the investigation, but like so many other events under this commissioner, the Mitchell Report was a bungling failure.

At least it gave us Clemens.

Former senator George Mitchell had no subpoena power, so instead he used very limited sources (which happened to give his report a New York imbalance), hearsay and uncorroborated anecdotes as evidence. All the speculation, accusations and claims most of us already knew about, and which most journalists would never publish unless they wanted to get sued, Mitchell shed no new light on but simply threw into his report. The Clemens evidence was some of the only evidence with teeth.

The very fact a report on performance-enhancing drugs was commissioned by Major League Baseball and was delivered is significant. The fact that Mitchell skewered Selig and team owners as accomplices to steroids in baseball is significant. The mere fact this report exists — despite its vast shortcomings, which left plenty of guilty players breathing a sigh of relief after not being named — puts an official stamp on the Steroid Era.

Now, it is time for the United States government to step in.

The good that came out of the Mitchell Report was not good enough.

The Mitchell investigation was sanctioned, in part, to keep Congress off of baseball’s back. But what the report revealed (a steroid user at the top of the sport and implications of rampant use throughout the sport) and what the report did not reveal (anything close to a complete picture of who, what, when, where and how) demands the subpoena power of govermnent intervention.

I want names. I want details. I want Bud Selig burned at the stake or I want him to resign.

I want to know what happened, as best we possibly can. I want accountability.

Selig, in the report he ordered, finally has been exposed as the disgrace he is. I don’t care about his achievements (expanded playoffs, record revenues, etc.). Many of Selig’s so-called accomplishments, specifically baseball’s resurgence at the gate, were based on steroids and Selig’s blind eye to steroids. This commissioner failed to do his number one job: preserve the integrity of the game.

I feel sad today. My childhood sport — the childhood sport for many of us, spanning generations — has been irreparably damaged. Baseball, as it always does, will go on. But steroids have created an historic disconnect unlike any the sport has ever seen, and the problem remains inadequately addressed.

In a strange sense, current fans of baseball are left with a sullied feeling for being linked to this era. All of us, who saw records shattered and then shattered again over the last decade, in some form have witnessed the death of baseball as we’ve known it since the days of our great grandfathers.