It's over now. If Pete Rose's reinstatement bid had any life before Monday (and that was unlikely), it's really dead now. Mike Bertolini's long-lost notebook -- the one the feds had, but wouldn't share with Baseball, the notebook that indicates clearly that Rose bet on the game as a player – is the smoking gun that will relegate to sad history the Hit King's quest to return to baseball legitimacy.As no less an authority than John Dowd said to ESPN, "This is the final piece of the puzzle. This is it, this does it. This closes the door.''You can speculate on how ESPN came to possess the scarlet notebook. After it was obtained by postal service inspectors during a raid at Bertolini's house more than 26 years ago, it had been sealed and stored at the National Archives. Dowd, Baseball's lead sleuth in the Rose case, had asked to see it in 1989, and had been denied. 
You can wonder about the timing of the notebook's availability, so close to Cincinnati's All-Star Game, and at a time when Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred supposedly is "re-evaluating'' Rose's case.
"Great question that I can't answer,'' Janszen said to me Monday, when I asked about the timing. "Maybe it's always been available if the right buttons were pushed. Maybe there was no urgency until now.''Yeah. Maybe.All that matters is, this sinks the formerly unsinkable Pete for good. It dismisses the notion that Rose would outlast MLB the way he outlasted Ty Cobb. He has been caught lying again. Not only to Baseball, but to all who have supported his return to the game's good graces.Enough is enough, it seems.There is a sadness to Pete Rose now. I noticed it almost immediately a few weeks ago, when he agreed graciously to walk back in time with me and a camera crew, to Bold Face Park and his boyhood home in Riverside. The Pete that day walked haltingly, slowed by two bad knees. More, he spoke almost wistfully about who he was before he became Pete Rose and inflicted so many wounds upon himself. Wounds he keeps inflicting, to this day."I don't think he understands how to get out of the quicksand,'' said Janszen, who is still haunted by the friendship. "There's nobody in his life that will say, 'Pete, we gotta talk'.''There was more than a little regret in Rose's voice that day two weeks ago, as if he knew he'd royally messed up his life and that it was too late to do much to fix it. Rose's story is a personal tragedy. It's a national disappointment, too.We love second acts in America. Pete never gave us a chance to love his.He told the truth in dribs and drabs. He didn't bet on baseball. He didn't bet on baseball as a player. He paid his taxes. And so on. Said Janszen, "Rose has only been honest to the degree he needs to be. That makes him his own worst enemy.''Janszen was a bouncer, a bodybuilder and not a nice guy when he and Rose ran together in the late 80s. In the years since, he has changed his ways, to the extent that he asks me to mention here that he belongs to Whitewater Crossing, a non-denominational church in Cleves.Janszen went to Baseball in early 1989 about Rose's gambling, because Rose owed him $30,000. "I had an axe to grind,'' Janszen says. "But I've learned what doing the right thing means. I started out with a vindictive spirit, but I've learned what it really means to have integrity.''It's a lesson Janszen wishes his former friend had learned."Pete's a sad sack, he really is. And he could have been so much more. There are people all over the place who are broken. That a Pete Rose could have come clean and said, 'Look what I did, but I'm on track now,' that could have helped so many people. You know the power he can have over people.''That Rose chose not to leaves him with mostly regrets. You can see it on the news today, after the notebook's contents have been revealed. You can see it in Rose`s face, too, and in the way he moves. The bad knees aren't the only things that have him limping.Paul Daugherty, pdaugherty@enquirer.com
You can wonder about the timing of the notebook's availability, so close to Cincinnati's All-Star Game, and at a time when Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred supposedly is "re-evaluating'' Rose's case.
It's irrelevant. If ESPN hadn't gotten it, another entity would have. In fact, former Rose associates and bet runners Paul Janszen and Tommy Gioiosa have spent the last two decades openly telling folks, media included, that Rose bet on the Reds while still playing. As long ago as September 2001, Gioiosa was telling Vanity Fair magazine that he ran baseball bets for Rose in 1986, when Rose was the Reds player-manager.
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