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By now you've all heard about Pete Rose and his exploits in the Dan Patrick show this week. You've heard what countless talking heads, bloggers, and just about everyone thinks about his confession that he bet on the Reds every night as manager. And now to you can add the thoughts of John Dowd, author of the infamous Dowd Report that got Rose banned from baseball. To put it simply, Dowd doesn't even remotely believe Rose's assertion that he bet on his own team to win every night.

"When (Mario) Soto and (Bill) Gullickson pitched, he didn't bet on the Reds," Dowd said on Thursday, when reached at his Washington, D.C. office...

The Dowd Report says Rose bet on the Reds 52 times in 1987. Each Major League Baseball team plays 162 games.

Dowd has said that when Rose didn't bet on the Reds, it was a signal to bookies that it might be a good night to bet on the Reds' opponent.

I'm with Dowd on this one. If Rose was half as competitive a gambler as he was a baseball player, there's no way he bet on his team to win every night because there's no way he actually thought the Reds were going 162-0. It's not like he walked into the clubhouse each and every night, threw a pile of cash on the table and said, "This is how much I believe in you guys," so what would the point of always betting the Reds to win be? And if he wasn't betting on the Reds every night like he said, than Dowd is exactly right; Rose's gambling patterns were a giant beacon to bookies on the Reds' chances that night, and you can't honestly believe that Rose didn't know that.

In twenty years Rose has gone from never betting on baseball to betting on baseball but not the Reds to betting on the Reds to win every single night. Anyone care to guess what comes next?

The Cincinnati Reds have opened a new exhibit at the Reds Hall of Fame to honor the MLB Hit King because by baseball rule he isn't allowed to be enshrined in the team Hall of Fame (or the real one, for that matter, but you knew that). So what's the exhibit? Balls. Lots of 'em.

Several Rose-related artifacts have been on display at the Reds Hall of Fame since it debuted in 2004, a year after Great American Ball Park opened. The new exhibit includes more than 300 items from the career of Rose, who finished playing in 1986 with a career-high 4,256 hits. His total is reflected at the Reds' Hall in a three-story high wall of baseballs -- one for each hit.

And what does Charlie Hustle think of the exhibit?

"I'm just happy having three stories of balls. That's a lot of balls," said Rose.

Rose also spent part of his day informing reporters that fans would be excited to see him in the Hall of Fame. I wonder if Bud Selig has considered letting Rose into the Hall of Fame just so that he'll go away. At this point, Rose continues to make a spectacle of himself and of baseball because the league lets him. The powers that be in are going to have to seriously reconsider their Hall of Fame standards in the next few years anyways with more and more steroid-era players becoming eligible. Why not give Rose what he wants and make the thorn in their side disappear? You can't argue with Rose's Hall case on merit and his gambling problem has kind of become like that stupid family feud that you can't even remember why it got started. With time it simply doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

UPDATE (5:19 PM)- Of course, I wrote all this a mere 20 hours before Pete Rose comes out and admits he bet on the Reds every night. Ugh. Nevermind that whole part about "you can't remember why it got started."