Koufax and Rose: there's no comparison.

Whatever Pete Rose and Sandy Koufax had in common 40 years ago, it long since has disappeared. They were great at what they did. They moved with a certain dignity. No longer is that true of Rose, and to say baseball is the poorer for that is to understate the sadness that shadows him. Now comes a new biography that reminds us of Koufax's grace even as we see Rose sell one more piece of his baseball soul.

There is Koufax, supreme, in Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, a perfect game of a book that is 14th on The New York Times best-seller list.

In it, we see the Hall of Fame pitcher at work, a meteor streaking across the heavens." Better, writer Jane Leavy scatters the clouds of mythology to show us, after all these years, the man Koufax.

That sweet man enlarges us.

There is Rose, his shirt tall flapping over an old man's paunch, belly-flopping into third base during an old-timers softball game for which 41,092 Cincinnati zealots paid $30 a head (plus $5 for a program, and Rose would autograph only that program). We see Rose in an exhibition sponsored by a cookie company, and by the hustler Rose we are diminished.

To read of Koufax, to experience again his fierce commitment to character and craftmanship, is to wish that Rose could tap into the well of his own fierce passion and do the brave thing of saying what Major League Baseball's evidence proves: He gambled on baseball.

If Rose tomorrow said, "Yes, it is so," he'd soon be in the Hall of Fame. The public's eagerness to forgive would cause MLB and Cooperstown to reconsider the banishment of a man with 4,256 base hits. Doesn't it seem likely, after all, that most people who saw Rose play already have given him a pass on the gambling? And with their good reasons.