New York ? Now the wait begins.

Pete Rose hopes baseball will end his lifetime ban after his first public acknowledgment he bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds.

The admission in “My Prison Without Bars,” his autobiography due out Thursday, will be part of the evidence in Rose’s case for reinstatement, commissioner Bud Selig’s chief deputy, Bob DuPuy, said Monday.

“The application remains pending, and the commissioner will take all of this into account,” DuPuy said.

Whether or when baseball makes a decision is anyone’s guess. Selig has refused to rule for more than six years on Rose’s bid for reinstatement, which is necessary for the career hits leader to reach the Hall of Fame.

Rose agreed to the lifetime ban in August 1989, and he applied for reinstatement in 1997.

For 14 years, Rose denied publicly he bet on baseball. He fesses up in the book, saying he regrets gambling on the game he loves and then lying about it.

Rose says he started betting regularly on baseball in 1987, the year after he stopped playing, according to excerpts from the book released to Sports Illustrated for this week’s issue, which hits newsstands Wednesday. He says he only ever bet on the Reds to win.

Selig’s immediate predecessor, Fay Vincent, read the excerpts and was outraged, concluding that Rose did not deserve reinstatement.

“There’s no sense of regret, no sense of shame, no sense of the damage he did to baseball,” Vincent said. “I guess I’m really disgusted. I think the whole thing is a sordid, miserable story. It’s sort of like turning over a stone — you see a lot of maggots, and it’s not very pretty.”

If reinstated, Rose’s last chance to appear on the writers’ ballot for the Hall of Fame is December 2005. After that, he could be voted in by the veterans’ committee.

But even if he appears on the ballot, he needs 75 percent of the voters to select him, and Hall rules state “voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”

Rose repeated his admission in an interview on ABC News’ “Primetime Thursday.”

“It’s time to clean the slate, it’s time to take responsibility,” Rose says in the interview. “I’m 14 years late.”