Several years ago Pete Rose applied for reinstatement from his lifetime ban for betting on baseball and still awaits word from Commissioner Bud Selig.

“Pete Rose wants to come back to baseball; Bud doesn’t want to make a decision,” said a lawyer who has worked with Selig and knows him well. “Bud doesn’t want to make decisions.”

This was not a discussion about Pete Rose; it was about the absence of a decision by Selig on the Oakland Athletics’ request to be allowed to move to San Jose.

It is Selig’s procrastination that has inflicted a federal lawsuit on him and Major League Baseball. The word procrastination, however, suggests that someday a decision will be forthcoming. In this instance, who knows? As the lawyer said, “Bud doesn’t want to make decisions.”

If he doesn’t make a controversial decision, which a San Jose decision would be, Selig figures he …

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Teams are playing extra-inning games at a record pace, and the Yankees, for one, would prefer to pass, thank you.

The Yankees played the longest – 18 innings – of three extra-inning games that occurred last Thursday, and some of their players achieved unprecedented levels of futility.

Travis Hafner and Vernon Wells each failed to get a hit in eight times at bat against Oakland pitchers, and Kevin Youkilis was hitless in seven at-bats, walking in his other plate appearance.

Their combined failure to hit safely earned them an assortment of firsts. Throw in Mark Teixeira and his 0-for-5, and the team known for decades as the Bronx Bombers can be rebranded as the Bronx Bums.

Teixeira, Hafner, Youkilis and Wells batted fourth through seventh in Joe Girardi’s lineup, meaning there was a huge gap in more than a third of the batting order. Leave it to Elias Sports Bureau to tell us how huge.

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While Yasiel Puig continued to prompt questions about the Los Angeles Dodgers’ decision to leave him in the minor leagues until last week, along came Gerrit Cole to give Pittsburgh fans reason to ask the same questions about the Pirates’ timetable for him. Zack Wheeler of the New York Mets and Wil Myers of Tampa Bay may be next.

Puig is Exhibit A and Cole Exhibit B in the clubs’ questionable practice of service-time manipulation that I wrote about earlier this week. That column prompted e-mail responses on both sides of the issue.

Here is one from a Pittsburgher who disagreed with my view on the matter despite a strong union background. He wrote it before Cole made his excellent major league debut for the Pirates June 11:

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