COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. (AP)-Is there a movement under way to keep Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame?

Some members of a special committee which recently formed to review eligibility guidelines to the Hall certainly think so. One committee member called the action taken by the Hall of Fame “a little suspicious,” and another said it’s a “thinly veiled attempt to keep Rose out.”

William Guilfoile, the Hall’s associate director said Tuesday that a nine-member panel of baseball executives and writers will meet in December of January to look at the way the current writers’ and veterans’ selection committees choose Hall of Famers.

The timing of the move has raised questions among the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, whose 450 members elect players to the Hall. Rose, the game’s alltime hit leader, is eligible for election in January 1992, five years after his last game as a player.

“We’ve been voting since 1935 and there have never been questions about the way we’ve conducting our elections,” Jack Lang, executive secretary of the BWAA, said Wednesday. “Suddenly, a year before Pete Rose comes up for election, they want to review our process. It makes us a little suspicious.”

Lang said Guilfoile attended a BWAA meeting in Oakland during the World Series and asked the group to select two members to serve on the committee. Selected were Lang and Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The newly-formed panel was not being convened exclusively to consider the Rose case, Guilfoile said.

ose is serving a prison term in Marion, Il., for income tax evasion and has been banned from the game for life. Nothing in current rules excluded him from being elected to the Hall of Fame, Guilfoile said.