The big brown spot IS obvious in pictures from all three of Rogers’ starts from the playoffs. Which is harder to accept: that the man somehow had the same dirt stain in the same spot on his hand three different times - and didn’t notice on any of those occasions, even though his living is so heavily dependent on his left hand - or that he didn’t cheat, because if he cheated, he wouldn’t have gotten caught. You could say the same thing about Kevin Gross.
I’m not emotional about this. In fact I’ve been rooting for the Tigers.
That brings us back to the “is it part of the game?” thing again. Rather than re-state my opinion, I’ll just say that if Rogers was cheating, I do want the word to be out there.
More speculation…since it’s so obvious, maybe the brown spot is just there as a distraction. If Kenny’s got a reputation for doctoring the ball, maybe the brown spot is just there to get the other team thinking about it. After he washes it off, then they’re thinking about what he’s doing now. They’re watching him every time he touches his hat or his belt, thinking about how he’s loading up the ball now.
If it really was pine tar, has he broken any rules if he didn’t put it on the ball? Nothing I’ve heard yet said the Cardinals had any doctored baseballs to offer as proof.
I remember back in 1986(?) the Mets were convinced that Mike Scott was scuffing. Davey Johnson had a bucket of balls that he claimed were all scuffed in the same place. Nothing ever became of it though.
I think you’re all missing something. The mark was in plain sight, may or may not have been related to doctoring the ball. The point is now that Cardinals “think” the ball is running crooked. It’s an excellent psychological edge. “Just get them to thinking you’re doing it”. Won’t help with the concentration at the plate. This strategy works in sports, war, makiing up exam questions, etc…
That’s pretty funny - I know you’re not trying to justify the pine tar, but that has such a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” quality. The guy had pine tar on his pitching hand. The most likely explanation is that he was trying to get it on the ball, not that he was playing some kind of mindgame. Why would he put it there and not use it? If he’d gotten caught, nobody would have believed it if he’d said “I was just trying to psych out the hitters, not get it on the ball.” And I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve been told by other sports fans that ESPN put together footage of Rogers touching that spot on his thumb to spread the pine tar to his other fingers.
This is not an adequate argument against the existing evidence, and it has been used before to deflect accusations of cheating. I call it the Basic Instinct defense.
The pine tar was obvious, but it’s near-certain that it never touched horsehide. It was a red herring cleverly designed to draw attention away from the colorless, odorless substance Rogers was really using to doctor the baseball.
Anabolic steroids.
When injected directly into the baseball, through lace perforations so as to leave no mark, they are undetectable even by trained umpires. Since the banned substance isn’t in the player, it can’t be caught even with the most rigorous testing regimens. Increases in velocity of only a few percent can have a big impact over the course of a game, but the real advantage comes from a side-effect seen as deleterious in humans but which is actually sought out in these cases: the batters have a tougher and tougher time hitting as the balls become steadily smaller.
I’m not taking sides on the cheating issue, but I am gonna call BS on one thing Rogers said. He said that he had a clump of dirt on his hand, and he didn’t notice it. That’s a steaming pile. I’m no major league pitcher, but I did pitch in Little League and High School, and I can tell you, if a pitcher has a “clump of dirt” on his pitching hand, he knows about it. It’s his job to know about it. A clump of dirt could screw up your pitching as much as pine tar could help it.
Well, I stand corrected. Whether or not Kenny Rogers was actually doing something illegal, Tony decided to be a “gentleman” rather than do something completely within the rules to give his team a better chance to be the World Champions.
What an idiot. If the Cards lose (and Kenny Rogers seems to be responsible for it to a significant degree), he deserves to be fired. It’s not like I’m questioning a judgement call, it’s sheer stupidity to let your opponent cheat.
Not really. This kind of cheating is endemic to professional sports. You don’t raise too much of a stink, because you don’t want the Tigers doing the same to your pitchers. Both teams know the tricks and are probably using a bunch. As others have said, it became an issue because Fox was making it an issue.
It’s like steroids. If they really, really wanted, they could find a lot more than the obvious suspects using. They don’t want to.
That’s crazy. If Chris Carpenter and Jeff Suppan are doctoring the ball on a regular basis and haven’t yet been caught, all LaRussa needs to do is tell them to keep their noses clean for the next week. Even if that affects their pitching in a bad way, the advantage of not having to face a red-hot Kenny Rogers has to outweigh that.
Do you see suspicious smudges on anyone else’s hands?
If the Cardinals batters care, it doesn’t matter who made it an issue, proper action could (perhaps) win them the series.
Umpires can’t run chemical blood/urine tests on the field of play. They can quite easily tell Kenny rigers to hand over his cap and run their hands along the bill. They could pick up the rosin bag from the pitchers mound and see if any manner of legal handling of it yields the kind of dirt smudge Rogers has. They can grab the pine tar rag from a batter’s box and see if THAT yields the same kind of smudge Rogers has. There might be a level of willful ignorance in the steroid cheat, but it’s not anything a manager or unpire can do anything about in-game. There’s quite a bit (aside from making Rogers wash the smudge off his hands, resulting in seven apparently clean shutout innings) that could have proven or disproven charges of the kind of cheating that was alleged here. For LaRussa to believe Rogers was in fact cheating and not to demand some genuine resolution to the issue is an abdication of his responsibilities to his batters.
Guess it just depends on which sportswriter’s story sways you more.
Nope, but I wasn’t looking for it. I’m sure interns at ESPN and Fox are combing the archives looking for it, though.
Depending on which version of the story you read, it could have been a reserve outfielder watching the game in the clubhouse who alerted TLR only after Fox made it an issue.
Here’s a first inning picture with the umpire talking to KR, who has his left hand extended towards the ump. The ump gets close and personal with Rogers and declares no foul. LaRussa didn’t and doesn’t feel the issue needs to be pushed. Why is it that sports fans, many with no ties to either team, are carrying pitchforks and torches?
Just to be clear, I’m not saying KR is clean, and I’m not saying he is dirty. I will say that I am not surprised when professional atheletes cheat, but I am surprised by the uproar as if it is always an isolated incident.
The more I read and hear about this stuff, the more I lean towards the “glass houses” theory as to why LaRussa did not ask for a formal inspection. John Kruk last night was saying that he thinks about 70% of pitchers use pine tar or some other substance to help with their grip in cold weather games (and that’s all the tar does is help with the grip. It doesn’t actually change the flight of the ball).
I also think that lots of pitchers, maybe even most, do other things to balls to give themselves an edge. Fingernail scuffing, vaseline under the hat brim, you name it. The Twins used to have a relief pitcher named Carl Willis who threw something he called his “neck ball.” It involved drawing his pitching hand across his neck to get some sweat on his fingers before the pitch. It worked essentially the same as a spitball. Willis helped the Twins win a World Series with that pitch and has publicly joked about getting some critical outs with a well timed “nasty neck ball.”
In short, this whole Kenny Rogers episode amounts to people being shocked about the gambling going on in the casino. Maybe he shouldn’t have used something so visible to cameras and busybody commentators but I don’t believe he was doing anything particularly unusual or even anything that the players themselves would think was out of bounds. You can call holding on every play in football, you can call fouls on just about every play in basketball and you can find pitchers messing with the ball (or in this case, simply trying to get a better grip on it) in just about any game – or at least series of games – in baseball.
Because LaRussa has no right to decide the issue doesn’t need to be pressed if he is not convinced that his opponent wasn’t cheating (as apparently he wasn’t). He has a duty to his employers and to his players to do everything within his power and within the rules to win games, and ultimately, the World Championship. What next…should he not appeal a failure to touch a base, “Hey, everyone makes mistakes, hopefully they won’t call us on it if we forgive and forget”? He’s not a “generalized baseball man,” he’s the CARDINALS’ manager.
My initial assumption was that after the umps said things were OK, LaRussa accepted this as fact. His later statements make it clear that he didn’t. That being the case, he should act on his suspicions to the degree that his team can benefit, not ignore them.
