Rant #1723

What is the #1 problem facing baseball/track/cycling/football today?

I would say each sport looked the other way for about a decade as its athelets got dirtier and dirtier and dirtier with syringes and chemistry. There's plenty of blame to go around here. The athletes, the CEOs, and the commissioners all get a slice of Blame Pie. But so do fans like me who continue to follow these sports.

So was anyone else watching the World Series last night? If you didn't, the game began and the announcers spent about three innings discussing the notion that Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Kenny Rogers may have some illegal substance on his thumb. This is cheating of course. Pitchers doctoring balls is as old as the game itself. The real story is how passively the umpires investigated the issue.

And this goes back to baseball's habit of looking the other way rather than vigilantly make sure that its players are on the up and up and preserving the integrity of the game.

Click here for the rest of the story.

I have no idea if Kenny Rogers was cheating. It wouldn't surprise me either way. But this guy has the chance to polish off a very tarnished image, and so I was cheering for him. If the umpires had taken charge of the game and really inspected what Rogers had on his hand (instead of just asking him to wash it off--and destroy the evidence), there'd be no need to speculate. The story would be about his amazing post-season run, not whether or not he's a cheater.

The irony here (as pointed out in the article referenced above) is St. Louis' manager, Tony LaRussa, may have just been burned by a culture that looks the other way. But he spent a decade looking the other way in the Oakland A's clubhouse/steroid outlet mall. You sleep in the beds you make.

END RANT HERE