What’s wrong with the following statements about cheating? “I needed something to give me an edge so I could perform at the highest level, so I turned to steroids to put me over the top.” “I needed something to give me an edge so I could perform at the highest level, so I turned to a foreign substance to rub on the baseball and my hands to put me over the top.” Answer: One is often considered cheating, while other is often written off as a simple matter of breaking the rules. I know, it’s silly, nothing more than semantics when you boil it down. If you believe that cheating is cheating regardless of the script, it’s ludicrous to even bring this up. But bear in mind that a lot of the truth behind baseball’s scandals get masked by the wording offered to the public. Remember there was once a player who took PED’s because he wanted to recover faster and get back to helping his team and pleasing the fans. Once there was a player who said his urine test’s alleged false positive was an affront to all the falsely accused and that he would be their champion of truth and justice. Now there is Michael Pineda, who tells us he smeared himself with pine tar because he has trouble feeling the baseball and is afraid of hitting someone. All of them cheated, not for themselves, but for others, for their safety, liberty, or pleasure. What a bunch of bull crap. In the case of Pineda, may I be so bold to suggest that, if you can’t take the mound without a quart of a foreign substance on your person lest you commit manslaughter, baseball may not be the right sport for you? The truth is, Pineda can take the mound without pine tar and be successful, and will in the coming weeks. He’ll have to as all of baseball will be watching him under the microscope to see where his new pine tar hiding spot is. But opposing batters need not come to the plate in fear for their life. In Pineda’s first inning against he Red Sox on Wednesday night, he took the mound without any traces of pine tar and no one was killed, beaned, or buzzed. No one besides Pineda, that is, who gave up 2 runs. Obviously Pineda didn’t feel like he could pitch successfully without the tar on tap, and so, come the 2nd inning, there was a patch of it on his neck. Whether or not using pine tar is a psychosomatic or quantifiably an aid for Pineda, he loaded up his neck with it, not because of some safer pitching pucky, but because he felt he’d be more successful doing it. When you have a better grip on your pitches, you get tighter spin, later break, and sharper movement—not safer batters. If all pitchers went from excellent control to reckless endangerment because they didn’t have pine tar on their hands, don’t you think the MLB would have made it legal, if not mandatory for pitchers to use by now? That said, I can understand why Pineda went for it, and lied about it. The last thing you want to do is say you can’t pitch without a foreign substance, or that your teammates are idiots for letting you take the mound with a glob of glistening brown on your neck when you’re presently a made man on ball doctoring. That’s the kind of truthful confession that makes you, and everyone around you, look bad. Not that the Yankees don’t deserve a firm slap in the head for this. They’re supposed to be one of the most self-aware franchises in sports. Last year they retired a baseball saint in Mariano Rivera, and this year they’re going to say farewell to another in Derek Jeter. They make sure all of their players are clean-shaven before they take the field as an outward showing of their commitment to professionalism. How on earth can they watch their starting pitcher slather tar across his neck without one cautionary word about what might result from it? Are they also committed to the safety of the Red Sox hitters, or should we expect Pineda to take the mound with pine tar spread across his face like eye black next start? You’re going to hear a lot of double speak concerning the matter in the coming weeks, about how it’s not really cheating because “everyone does it”—a pseudo-fact that can’t even hold up it’s own weight. That, when it’s cold, you have to use something on your hand or batters will die—something that no one seems to worry about when brawls happen over accidental beanings and buzzings. You might even hear a team—that cares enough about sportsmanship to make a push to void one of it’s own player’s contracts for embarrassing it in A-Rod—say it’s clueless that one of its pitchers has a thing for pine tar. The Yankees did say they all take responsibility, which is commendable, but, bottom line, Pineda and the Yankees got caught doing something they knew was wrong before they actually got caught doing it. The rest is just semantics.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:41:38 +0000