October 24th, 2006
The people have spoken, and they want to discuss a very short man
I’m a serious man, and I like to think that I spend my time working on serious things; because of this, I was attempting to get through the week without spending any time thinking (or writing) about the death of Nelson De La Rosa, the two-foot, four-inch actor, man about town, and Mini-Me inspiration who became known as a Red Sox good luck charm after Pedro embraced him during the ‘04 playoffs. (Nelson was also one hell of a tiny dancer.) De La Rosa (aka Mahow Mahow), who was 38, died at early Sunday morning at the Rhode Island Hospital. The cause was unknown.
For anyone who didn’t follow the Nelson-Pedro romance, the two Dominicans went through an ugly breakup after Pedro signed with the Mets. Pedro called Nelson a “palm-sized pipsqueak” at his introductory news conference at Shea; Nelson responded, like all jilted lovers do, with a mixture of hurt and anger, saying that Pedro had broken his heart and that he’d root for the Red Sox regardless of where Pedro was pitching.
You’d think that’d be the end of the story…but you’d be wrong. As one high-powered and influential lawyer in Washington wrote, there wasn’t much “in the way of healthy journalistic skepticism about the cause of death. What really happened? Has Brian Cashman made a statement? The US Attorney’s Office? The State Department?” Said lawyer implored me to plow my sources. In lieu of that, I’m plowing my readers. (Pervert: not that way.) Please send in all thoughts/conspiracy theories/bad jokes.
October 24th, 2006
Speaking of Eminem; calling all copyeditors
How is it no one’s taken advantage of “Lose Yourself”’s opening stanza — “Look, if you had one shot / one opportunity / to seize everything you ever wanted / one moment / Would you capture it / or just let it slip?” — when called on to produce pithy headlines for Dirtgate? (Eminem might rap about murderous incest and all that, but let’s be serious: before the ‘06 Tigers, he was pretty much it for Detroit.) “Rogers takes shot, doesn’t let it slip”, “Rogers needs help to seize everything he ever wanted”…I mean, c’mon!
October 23rd, 2006
If you had one shot, would you capture it (and if you did, would anbody bother tuning in?)
This should surprise exactly no one: the Detroit-St. Louis matchup has topped last year’s Chicago-Houston contest as the least watched World Series in history. Kind of give a new meaning to the notion of losing yourself, eh?
October 23rd, 2006
Witness the media’s self-correcting mechanism in action
“[N]ow we’ll always be left to wonder what Kenny Rogers had on his hand. And here, in what’s supposed to be the best of times in his sport, that’s what stinks the most about this unsavory World Series evening.
“See, it wasn’t just his pitching hand that Rogers soiled on Sunday night. It was, regrettably, his whole sport. And that’s a stain that will take a lot longer to wash off.”
– Jayson Stark, October 22, 2006
“From the tenor of this discussion, you’re probably catching on that it didn’t take long yesterday for Dirtgate to transform itself into the kind of topic that nearly every baseball subject in history has ever morphed into — i.e., raging talk-show controversy on one hand, an irresistible clubhouse-comedy opportunity on the other hand.
“It was a healthy sign that the sport will undoubtedly survive Dirtgate. Not to mention a sign that this World Series will undoubtedly survive Dirtgate.”
– Jayson Stark, October 23, 2006
October 23rd, 2006
My cousin (in-law) the pessimist
Admittedly, a book titled “Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit” does not sound like a page-turner…but then, neither does a book subtitled “The scandals at the New York Times and their meaning for the American media.” And yet they both are…
I’ll readily admit that I’m biased on both counts; “Pessimism” author Joshua Foa Dienstag is my first cousin (in-law). (Tangentially, does anyone know if there’s a term for cousins-in-law?) So don’t take my word for it; take Newsday’s, which calls “Pessimism” a “rich and subtle book” and “a work of exact[ing] scholarship. … Dienstag writes uncommonly well. He is not one of those philosophers who, as Nietzsche once put it, muddy the water to make it seem deep.” The Newsday review comes on the heels of raves from other non-academic outlets like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Library Journal. You depressives out there needn’t worry; “Pessimism” is actually very uplifting. You’ll need to read it to find out why.
October 23rd, 2006
We’ll keep this brief: Monday’s Murray watch
Murray Chass has two stories in today’s paper; both grouchily take swipes at Bud Selig. His baseball column, as opposed to his baseball labor column, isn’t even on the Times’s main sports page. (Chass remains the only sports columnist not behind the Times Select wall.)
Instead of a full breakdown of the mystery that is Murray, we’ll just offer a couple of highlights from today’s entry, “In Postseason Full of Surprises, Rogers is the Biggest.”
Inre: The stupidity of World Series home-field advantage being determined by the winner of the All-Star game:
“The Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox benefited the past two Octobers by winning the first two games at home, then taking the first two on the road to complete four-game sweeps.” Because playing on their home turf helped the Cards and the ‘Stros so much in those years.
On this year’s matchup:
“Despite their presence on the road, the Cardinals won the opener, becoming the first N.L. team to win a World Series game since the Marlins ended the 2003 Series in Game 6 against the Yankees. But the Cardinals squandered their unexpected advantage by losing Game 2 last night.” Let’s see: five more games, three of which are in St. Louis. Huh. It seems to me that the Cardinals actually seized home-field advantage by splitting in Detroit. But what do I know?
(If you’re wondering what the All-Star game and home field advantage have to do with Kenny Rogers…well, you’ve got me.)
October 23rd, 2006
Jayson Stark’s found a controversy that could rival steroids!
The lead story on ESPN.com’s baseball homepage is a Jayson Stark piece titled “Rogers’ dirty hand overshadows his Game 2 brilliance“. After writing that the controversy surrounding what appeared to be some dirt on Kenny Rogers’s hand in the first inning of last night’s game would overshadow the game itself, Stark puts a new spin on the innocent until found guilty thing: “[I]f Rogers was so darned innocent, how come he was trying so hard to deny everything except his pitch count?” That makes sense. Rogers is guilty because he said he was innocent; try figuring out what that would mean if he said he was guilty of using pine tar. The piece ends with this weighty pronouncement: “See, it wasn’t just his pitching hand that Rogers soiled on Sunday night. It was, regrettably, his whole sport. And that’s a stain that will take a lot longer to wash off.”
Wow. This must be all the talk of baseball. Look at what the St. Louis Post Dispatch had to say: “‘Somebody said they saw pine tar on it. That’s about it. He obviously got rid of it or he never had it in the first place,’ said [Cardinals] second baseman Aaron Miles. ‘The stuff looked about the same as it did at the beginning. I’m not sure what difference it made.’”
“Had the umpiring crew discovered pine tar or some other intentionally applied foreign substance, they could have ejected Rogers from the game. Intentionally applying dirt to the ball is also grounds for ejection. Major League Baseball director of umpires Steve Palermo said ‘there was not an inspection, there was an observation.’
Palermo referred to ‘a noticeable dirt mark’ but said it in no way met the definition of ‘deliberately doctoring the ball in some regard.’”
Huh. Okay, well how about the Detroit Free Press:
“‘It was wet out there tonight, so you get a compound of water and dirt, and it’s going to create a little bit of mud,’” Palermo said. “‘And Kenny may have had that spot on his hand or whatever it was when he left the bullpen.’”
They’re the hometown boosters, so that’s to be expected. What about over at MLB.com?
“‘Kenny,’” [home plate umpire Alfonso] Marquez told the pitcher, “‘also that dirt thing that you’ve got on your hand, if you’ll do me a favor and just take it off.’”
“After the game, La Russa said, “‘It’s not important. I wouldn’t discuss that about someone who pitched like that. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from anybody.’”
So you’ve got Cardinals players, the Cardinals manager, the home plate umpire, and the umpiring supervisor all saying it was no big deal. And you have Jayson Stark, who feels that because Rogers is “a pitcher who, a mere three weeks ago, was carrying around the highest career postseason ERA in the history of baseball” and goes on to “spin off his 23rd consecutive scoreless October inning, you want to tell the world how he finally rewrote the script of his lifetime. But we’re having trouble with that angle, too.” The Gambler also has thrown a perfect game, has been in the league’s top ten in wins six times, and has the ninth most wins among active pitchers. Compare that to, say, Don Larsen, who threw the only perfect game in postseason history in the 1956 World Series against the Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers. Larsen finished his career with an ERA above the league average and a career record of 81-91. Must of been the pine tar.
I’m sure Rogers’s “caramel covered mark” will continue to be discussed and analyzed — especially after ESPN analysis showed that Rogers appeared to have similar discolorations on his pitching hand during his two previous postseason starts. And Rogers certainly doesn’t have a the best reputation. But Stark’s presumed guilt piece is going a bit overboard, and is in marked contrast to his colleagues Buster Olney (who focuses on the ever-fiesty Tony LaRussa’s apparent wimpiness vis a vis Rogers), Keith Law (who doesn’t talk about Dirtgate at all), and Gene Wojciechowski (who focuses on the fact that the controversy will continue…at least until a possible Game 6, when Rogers is would pitch again). Finally, the Globe’s Gordon Edes — day in and day out, one of the best baseball guys out there — has a more clear-headed take on the whole thing: “Kenny Rogers, who has been master of any neighborhood he has occupied this October and showed no letup last night…evidently didn’t resort to anything underhanded in pitching the Detroit Tigers to a 3-1 win last night that evened the 102d World Series at a game apiece. To suggest otherwise would besmirch a reputation that has undergone a major renovation this postseason, one in which Rogers’s performance is approaching historic levels. And last night’s umpires did not take it upon themselves to do so, electing not to make an issue out of it, although the rules stipulate that any pitcher detected with an illegal substance on his person is subject to automatic ejection. And neither would opposing manager Tony La Russa.”
That sounds about right to me. Is whatever’s going on with the man putting together an historic postseason run worth investigating more? Of course. But at the moment, it’s a bit much — a lot much, actually — to say that the whole sport is soiled and this stain will take a lot of time for baseball to wash off.
