As predicted previously! The Angels claimed it was “built-up resin” and that MLB, has decided there’s nothing there. (original post)
From the AP story:
Angels GM Bill Stoneman said baseball disciplinarian Bob Watson called the team and said “there’s nothing to it, nothing to investigate.”
Nothing? That seems a little strong, given the strength of the high-quality ESPN footage they were running yesterday. If I was going to deny it, I’d have at least acknowledged there was something. But then, that’s Stoneman quoting Watson.
From the LA Times:
“It’s easy for a guy sitting at his desk, watching television, to put pictures on the Internet,” Rodriguez said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “But I hope he has something better to do than to mess with people. He has no clue what he’s writing about. I don’t even know who he is.”
Zumsteg, reached by e-mail, told the Times “I understand where from his side it seems like he’s been singled out and persecuted for what’s a fairly common practice, and if baseball’s going to crack down on him they should certainly look around the league at other pitchers with pine tar on their hats. I brought this up as something I found interesting in connection with my work on the book, and it’s not at all personal.”
Here’s the thing. First, assume that my initial post was totally right, and on Opening Day when he was really working it over he put a little something on the ball, that makes K-Rod one of easily a half-dozen top-tier perpetrators (and I’ll talk about those later, I promise). He’s cruising along and then someone tells him “Hey, some guy on the internet put up pictures of you from Opening Day and thinks you’re doctoring the ball”.
He’s thinking Comic Book Guy caught him. I’d be pissed about that. And he’s certainly not going to go “whoops! Some dude with an MLB.tv account got me!” So okay.
And take anything in the rest of the possibility spectrum, from it’s a personal stash of resin (which Orel argued every pitcher does) to it being totally innocent resin buildup that he didn’t even know about. Then out of all the pitchers doing this, he’ll feel like he’s been singled out because there happened to be a really good set of camera angles on him on Opening Day. He’s going to be twice as pissed, because now Comic Book Guy’s caused all these reporters to hassle him, and he’s on ESPN and they’re showing video with the underside of his hat brim highlighted…
Here’s the thing, though, and this is an important distinction: I didn’t say K-Rod’s a bad guy, or he kills puppies, or whatever. The original post says “Hey, I think Rodriguez doctored some pitches, here’s some awful stills of him going to his hat, here are timestamps so you can go look at it yourself, I think he got some extra movement on those pitches, and here’s the shot of the white stuff.”
I try to make a clear distinction in my baseball writing between what I know - the performance, the actions, and so on - and what I don’t - the personal lives of the players.
Anyway, I digress. I think it’s clear in the book that I have a lot of love for the cheaters (except the game-fixers and drug users), and I bear them no ill will. It’s not personal, certainly not in the way we usually think about that (”Player X is a bad person”).
I also think there are outstanding questions about this, quickly buried by MLB’s InstaInvestigation, which I’ve brought up in previous posts. And we’ll see if Rodriguez, and others like him, have a little cleaner uniforms from here on out as baseball continues to weigh how to enforce those rules.
