The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

4-2-2007, against the Rangers, K-Rod put something on the ball repeatedly during the 9th inning, and wasn’t even subtle about it. First, I’m going to admit these are bad pictures. Patches welcome, as they say in the open source world. Or suggestions on how to get better stills — but any set of stills isn’t going to be as good as watching it yourself: if you’ve got mlb.tv, it’s worth checking out.

Pitches:
to Wilkerson
1: wipes brim of cap during long walk around mound, ball
2: video cuts back to him too late to see. 94, ball
3: grabs, rubs brim of cap, (2:48:28 on the mlb.tv feed)brings hand down, touches back of hand to back of jersey, rubs hand on jersey leg. 95.

4: nothing, 94, strike
5: grabs, rubs brim of cap (~2:49:15, same deal, running thumb inside) quick jersey touch. 95, strike.

6: video cuts back to him too late to see, fouled
7: good thumb work while walking back to the mound, 94, fly to center

to Laird
8: walking back to the mound at ~2:50:20, he crabs the brim and works the thumb for a couple seconds. Ridiculously blatant. Ball.

9: no camera, 94, strike
10: late camera, ground to 2b. Touches cap brim, thumb thing.

to Kinsler
11: no camera, 95, ball
12: no camera, 94, strike
13: crowd shots, 94, foul
14: ~2:52:47, off the rubber, he does the cap brim thing again, touching jersey before and after. Ball goes into the dirt, Napoli swings, ball’s picked off the ground and he’s tagged out

Compare the movement on those pitches to the movement on the fastballs where he clearly doesn’t go to the hat brim.

Also, watching the video, it’s a lot more striking than stills convey — it’s clearly not a cap adjustment, but something else entirely. He grabs the front of the cap and then rubs his thumb on the underside of the cap, picking whatever it us up. On the video, it’s quite striking.

Update: check out this still, where he’s tilting his head, courtesy of Sal Baxamusa

Update: from today’s game, you can repeatedly see that there’s a glop of something white on the underside of his brim on the right side. Here are two shots. First, the straight still:

And then, adjusting the levels to make that a little brighter

In the 4-3-07 game, there isn’t the kind of totally blatant grab-the-brim-then-rub-thumb repeatedly, but it’s even more clear that there’s something on his hat brim and he’s putting his thumb right on it.

Selected timings of shots of K-Rod’s brim, for your own reference:
2:45:49
2:46:07 (good)
2:46:18 (good)
2:47 (good)
2:52:30 - decent shot of the brim
2:54:50 - decent shot of the brim
2:56:48 - decent shot of the brim
2:57:50 - nice shot of the brim followed by K-Rod putting his thumb right in it

Update: MLB’s looking into it. The Rangers have denied complaining to the league, which is what I’d heard when I was told about the Opening Day inning.

Update: The story’s on ESPN, including some fine video footage and highlights of what was under his brim. I have yet to receive apologies from everyone who accused me of faking it in Photoshop. :p

Check it out.

I’m super happy at all the praise.

Sigal suggests this:

What I miss in Zumsteg’s entertaining manual for baseball delinquents is any serious reference to pitchers throwing murderously inside balls at batters (beaning), runners sliding spikes high into second base to prevent a double play (and, if possible, fracture the baseman’s leg) or other career-ending tricks that have always been part of professional baseball.

There was a chapter on head hunting (in fact, I’ve got a whole file on it) but like equipment, got cut to make the word count.

I promise to hit that up here on the blog, where I can discuss without length considerations.

They’re fans. Check it out. It made me super-happy.

White Sox fans will adore the chapter on groundskeeping, largely devoted to Emil Bossard. His son Roger is the White Sox groundskeeper. As early as 1911 in St. Paul, Emil Bossard was doctoring baseball fields to players’ requests. Zumsteg reports that Joe DiMaggio blamed the Bossards for ending his 56-game hitting streak at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium by watering the infield so much it slowed the ground balls he hit.

So is that cheating?

Zumsteg writes, “Some people argue that any lie is an immoral act and that any time you lie to gain an advantage, you’ve sinned.

“Those people get really bad deals on consumer electronics.”

If it’s not obvious, I love, love, love the Bossards. I would put an entry about them here every day.

There’s also a request:

Hard core fans will quarrel with errors like referring to A.J. Pierzynski as “then-Oakland A’s catcher” (he never played for the A’s) and Zumsteg ignoring gimmicks like players who wear tons of armor in order to get hit by a pitch (as in the Astros’ future Hall of Famer Craig Biggio), or the great Ron Hunt, who merely knew how to lean into a pitch.

I talk about AJ in today’s errors post, and I promise that body-armor cheating’s on the to-do list here at the blog. The short version is that I didn’t cover it in part because I hugely cut down and scattered an “equipment” chapter because the book manuscript was way too long. But I’ll get to it.

Anyway, pretty awesome.

Two errors for the day: AJ Pierzynski’s mentioned as once being with the Athletics. He wasn’t. I have no idea how that got in.

There’s also in the groundskeeping a mistake where the game situation doesn’t match up quite right. I know where this one came in - I re-wrote that short introductory section every time we went through a set of revisions, and when you edit something over and over, eventually you make a mistake and you’re too close to it to see.