Personal Responsibility

Hey everybody. This feels weird. I'm typing on a computer almost as old as myself, it seems, and all the icons above where I'm typing look as though they've been shaded in with color pencil. Apparently, the Pleistocene-era moniter doesn't have the right gidgets and doo-dads to allow for the millions of colors I need to feel normal in the world of web.

But I digress.

Today I came to talk to you about personal responsibility. Kenny Rogers - the pitcher, not the singer - was found to have been using pine tar on his pitching hand the other night, and though I won't go through too many of the details (they seem to be all over the news anyway), I thought I'd talk a little about personal responsibility.

Now, it seems trivial to wonder whether or not Kenny Rogers should have used an illegal substance or not. That is beneath this discussion. Pro athletes have always used nefarious means to reach good ends. Ty Cobb, after all, used to file the points of his cleats (?) down to sharp points, in case he needed to use them on an opposing player during the game.

Using pine tar, I feel, is a trivial matter, you see.

BUT, I ask, why is it all right for a pitcher to bend the rules in the World Series? As reported on ESPN, the use of pine tar is often overlooked, especially on cold nights, because it only gives the pitcher a negligible amount of "edge" against the other team. So why bother to report it at all? He washed it off and continued pitching even better later in the game. What's the big deal?

Which is fine, I guess. But I just don't understand why newscasters would explain it away, admitting such a fact on the airwaves. They admitted that it was a common thing for pitchers to used pine tar or snot or whatever to gain an edge. No big deal. It's like saying, "Oh, he cheated a little bit." You can't cheat a little bit. It's all or nothing in these cases. There is no subjective angle to this situation. There is no degree to cheating. Once you've crossed the line, it's done. You have either cheated on an exam or you have not. There is no fuzzy ground. So, in this section, I'm calling out "THE MEDIA." Don't suggest that there was an amount of cheating involved. Kenny Rogers cheated, plain and simple. He got away with it, sort of, whether or not the umps overlooked it, and that's fine too.

So did O.J.

Which brings me to my next point.

The reason that I think people are making a big deal of the Kenny Rogers pine tar incident is because the World Series looks BORING this year. I mean, come on. It's the Tigers and the Cardinals. There's no storyline there, so it's easier to jump on a story about some pine tar. You know why? Kenny Rogers is pitching as well as Orel Hershiser did in the '88 series, and that is the only worthy storyline in the entire series.

It's not the tar. It's not the cheating. And it most certainly is NOT the idea peersonal responsibility that has people in "THE MEDIA" interested. It's why people jumped on Janet Jackson's breast (not literally, though I wouldn't rule it out). The Super Bowl was boring that year. Does anyone remember what happened other than the booby? I think not.

So let's just get honest, "THE MEDIA." CONTROVERSY is the only thing keeping baseball alive anymore. Because nobody watches it, even when it's a subway series they don't watch it anymore. The Tigers and Cardinals can't bring it back, most certainly, so controversy has to. The only thing that would have played better was a player walking up to the plate with a syringe sticking out of his ass.