Proactivity

It's so nice to see that baseball learned its lesson from the steroid era. There, they allowed cheating for years, always reacting, never getting ahead of the story.

The story consumed them the way a mudslide consumes California. After it happens, Bud takes on the same look as the California coasts residents. Well, I know I live on a mudpile, 300 feet above the ocean, but I never thought my 3,000 pound house on stilts would fall.

Things are different in baseball now.

I heard somewhere that Steve Palermo, the head of the umpires, praised the crew for being proactive in dealing with Rogers in game 2. It's a good thing they were there. For the proacting. It's the baseball way. Being proactive. Excuse me while I gnaw my left arm off.

Much has been written/shouted today about the palm. It, according to photos, was there in the previous two rounds. Paul Lukas even has a great piece about Rogers’ uniform.

In short, Rogers wears a cap with a darker color underneath the brim. Makes you wonder why he touches his left thumb there before every pitch, or why he puts the heal of his hand on the back of his cap.

Yeah, he's cheating. Thank goodness for the proactive umpires.

Should the umpires have done more? How could they possibly do more than they did? They’re told about the issue, and Rogers says it’s dirt. They don’t need to touch it, or inspect it in any meaningful way. Then they might have felt the substance. He said he didn't do it. How could you possibly convict anyone who proclaims innocence in the face of incontrovertable evidence?

How is it these umpires haven't made the CIA yet?

They simply asked Rogers to remove it. And in a related story, the new penalty for injecting steroids will be a blood transfusion. Swallow a pill, you get an enema.

Should LaRussa have done more? Nah. TLR didn’t want to make a big scene. So he told the ump about it, and by the time anyone could look at Rogers hand, Inge had told Kenny to wash it. TLR missed his chance. He was right to avoid a scene. Now no one is talking about it.

Then there's Bud. Dan Wetzel writes an excellent column about Bud ignoring the issue. This is right in Bud's wheelhouse. No way he'd fail to ignore this.

To verify Bud’s absence. I checked http://www.mlb.com/, and they do indeed seem oblivious to the whole mess, with one story burried three fourths of the way down the page. The story contains this gem:

“Rogers' ensuing edge -- he retired 16 of 18 men, around a pair of walks, second through seventh innings -- was so sharp, it was easy to discount any advantage a "dirty ball" could have given him.”

I'm now officially renaming mlb.com "Pravda."

Gee, Bud, if only there was someone who had an office in major league baseball that was empowered to deal with cheating.

It’s ok Bud. If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that consistent ignoring of cheating will always make the problem go away. That's the baseball definition of proacting.