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Saturday, April 07, 2007 |
MLB: "No Investigation" Of K-Rod's "Ball Doctoring"
Derek, you've got some 'splainin' to do:
Scioscia said Angels general manager Bill Stoneman spoke with MLB head of discipline Bob Watson on Friday about allegations of ball doctoring by Francisco Rodriguez against Texas made on a Web site, and that Watson said there is no investigation."It's a non-issue, much ado about nothing," Scioscia said.
Labels: angels, ball doctoring
Thursday, April 05, 2007 |
MLB Investigating K-Rod For Ball Doctoring
There's already been a bunch of stuff following Derek Zumsteg's video accusations of K-Rod doctoring the ball. The Dallas Morning News and CBS Sportsline both have stories that MLB is now investigating this; the Rangers supposedly did not instigate this, even though two of the example frames were from games in the recent Texas series. K-Rod could face a 10-game suspension if the allegations prove true. More commentary on the original well-commented BTF thread and at Halos Heaven, as well as an inconclusive analysis at Chronicles.
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Update: From DMZ's comment 57 on the original post:
You can in tonight’s game see that the white substance is well-established early in the inning before, as anyone argues, he starts hitting the rosin bag. I don’t understand how the cap picks up that kind of buildup that fast.Clearly DMZ hasn't seen Eric Gagne's hat in-season, though I do agree that two days of the regular season isn't quite enough to get that much rosin on a cap; on the other hand, how many days has he worn the cap? Is it the same one he wore to spring training?On sweat: I don’t understand how sweat would appear that way. When pitchers sweat through dark-colored hats, it appears darker, not as a white discoloration.
Update 2: David Pinto recalls the June 14, 2005 game in which Brendan Donnelly was ejected and eventually suspended for pine tar use, and asks
Is someone on the Angels staff encouraging this kind of thing? Scioscia comes from the Dodgers system, where legend has it this stuff was taught to everyone.I wouldn't be too surprised if such "legend" were true, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were just the musings of bitter old hitters.
Update 3: Seitz also dissects the allegations:
And finally, I'm not trying to bust Derek's chops on this, but I think he reported this incredibly unprofessionally. That's fine, it's his blog. But for Christ's sake, the title of the post is "Francisco Rodriguez Doctoring the Ball". That doesn't leave you a lot of wiggle room in case the whole thing turns out to be fairly innocent. You'd think a guy who spent a lot of time wiping egg off of his face after announcing that Pete Rose had reached an agreement with Selig for reinstatement [$] might measure his words a little more carefully.And therein lies a good bit of the problem. Not only does DMZ not mince words in his title, he opens himself to charges of not a little timely self-promotion. Seitz makes a number of suggestions in his post, including what I think is the most likely possibility, talc, based on a suggestion by Rob Neyer. This would have been less visible with the old gray-colored hat undersides, though the Angels used to use black hat undersides in 2002, so you'd think it would have been discovered in the postseason then. Of course, even talc would still be illegal, but it's hard to imagine how it would work to doctor the ball in a way that would affect its flight. Interestingly, DMZ has "spitballing" as one of the tags on his post; it's pretty clear that it's as far from that as you can get. What should we call it — dryballing?
Update 4: K-Rod says it's just rosin. Additional stuff from Matt Hurst's Press-Enterprise Angels blog.
Labels: angels, ball doctoring
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