Todd Jones is having a hell of a season. The journeyman pitcher is now closing for the Florida Marlins and has 13 saves so far. (I bet he was even a free agent in your fantasy baseball league when the season started!)
Jones has written short, honest articles for The Sporting News (they’re also carried on Yahoo) for some time now. The latest, however, is something of a departure, at least in terms of content: it details and defends the widespread cheating that goes on in the game of baseball today.
As long as I’ve been around the game — and as long as there has been baseball — people have bent the rules to gain an advantage.
Not only that, but Jones, who, despite the moustache, comes across as a really nice and upright guy [update: I take this back; see comments], goes on to catalog his own rule-breaking (don’t call it cheating!).
I pitched in Denver for two years, and at a mile above sea level, I used pine tar every time I pitched at home. My thinking was that I was more than 5,000 feet in the air and was entitled to at least do that much. I never thought one thing about it. Was it cheating? My numbers say no, given that my career ERA at Coors Field is 7.64 in 59 games. It’s very dry in Denver, and that makes the baseball slippery. I needed the tar to hold onto the ball. I didn’t want the ball to slip and hit a hitter. At least, that was my thinking. I never considered it cheating; I was breaking even.
I find this fascinating in light of all the hoopla surrounding steroids. If this is really the way the game is, who can blame players for juicing up, despite what the rules say? Baseball’s biggest mistake has been in not drawing a line in the sand; it has a double standard that’s allowed to stick because the team owners and the commissioner have no balls of their own.
