The Detroit Tigers' first gem came against the Yankees, followed by a spanking of the Athletics. The most recent eight-inning diamond was in the World Series Sunday night against the Cardinals. All three games were shutouts, meaning that a pitcher who hadn't won a playoff game in nine prior tries had suddenly thrown 23 scoreless innings and counting. He had been 41 years old and choking, but with this newfound clutch-ness, writers the land over declared that the Rebirth of Kenny Rogers had arrived.
For my own part, though, I perceived a different kind of rebirth. Last year Rogers attacked a cameraman who was trying to film him. Charges were dropped, but poor public perception remained; he was heavily booed, for example, at the All-Star Game. This year Rogers switched to a new team, the team whose park had housed that game, and tried to bring an image of good leadership and nice behavior with him. These playoff games were about more than Rogers proving his mettle; they were about a man changing, from a brute and a coward into a championship stud.
But that's the funny thing about sports: in an age of short attention spans, crowds often prove selective in their memory, and it's easier to forgive your boys when they're up than when they're done. Take Kobe Bryant, who once was the defendant in a rape trial. We'll never know what the truth in that case was, but when Bryant scored 81 points in a game the next year fans had their mouths open too wide to let those their prior thoughts turn to speech. When people question Bryant now, it's mostly about whether he makes for a good teammate; doubts may still exist about the other sides of him, but the monumental talent pushes most of them aside.
It's no secret that we live in a star-worshiping culture, and that athletes inhabit our consciousness as much as movie stars. They are capable of feats we only dream of, and the proliferation of their images reminds us of this repeatedly. We find ourselves searching for the quick gratification - the home run, the slam-dunk, the death-defying touchdown - but we are rapid to add that, of course, the people who do these things do them all through hard work. And they never, ever cheat. That's a part of the bargain that we strike with ourselves.
On Sunday night, Rogers pitched a scoreless first inning before the cameras noticed a yellow blotch on his hand. He said it was a clump of dirt, the umpires told him to wipe it off and after doing so he proceeded to pitch seven more innings. After the game commentators examined that blotch and raised a question. If Rogers was right and it was dirt, then no harm and only a few foul balls, but the blotch looked suspiciously like pine tar, an illegal substance that big-leaguers use to alter their pitches. Rogers could have been tossed from the game for using it, and the Rashomon-like mix of stories fed to the media - Rogers, the ump, his manager and members of both teams all had conflicting accounts as to what exactly happened on the mound - only made the issue less clear. Not that it would be any clearer, though, even if the truth were known.
The problem - and part of the problem is that it's hypocritically seen as a problem - is that cheating in baseball is as old as the hills. The game's lore abounds with much better players than Rogers doing what he might have done, and some writers speculated that the reason that the opposing manager, Tony La Russa, didn't put up more of a stink is because doing so would have also brought scrutiny upon his own players. Baseball's great modern headache is the still-exploding steroids scandal, in which we all closed our eyes while sluggers grew like tree trunks; Barry Bonds may break Hank Aaron's career home run record, but he'll have ingested a pharmacy to do it. We act like this all bothers us, because that's the bargain that we make with ourselves - we'll worship you, but please don't tell us you're not a role model. But cheating has been present all along. It's just that the cameras haven't always caught it.
Despite what I want to say otherwise, I assume that Rogers is guilty, and I'm bothered by the fact that I'm not bothered more. Pop culture scribe Chuck Klosterman, in an article on Bonds, wrote that we live in "the Era of Predictable Disillusionment," in which our celebrities disappoint us, but that's okay because, in a sense, we expect nothing less. Part of me finds a nice irony in the fact that Rogers may have been right to attack that cameraman a year ago - he knew how emboldening a camera could be, but after Sunday night he learned how threatening it could be, too. The camera can save an image, but it can also murder it. I wonder when, if ever, the image will be reborn. And when the final out's recorded, why should we care?
I don't know the answer. I just watch baseball. The camera doesn't know either, and it watches everything.
Aaron Cutler '08 thinks the playoffs were an early brand of reality TV.
