As if there aren’t enough reasons to fear turning on the TV during the campaign season this fall, now the World Series is under way.
Hide the children.
When Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers showed up on camera Sunday night with a suspicious brown smudge on his left hand – something that looked like pine tar but might have been tobacco juice – Dirtgate was born.
The explanation for Rogers’ dirty hand was still being refined by team spokesmen on Monday, with the pitcher saying it was just dirt and others on the team suggesting it was a nicotine stain from shaking hands with Tigers manager Jim Leyland, who presumably drools a lot.
But in the meantime, news outlets were unearthing pictures from their archives showing Rogers’ pitching hand with the same brown smudge in the same spot on the same hand in previous games during the post-season.
Doctoring the ball may not be as insidious a problem for the beleaguered institution of major league baseball as record-setting hitters bulking up on steroids, but it’s still sleazy. And even in 2006, when a pitcher can make $8 million a year delivering fastballs and the old dirty-hand excuse – and the fans keep cheering – it’s still cheating.
For Maury Darnell, that’s a bummer.
Darnell is principal at Jefferson Elementary School in Greeley. After 28 years as an educator, he knows what happens when a high-dollar athlete cheats, especially if he gets away with it and everybody talks about the big win.
It messes with the kids’ heads.
“I know a lot of professional athletes don’t agree, but whether they want it or not, they are role models,” he said. “When they choose to use pine tar or steroids to win, it’s a strong message to children.”
The kids think that cheating is an alternative to talent and hard work. They think it’s clever. They think it’s not really cheating unless you get caught, and they think only losers get caught.
The message: No matter what, don’t be a loser.
“The problem just keeps getting worse and worse,” Darnell said.
It makes him crazy.
In elementary school, when kids cheat it’s usually pretty obvious, he said.
They write answers on their hands or look at another student’s test.
Teachers catch them and tell them that cheaters never win and winners never cheat, and they just hope the kids aren’t baseball fans.
In high school, the kids most often steal test answers from the teacher’s desk, text-message answers to each other via cellphone or plagiarize term papers from the Internet.
Most of the time they get caught, said Andy Mendelsberg, an assistant principal at East High School in Denver, though teachers have to be vigilant because adolescent cheaters are sneakier and better
liars.
“Still, it’s usually pretty obvious,” he said. “The higher level of writing gives it away.”
The offending kid usually gets an F and the standard lecture about how he’s really only cheating himself by failing to develop the skills necessary to succeed in college and in life, unless, of course, he wants to play baseball.
By college, the hard cases flagrantly surf the Internet for term papers at the more than 250 sites that provide material for dishonest students everywhere, and instructors have to Google suspicious passages constantly to police the situation.
At termpaperslab.com, there’s even a 31-page tome for the aspiring theologian with a seriously underdeveloped conscience.
Titled “Christ and the Soul,” the paper tells of “dispensation of salvation,”
“divine illumination” and “how Christ
redeems the individual soul.”
It’s only $29.95, but I’m guessing the price of redemption once a guy has
cheated his way through divinity school and gets his collar runs a lot higher.
Which in the end kind of makes throwing gobballs in the World Series seem tame.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
