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Game 2 Hullabaloo: "Dirtgate" Gone Wild

Peter A. Flies

World Series lore loves controversy, from the 1919 Black Sox, all the way up to last season when Major League Baseball forced the Houston Astros to keep the lid open on Minute Maid Park. This year a "foreign substance" is stealing the spotlight. ESPN's Jayson Stark called it "Dirtgate." The brown spot seen on Kenny Rogers hand in the first inning of Game 2 has been called everything from pine-tar by TV commentators to gravy by teammate Todd Jones. Kenny Rogers brushed it off, literally and figuratively, saying to the AP that it was a "clump of dirt" maybe mixed with "resin."

Whatever the recipe of the foreign substance, it's difficult not to see parallels in 41-year-old Kenny Rogers and the fictional veteran pitcher, Eddie Harris, in the movie "Major League," who relied on spitballs to put extra English on his junk pitches."Crisco, Bardol, Vagisil," said actor Chelcie Ross, showing a rookie where he hid his foreign substances. "Any one of them will give you another two to three inches drop on your curve ball. Of course if the umps are watching me real close I'll rub a little jalape?o up my nose, get it runnin', and if I need to load the ball up I just..."

We get the picture.

The post-game press conference kept circling back to the "clump" of dirt on Rogers' pitching hand. Even the supervising umpire of Major League Baseball addressed the substance and defended the umpiring squad of Game 2. And who knew that Steve Palermo could deadpan a comeback as well as Johnny Carson or Jim Gaffigan?

When asked by a reporter, "How do you know it was dirt?" Palermo responded, "Because it was observed as dirt. Umpires have been around more than a week or so. This is not their first summer away from home, so they've got a pretty good idea as to what dirt is."Palermo was not the only comedian. Tigers' reliever Todd Jones, who barely picked up the save for Rogers, suggested to the AP that "it could have been chocolate cake." Or maybe it was leftovers from the "steak and gravy" the Tigers ate prior to the game. This is not the first World Series controversy, but it is the first scandal with gravy as a suspect. Normally, anything involving Kenny Rogers and gravy is confined to the other Kenny Rogers, the former country music star-turned-fried chicken tycoon. Stranger things have been used outside of gravy in creating spitballs, including leather dressing and Vaseline. Three-hundred-game winner, Gaylord Perry, a legendary doctor of spitballs, was suspected of putting petroleum jelly down his pants. Knuckleballer Phil Niekro was famously caught in the act of discarding an emery board before the umps could do a uniform shakedown. Kenny Rogers is a good target for controversy. Compared to past performances, his 2006 postseason has been marvelous, but even if the conspiracy theorists are right, after Rogers came back in the second inning with clean hands the Cardinals did not touch his pitches in the following seven innings.After the game, Cardinals' manager Tony La Russa, whose visit to the umpire in the first inning began the conspiracy madness, refused to address the issue. But that doesn't mean Cardinal fans won't remember it and wonder for years to come.

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