Its baseball rules only and the umps should have caught it.

But they didnt….I wish the Cubs pitchers did the same thing and we could have a winning team.

But you don’t hear people calling Bonds and McGwire criminals – they’re called cheaters. They get asterisks not because they broke the law but because their numbers are considered corrupt. They’ll be kept out of the hall of fame because they didn’t respect the rules of baseball, not because they didn’t respect the laws of the US.

In the case of the Carribean players – for all we know, most of them were juicing in the off season in their home countries where it is legal. They may have never broken US law and yet they’ll still be held out of the hall.

That may be why congress had hearings but it’s not why people have so much indignation about what they did.

is against the law of the land, and is worthy of misdemeanor battery charges should the cavee choose to press charges.

Don’t cross the streams.

…and altering a baseball in order to make it harder to hit. Brett’s was a technicality that he was likely ignorant of. This was a deliberate use of foreign substances to alter the ball.

but in case not, just thought I’d point out that the rule against having pine tar too close to the barrel of the bat is a rule designed to keep the ball from getting smudged, thereby forcing it to come out of play. It’s a cost saving rule so that the league doesn’t need to change out the ball everytime a guy makes contact. If anything, having pine tar in the hitting area would be a disadvantage to a hitter, not an advantage.

(and for what its worth, the remedy provided for in the rulebook is that they take the bat out of action; the ump who disallowed Brett’s homer really screwed it up).

People have been cheating at sports since the dawn of time. Do you really think no one was doctoring baseball until the 90’s?