Aside from my own baseball exploits, I typically don’t bother writing about baseball here, even if it is my own personal brog. I have actual people in which I can blab about baseball with when I want to, so I don’t always feel the need to write about it anymore.
But for whatever reason, I felt compelled to write about Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda, who tonight was caught with pinetar smeared on his neck, and was subsequently ejected from the game. Long story short, this is perceived as an act of cheating, because pinetar is sticky, and having pinetar on your fingers gives you superior grip of a baseball, and when you have superior pitch of a baseball, you can make it do extraordinary things when thrown.
It’s all very funny to me, because it was barely two weeks ago when Pineda was seen having very obvious pinetar smeared all over his hand, and the results of such were that he was pretty much throwing a no-hitter against the Red Sox. I would imagine that in spite getting away with it, it was very, very much discussed all over the sports world, that I might not consider doing it again, or trying to find a more discreet way of cheating.
But nope, two weeks later against the very same Red Sox, Pineda goes back to the pinetar. The funniest thing about it though is that it’s very noticeably pointed out that he tried to go without it, and in the first inning of the game, he got tagged for a few runs, so when he stepped onto the mound in the following inning with pinetar smeared on his neck and started throwing strikes suddenly, he seemed to have thought nobody would have noticed.
The point is, Michael Pineda is clearly stupid. But the bigger thing to me is that now, I pretty much question absolutely everything about Michael Pineda now. He was perceived as a hotshot in Seattle where he debuted, but I wonder if he was cheating back then too? Probably not, because this was pre-injury, and there’s a good chance he started pinetarring after his injury to get a leg up on his competition to make up for his deteriorated skills, but who really knows?
Maybe he became hot shit out in Seattle because he was cheating. Seattle is a vastly less-covered market than the New York Yankees, and playing against the vastly less-covered Athletics, Angels and Rangers for most of 2011, who’s to say he wasn’t pinetarring his way to 173 strikeouts?
I don’t know what to believe with Michael Pineda anymore. Is he really 25 years old? Is his name really Michael Pineda? I mean seriously, Latin players are always being revealed to having completely different names and occasionally being completely different age than they originally claimed, so who’s to say that if Michael Pineda is so predisposed to trying to cheat, that he’s really not 28-year old named Ernesto Gonzalez?
Doesn’t matter though, because as long as he can pitch a baseball, he’ll be allowed to stay, no matter how much laws are broken or deportation would occur for ordinary non-professional athletes. I don’t care of Michael Pineda goes the rest of the season without cheating, or actually turns around and wins the Cy Young; Michael Pineda is always going to be a joke to me now.
