March 22 | 6:05 p.m. ET

Few people arouse as much passion as does Tiger Woods, and when I chided him for not talking about his terrible final round last Sunday, the e-mails started pouring in. Most agreed that he needs to explain the bad as well as the good.

JoAnn of Agawam, MA
You’re absolutely right on about Tiger. I have said that for years, he can accept the praise but he cannot face the crowd or camera when he does poorly or doesn't win. Tiger has brought a lot to golf that is true, but he has to learn he can't win everything and the people that support golf should not be shunned because he's not in the mood, after all they are also paying his salary and making the good things in his life possible.

Shai of Walnut, Ca
No golfer is bigger than the fans and I agree with your point of views. Tiger must respect the protocall and media, and accept folies gracefully. If fans don't come and watch, no one will get that type of money or paycheck upon winn ing a tournament

billy of big stone gap, virginia
Right on Mike! It shows that money cannot buy class.

Ron of Columbia, Sc
Spoiled

Kris of Los Angeles, CA
. . . Eldrick is the biggest crybaby in sports. . . It's tougher to be a gracious loser than a gracious winner. I think he's a spoiled jerk who only thinks of himself, as proof, I remember when he could've made a difference in the policies at Augusta. Instead of putting his foot down and saying I will not play where there's such discrimination, he said it wasn't his problem. Just gutless. Someone should tell him about "The Greatest" - Muhammad Ali, and what he sacrificed to stand up for his beliefs.

Bradley of Woodland Hills Golf Course, Eagle, Nebraska
Mike, Because of the amount of money these professional golfers play for, the game has become a game of "nerves" as well as skill. Who ever can control his emotions has a better chance than perhaps a better player. Tiger has managed to control his nerves and has the best game. You are right, when something goes wrong with Tigers Game we deserve to hear about it. . .

Peder of Wautoma, WI
. . .I had the pleasure of being the walking Standard Bearer of Jack Nicklaus' group in a US Open (1990)-past his prime, but still he was in demand - more so than anyone else in the tournament. The autographs hounds, etc. were all over him. He did a good job of trying to sign what he could and 'chat' with a few people. He was gracious. I also worked at the GMO the year Tiger "Came out". . . That day I tried to get his autograph. Now he was in demand and had lots to do, like sign a $40M contract with Nike, but there was a moment(after I was finished working) when there were only 4 or 5 of us near him asking for an autograph when he was getting in a cart to go to another media event. He declined. Not in a rude way, but nevertheless I have seen both men up close and Jack does "get it" and Tiger may not. I cherish my autograph and memories with Jack, and I still long for that autograph from Tiger on my badge from the event he turned pro...

Duncan of Clarkston Michigan
Not only does he have to face defeat,he must also keep his anger in check especially while the cameras are rolling, which is pretty much all of the time. It is pretty easy read his lips if you know what I mean. . .

Jim of Toledo, Ohio
. . . I think Tiger should make a call to Phil on humility. The brow beating Phil has gotten and how he took it says alot about the man and the sport

Ken L.
You're wrong, Mike, Tiger doesn't owe the media or anyone else a comment whether he wins or loses. Golf is his job, just as sales is mine, and writing columns is yours. . .It's only the media that has created this idea that athletes and other public figures owe us the courtesy of a sound bite after every performance. They don't, and in that regard Barry Bonds doesn't have it as wrong as everyone thinks.

Terrance of Plantation, Florida
This is his wake up call just like Jack had his in the 60's. He has never been forced to face reality because his world has been so pampered for so long, but everyone is human even him, hopefully he understand he walks on the same earth that we do and expectations are the same, respect and humility is a true sign of greatness.

Carlton Smith of Kirkland, Washington
I completely agree. If he does not come to grips with being cordial when he loses, it will forever tarnish his legacy. . .

James of Sandpoint, Idaho
You can't have your cake and eat it too. "Golf depends on him" you say. "He owes the game for that" you say. Tiger is in the driver's seat, like it or not. Golf needs Tiger - good days and bad - way more than Tiger needs golf. . . Tiger's driving this train- accept that and give him a break for not catering to a bunch of reporters, who by the way, need him way more than he needs them.

Andrew of Calias, Maine
I completely disagree with your premise, that Tiger doesn't "get it." That he needs to learn to face defeat as he does victory. How many tournaments has Tiger lost and he sticks around and takes all the questions about why he didn't win. When he was going through his swing changes, he stuck around and answered all the questions from the media, ad nauseam. What do you want to hear? Tiger say, "I didn't drive it well. My putting was off. My irons were not sharp." I agree that the man carries a lot of weight on his shoulders and a lot of responsibility. That is exactly why, if he chooses once in awhile not to answer all the questions from inquiring minds, it is his right. I think we expect too much of him anyway. . .

March 21 | 11 p.m. ET

In December 2005, WWE impresario Vince McMahon announced that his organization was going to start randomly testing its athletes for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

It’s hard to know if the policy is anything more than another McMahon smokescreen, something that he’s developed into an art form. It’s not as if the performers look smaller or carry less muscle in the ring today than they did a year ago. On the other hand, WWE has yet to announce that it’s caught anyone doing drugs. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

What we do know is that the names of 11 pro wrestlers have surfaced in connection with that mail-order steroids investigation that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Albany, N.Y., is conducting. The AP story contained this paragraph:

“WWE spokesman Gary Davis told SI.com that WWE policy prohibits performance-enhancing drugs but would not say whether any wrestlers have tested positive since the policy was enacted.”

He neglected to mention that wrestlers continue to die at young ages, though, which is the sport’s ugly secret. USAToday did an investigative piece on the subject three years ago and found that of about 1,000 professional wrestlers in the country, 65 had died prematurely over a seven-year period.

If that were happening in any other segment of society, there would be Congressional investigation. But it’s wrestling, and nobody cares.

The WWE’s steroid policy — if it actually exists anywhere other than in a press release — operates on stealth. I spent a few minutes at wwe.com and couldn’t find any mention of it. I did, however, see pictures of Donald Trump, whose hair should be tested for illegal substances.
The transactions, investigators say, took place before the WWE initiated its policy, but not before the drugs were outlawed.

If the athlete’s had been baseball players, we’d have disgorged no end of outrage over it. But if there’s been a scrap of righteous indignation on the part of the sporting media over the WWE names — Randy Orton was one of them — I have yet to hear it.

There’s something horribly wrong with this picture. I know that professional wrestling isn’t a legitimate sporting event, the outcome determined in advance and the fights choreographed like the Bolshoi.

But millions of kids watch the shows on television and idolize the freakish mountains of muscle who are the stars of the show. Former star Jesse Ventura, who went on to become governor of Minnesota, admitted to using steroids when he was with the WWE. You can pretty much guess for yourself who else probably uses them.

Kids aren’t that clever. They see great slabs of muscle and zero body fat and they think it’s a cool look to cultivate. If the government is so hot to save kids from cheating heroes, you’d think somebody would tear into professional wrestling.

If they did, they just might save some of the performers from early deaths.
If anybody cares.

March 19 | 2:45 a.m. ET

Tiger Woods knows a lot about golf and almost as much about living well. But he still has a few things to learn about life. Primary among them is learning to face defeat as well as he accepts victory.

He shot a 76 Sunday at Bay Hill, his worst score in a PGA tournament in years. And when he was done, he walked off the course and got out of town without telling his tens of millions of fans around the world what went wrong.

It was big news. In fact, Tiger Woods’ bad day on the golf course was, for the headline writers, bigger news than the person who actually won the tournament. But don’t feel sorry for Vijay Singh, who won Arnold Palmer’s event at Bay Hill in Florida. Thanks to the money Tiger’s pumped into the PGA Tour, Vijay’s check for first place was a tidy $990,000, which is more than Corey Pavin made in an entire year when he led the tour in winnings just 16 years ago in 1991.

As far as that goes, a tie for 12th place was worth better than $120,000, which isn’t bad for four days’ work. It also would have led the tour for the entire year in 1966. (See the all-time money leaders’ list here.)

Records for the leading money-winner go back to 1934, and it took 29 years for Arnold Palmer to crack the $100,000 barrier in 1963. Twenty-five years later, in 1988, Curtis Strange pushed the record over $1 million.

Tiger joined the Tour in 1996 and quickly won his first tournament, collecting $297,000 for his efforts. Tom Lehman led the Tour in earnings with $1.8 million; the following year, Tiger became the first $2-million winner.

Just two years later, in 1999, first place for the year was worth $6.6 million, a tripling of the take, and it was all due to Tiger. Since then, Tiger’s hit $10 million twice and $9.9 million a third time.

So we went from zero to $100,000 in 29 years, from $100,000 to $1 million in 25 years, and from $1 million to $10 million in 16 years. We also went from $2 million to $10 million in seven years — all of them on Tiger’s watch.

I can think of no other way to emphasize his importance to the game than to recap how much money he’s brought to everybody involved with it. The reason all that money is there is because of the interest — and profits — he generates.

So for him to act as if a horrible round isn’t worth sticking around to talk about is incredibly short-sighted. It’s a slap in the face to everyone who invests time and money into making him the richest athlete on the face of the planet.

I don’t blame him for not wanting to talk. He had a chance to win the tournament before utterly unraveling on the back nine, shooting 43. For most of us, that’s a decent score. For him, it’s enough to make him physically ill.

But in sports, as in life, if you’re going to be all hale and well-met when you win, you have to also face the music when everything goes wrong. Say what you will about Alex Rodriguez, but never say that he doesn’t talk to the notepads and microphones when he screws up just as he does when he’s the hero of the day.

Once upon a time, Jack Nicklaus, the man whose legend Tiger is stalking, had a horrible day at the British Open. Like Tiger, Nicklaus stormed past the assembled media, too ticked at himself and the world to share his feelings.

Nicklaus went into the clubhouse to shower and change, and a few golf writers, among them Dave Anderson of the New York Times, gingerly followed him. When he found them at his locker, he demanded to know what they wanted. He wasn’t the story, he said, advising the writers to go and talk to the guys who had put up good rounds.

The writers told him that Jack Nicklaus having a bad round was bigger news than Joe Six-Iron having a great round. That’s just the way it was.

Nicklaus thought about it and agreed they had a point. He ended up spending more than half an hour recounting his nightmare. And from then on, he never brushed past the crowd of writers waiting for him to finish, no matter how good or bad his score was.

Nicklaus got it that day. He was the greatest golfer of his era and would become the greatest of any era. He saw that if he was going to accept all the good things that came with that, he also had to deal with the bad. It wasn’t for him that he had to do it, but for the sport.

What Nicklaus didn’t have that Tiger does is squadrons of promoters and agents buzzing around him, telling him that he’s the best thing to happen to the game since gutta percha and that he doesn’t have to talk to those vultures if he doesn’t want to. Woods has kissed off the media — and through them his fans — before. No one has ever told him it’s not right.

Golf depends on him. It’s made him rich and world famous, and he owes the game for that. He let it down on Sunday by refusing to talk. Two minutes would have been enough. It’s not a great price to pay for the position he occupies.

March 15 | 2:30 a.m. ET

I never thought I’d feel sorry for Pete Rose, and I don’t — yet. But I could be getting there.

He’ll be 66 on April 14 — the day before income taxes are due, which somehow seems ironically appropriate. And he’s still fighting to get back into a game that gets closer to forgetting him every year.

On Wednesday, he was on ESPN radio with Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann, and for the first time since he agreed to be banned for life from baseball, he publicly confessed to betting as a manager on his Cincinnati Reds “every night.”

He had prefaced this by saying, “I’ll be honest with you,” which in his case isn’t the greatest assurance in the world. He wasn’t honest when he got banned and denied any wrongdoing. And he hasn’t been honest for most of the subsequent years — at least not if his latest pronouncement is true.

If it is, it does shed a different light on things. I’ve been under the impression that Rose did not bet on every game, which means that he might have tried harder to win games he had money on than those he didn’t. If he held his closer out in a non-money game for the next game that he was betting on, that goes to the integrity of the game. It’s the same thing if he used his closer for an extra inning to get a win and lost him for the next game or two.

But if he bet every night, then every game is the same as every other. From that you could conclude that he did nothing wrong.

I mean nothing other than breaking the one rule in baseball that no one can break. It’s posted in every clubhouse in multiple languages: You bet on the game, you’re out for life with no hope of parole. The rule goes back to the Black Sox scandal of 1919, for which eight players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, were banned for life. Jackson was in on the plot to throw the series to Cincinnati, but when the games started, he played as hard and as well as anyone on the field on either side. He always maintained that he played an honest series, but it didn’t matter. The lifetime ban continues, even though he’s long dead.

That’s what Rose is up against. He committed the biggest wrong possible. And before you say nothing bad happened, consider what can happen when you get involved with big-time gamblers. Have a little losing streak and two guys named Vito and Rocco are at your door, looking for payment. Get far enough behind and you’ll be offered a choice — either make sure you lose a few games or find out how long you can hold your breath at the bottom of a lake while wearing cement footwear.

Rose couldn’t tell Patrick and Olbermann why he bet on the Reds, although he didn’t play the addict card, which I hold in his favor. But he did it and, whether he admits it or not, he put the integrity of the game at risk.

Last year, in another appearance, he had asked Patrick, “Why am I the only guy in this country who can’t get a second chance?”

That’s a nice piece of whining, but it’s not true. There are plenty of people who don’t get but one chance, including the guy in Florida who’s serving 25 years without chance of parole for taking pain medication.

He seems to think that second chances are part of life, and they frequently are. But second chances aren’t a right. He signed his lifetime ban, and if I were Bud Selig, I’d ask him which part of “lifetime” Rose didn’t understand.

So I don’t feel sorry for him for being banned. What raises my sympathy is the way he keeps talking about how good he’d be for baseball; how the game needs him.

He’s got that wrong. The game is doing just fine without him. It’s Rose who needs baseball, not the other way around.

It’s going on 18 years, and that part of his tune hasn’t changed. The game was his life and he gave it away. Slowly, he’s coming around to understanding that it’s his fault and his loss, not the game’s.

That’s got to hurt.

March 12 | 1:10 a.m. ET

Here’s a surprise on the level of discovering that David Wells likes beer: the same consulting outfit in Chicago that revealed that the Super Bowl costs the nation’s employers $800 million in lost productivity has figured out it can get its name online by figuring out what the NCAA tournament costs.

They’re wrong, at least in this space, where crass publicity grabs work once, but not twice. So, if you want the particulars, read all about it here. Otherwise, take the AP’s word for it: the estimated price is “$1.2 billion in lost productivity. The estimate is based on the assumption that 22.9 million workers — nearly 20 percent of the work force — will spend an average of 13.5 minutes a day following the games and updating their brackets (or tearing them up).”

So synchronize your watches, hoops fans. If you don’t waste 810 seconds a day, you’re not doing your part to derail the economy. (This could be what Alan Greenspan had in mind when he said there’s a 30 percent chance of a recession on the horizon.)

As I said back when the Super Bowl lost-productivity alarm sounded, such “studies” are meaningless, especially as they don’t consider the increased productivity that comes from having a happy office. Also, it’s taking one event and elevating it above all the other things that affect how we work.

Americans are the world’s most productive workers. So whatever they’re doing, don’t mess with it, especially by suggesting to personnel directors that there might be an extra 13.5 minutes of work to be squeezed out of the hired help. Keep pushing idiot studies like this, and the bean counters are going to start banning office pools.

It’s not as if America is the only country that does such things. If these publicity hounds want to look into lost productivity, how about putting a price tag on what the World Cup does to offices in Europe and South America and Asia and Africa and everywhere but here?

I expect we’re stuck with these folks doing this for every big sporting event, although I’d stay away from the Stanley Cup playoffs — I’m not sure the nation can deal with the $56 in lost productivity that costs us.

Ultimately, the question that needs to be answered is: If we banned sports entirely, could we pay off the national debt?

March 9 | 9:45 a.m. ET

Arte Moreno, the owner of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, has made a lot of friends and earned a lot of applause for the tough stance he’s taken on allegations that one of his ballplayers, Gary Matthews Jr., received mail-order performance-enhancing drugs.

Matthews is not charged with anything, but his name came up on the customer list of an alleged drug ring being investigated by federal prosecutors in Albany. Moreno, who made his fortune in billboard advertising and bought the Angels in 2003, quickly demanded that Matthews come clean on the charges, suggesting that there would be dire consequences if he didn’t.

Okay, so here’s an owner who isn’t going to turn a blind eye to whatever his players may be taking to improve their performance, and hurray for him. As others have pointed out, it beats the see-no-evil approach of Giants’ management towards Barry Bonds.

But Moreno didn’t make his money by being stupid and ignoring the advice of legal experts. So he’s got to know that Matthews, who is represented by attorney Robert Shapiro, isn’t going to say anything his lawyer doesn’t tell him to say.

Shapiro had told Matthews he had to say something by last Saturday. Yesterday, according to The Orange County Register, he declared that he is losing his patience.

Today, The New York Times, (registration required) said that Moreno doesn’t want a confession, quoting him as saying , “Address the press and say: ‘Yes, my name has been linked to this story. I’m sorry this has become a distraction and we’re going to try to clear it up as quickly as possible,’ I’m not asking him to admit to anything illegal. His response was, ‘I’m talking to my people and we’ll get back to you.’ ”

Moreno also told The Times that Matthews could use the Jason Giambi defense, which was to apologize for the unspecified naughty things he’d done.

That he could, and he’d be better off for it. At least we’d have an idea of how he went from being a career .250 hitter to being one of the better sluggers in the American League.

But until Shapiro tells him to talk — and Shapiro isn’t likely to do that — there’s nothing anyone can do to make him. The Angels have invested $50 million in Matthews over the next five years, and there’s nothing in the contract require him to confess to using drugs the game doesn’t test for. There’s really nothing Moreno can do. If he cuts Matthews, the players union is going to take it straight to court and win. If he benches the player, he’s just hurting the team.

Moreno seems to think that the cloud over Matthews head will keep fans away or cause problems in the clubhouse. He’s wrong. The fans have proved they don’t care — attendance hit an all-tine high last year. And the players don’t care, either, not as long as he helps them win.

But what could disrupt the clubhouse is an owner who keeps climbing up in his pulpit and stirring up the media and the fans against his own player. There’s no future in it and no point to it. Moreno said his piece. If he wants to talk to Matthews, call him into the owner’s office and hash it out. Anything else is grandstanding — and counterproductive.

* * *

The game’s sold out. What do you do?

I got a book in the mail called “How to Get into the Big Game: The Poor Man’s Guide to Buying Scalper Tickets” by Fred Salas. If you’ve ever wondered how you can score a ticket to just about anything, whether concert or sporting event, for face value or less, Salas gives you the recipe, complete with examples from his own adventures.

I’m ambivalent about books or articles that tell the masses about the great secrets of life. If everybody knows how to score a cheap ticket to a sold-out event or how to beat all the traffic home, all you do is ruin everything.

I and some friends once found a perfect tropical vacation getaway, a blissfully peaceful place with bright and cheerful rooms, outstanding food and deserted beaches on crystalline lagoons. It would have made a great story for a travel magazine, but we swore a pact never to sell the place out. If everybody knew about it, it wouldn’t be special anymore.

Then there was the time the newspaper I used to work for asked the Yankees beat writer to come up with a piece revealing the secret shortcuts to and from the stadium. The players told him they’d never speak to him again if he wrote the story. So he lied to his editors and said there were no shortcuts.

Salas is running the same risk with his book. If hundreds of fans start using the techniques he outlines in his book, prices go up, tickets get gobbled up and the secrets he reveals become worthless.

But that’s his problem, not mine. Besides, the techniques he recommends — and I have no doubt they work — require discipline, the willingness to pass up a game or to get in well after it’s started and a lot of research. My guess is most people will either pay a premium or not go, and the few willing to take a chance won’t significantly change the market.

So if you want to know how to score that ticket, Salas’ book will let you know. It’s $14.95, and I already E-mailed him to tell him that if I were to use his own formula, I’d wait until used copies were on Amazon or eBay and get it for a buck or two.

March 8 | 9:25 a.m. ET

I know this isn't standard blog fare, and I've been trying to write it — or avoid writing it — for far too long. But I loved this guy, and I want the little bit of the world I can reach to know about him.

It’s 28 or 30 hours since I learned that my friend and fellow sportswriter, Alan Greenberg, dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 55, and left his wife, Anne-Marie, and three children, Alex, 13; Allison, 10; and Abigail, 7.

I’ve spent that time feeling useless and inadequate because I don’t have the words to convey what a wonderfully talented and caring and passionate man Alan was.

Those of you who read The Hartford Courant or listened to WEEI radio, knew Alan well from his provoking reporting of the Patriots, the powerful feature stories he brought to your breakfast table and the quirky wit and cutting insight he brought as a radio guest.  Some of you Left Coasters may remember him from his days as a writer for The Los Angeles Times, where he and Mike Littwin once blew the lid off the UCLA basketball program. And if you’re old enough and lived in Atlanta 30 years ago, you may even remember him from the Journal & Constitution.

But, like most writers, he’s probably unknown to most of the country. That’s a pity. If his passion had been for television, he’d have been a national star. I could say the same about a lot of writers, men and women who have poured their souls into their art, enriching the lives of all who were privileged to read them.

Make no mistake, Alan Greenberg had a giant talent. Twenty years ago, a great generation of writers who were weaned on the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein that exposed the Watergate conspiracy and brought down a presidency came of age. Alan was among the sportswriting fraternity of that generation. A few of the others were Mike Downey, Tony Kornheiser, Mike Littwin, Mitch Albom, Scott Ostler, Rick Reilly, Bob Ryan, John Schulian, Mark Whicker and Charlie Pierce.

We had grown up wishing we could be Red Smith, for my money the greatest sportswriter who ever lived, who himself had grown up wishing he could be Grantland Rice, who defined the Golden Age of sports writing going back to the Roaring Twenties.

Alan was a son of Baltimore, the home town of H.L. Mencken, the dean of American letters during the first half of the 20th century. Like Mencken, Alan could write a little.

No higher compliment exists in the fraternity of people who make their living by single combat with the English language.

I met him when, fresh out of Syracuse, he blew into the newsroom of “The Home News” of New Brunswick, N.J., for which I was covering the New Jersey Statehouse. He was wearing a tight-fitting Izod polo shirt. I know that not because I remember his first day but because that’s the only kind of shirt he owned and the only shirt I ever saw him in.

He was broad in the shoulders with big pipes and an absurdly narrow waist. He had an easy smile, a blast of white teeth in a face heavy with stubble under a thatch of black hair that grew thick and straight. The pumped body was an artifact created in the gym. In truth, Alan, who grew up in suburban Baltimore wishing he could be Johnny Unitas or Lenny Moore, didn’t have a scrap of athletic ability, and he knew it.

Believe me; you don’t have to have played the games to write about them. Red Smith had no flare for sports, either. As Mencken once wrote, “It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.”

All Alan wanted to do was cover sports. He went to Marietta, Ga., to get his first job, which turned out to be something of a culture shock, both for him and for his audience, some of whom thanked him for his efforts by taking crayon in hand and scrawling hateful letters writhing with anti-Semitism. Such are the wages of doing a job well.

They’re not making newspaper writers like Alan or any of his contemporaries anymore, at least not that I’ve seen. It’s not that today’s crop aren’t as talented as that generation, but that the job has changed. Today, thanks to blogs and the Internet, everybody’s a writer. Newspapers are dying, and with them the writers who made reading the morning paper an exercise that added to your knowledge of the world, but also enriched your soul.

Last year, Alan won an Associate Press Sports Editors award for a feature he wrote on the Yale-Harvard rowing competition. It looks like a dull subject – a bunch of yuppies passing their free time in a sport too obscure for even the 3 a.m. slot on ESPN2.

That brings me back to Mencken, who summed up the essence of journalism by saying: “There are no dull subjects, only dull writers.” For a demonstration of that truth, read “Rowers’ Time,” by Alan Greenberg.  When you’re done, try to convince me that good writing is no longer important.

We once shared an apartment. We always shared a passion and a profession. You may not have heard much about him, but he was as good as anyone in a business that will miss him sorely.

Writers have an epithet they apply to those who can do with words what a great sculptor does with marble, and there is no higher praise. It fits Alan Greenberg: “He could write a little.”

March 4 | 2 a.m. ET

The only thing better for baseball than the developing frenzy over Red Sox import Daisuke Matsuzaka — that’s Dice-K for you headline writers — and his gyroball would be if the pitch actually were the unhittable weapon it’s purported to be.

The gyroball buzz is something that can happen only in baseball. You’re not going to come up with a new way to throw or kick a football or hit a golf ball or shoot a basketball, and even if you could, it wouldn’t change the game. But people have been coming up with new secret weapons in baseball ever since Candy Cummings invented the curveball in 1863. (Fred Goldsmith also claimed credit for the curve.) Back then, as now with the gyroball, people claimed it was impossible to make a ball curve. Goldsmith proved it could in 1870 by throwing the ball to the right of one post and the left of another set in line with the first.

Since then, a plethora of pitches have been dreamed up by pitchers in their eternal quest to keep batters from putting them out of jobs. All but one of them rely on the interaction of a spinning baseball with the air through which it travels.

The exception is the knuckleball, which doesn’t spin, at least not more than three quarters of a rotation to a full rotation on the way to the plate. The result is random aerodynamic forces that produce its unpredictable dance.

Every other pitch ever invented obeys the certain laws of physics, so the gyroball, despite all the speculation, isn’t going to do anything new, because there aren’t any new ways for a ball to move.

Jeff Passan at Yahoo Sports has been on something of a crusade since hearing about the pitch last year, when he wrote a column about it, complete with a video that purports to show Dice-K throwing it. The only problem is that the pitch shown is actually Matsuzaka’s slider. The pitcher himself said at the time he didn’t even throw the pitch, which was invented in a laboratory by Japanese scientists. Passan reported then that the pitch could move more than four feet laterally.

This year, he revisited the issue, discovering now that the pitch doesn’t move laterally at all.
Passan does an impressive job, but he could have saved a lot of effort by talking to Alan Nathan, the professor who authored “The Physics of Baseball,” which he has graciously provided free online. He’s even got a section on the gyroball.

The ball is supposed to be thrown like a football so that it rotates around an axis that corresponds with the direction of travel. What that means is it doesn’t curve. It also means that because it doesn’t have backspin like a fastball, it doesn’t appear to rise. (Fastballs don’t actually rise, they just fall less than the eye expects, making it look as if they rise.) It doesn’t have topspin like a curve, so it doesn’t have a big drop.

But if the batter thinks it’s a fastball, it will seem to drop. Nathan says the effect would be similar to a good splitter. If so, it would get hitters out, but it wouldn’t be unhittable, not to a major league hitter who learns to recognize it.

And it should be recognizable because of its unique spin. Great hitters should be able to literally see it coming.

While I’m on the subject, let me add that most of the things announcers tell you about the flight of pitched balls is based on what hitters see, not on what the pitch actually does. There is, for example, no such thing as “late movement” on a slider or any other pitch. Whatever a pitch does, it starts doing the instant the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and continues to do it until interrupted by a bat, the ground or a catcher’s mitt. What hitters and catchers see and describe as a rising fastball or late movement is an illusion caused by the brain expecting the ball to take one path and finding out — usually too late — that it’s taken a different route to the plate.

The gyroball isn’t going to be any different. It’s a new way to throw an old pitch — a sinking fastball. Its success won’t rely on the pitch, but on the man throwing it.

Feb. 28 | 8:45 p.m. ET

We’ve got another steroid scandal brewing , this one tarring the names of Evander Holyfield and Gary Matthews Jr. and allegations of mail-order drugs. (Jose Canseco is also mentioned, but the only thing interesting about that is that his lawyer denies Canseco’s involvement, saying Jose got his through different avenues.)

My last post was about how athletes don’t really want to get rid of drugs. This one shows why: if the allegations prove true, they show that current testing isn’t catching all the cheats.

You have two choices in dealing with this. One is you can gnash your teeth and rend your garments and lament the lack of values exhibited by today’s athletes. The other is you can quit pretending that this generation is any different from any other going back to the dawn of history and accept the fact that cheating isn’t a product of modern culture, but a fact of life. If you take the latter option, feel free to revile the cheaters, but don’t let it ruin the games for you, because cheating has always been part of life.

This shouldn’t be news, but for some reason we keep acting surprised that people would try to get an unfair advantage.

A piece written four years ago by Kirk O. Hanson, the executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, suggests that cheating is simply part of American culture. To expect athletics to be different is delusional. The essay is short on facts other than the claim that one in four Americans think it’s okay to cheat on your taxes, but it does remind us that athletes aren’t the only ones who cheat.

We tend to ignore that when we write about cheating athletes. Instead of looking at athletics as being just another thing that people do, we separate it out and treat it as if it’s a different from all the other pastimes and professions we pursue.

That’s part of the mythology of the sports. In our quest to create heroes, we throw out all the inconvenient realities and save the bits that fit what we want them to be. In journalism, it’s called never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. In foreign policy, it’s called weapons of mass destruction.

Athletes aren’t gods or saints; they’re people. No matter what the business, from preaching to writing to music to painting to science to investing to construction to law enforcement to education, people cheat. The surprise would be if athletes were the only humans who were as honest as the day is long on Mercury.

There’s a Website called cheatingculture.com . I’m not sure it’s totally current, but there’s enough stuff there to remind you of how much cheating there is out there and how many people do it, whether it’s fudging on their resumes or stealing music and software online.

Stanford student Andy Kuo wrote a paper about cheating in online fantasy role-playing games.

And here’s a site that can’t be accused of hiding its purpose: learntocheat.net. There’s a book on business cheating: “The Cheating Culture.” Cheating, it appears, is an honest industry.

In baseball, steroids didn’t change anything other than the length of the home runs. But cheating was alive and thriving before the pharmacists arrives and will be that way as long as the game is played.

So our first mistake is pretending that cheating is abnormal; it isn’t. Our second is blaming our culture, as if we Americans are the first civilization to put such a premium on success that people will cheat to get it.

In fact, people have been cheating at everything they could from the dawn of civilization. The reason writing was invented was to protect merchants from being cheated. The ancient Olympic games fought cheaters the same as the modern ones do. The ancients also had us beat by 2,500 years on commercializing the games.

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight all the ills we see in our games. We should. But we also shouldn’t give up watching something that gives us as much joy as sports. Cheating, after all, is not just part of the game, it’s part of life.

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