Kenny Rogers' stinkpalm

The World Series takes a day off today at a point that it hasn't been at in a while, tied at something other than zero. It's tied because of Kenny Roger's masterful performance last night, which is all anyone wants to talk about today. Of course they're not talking about the game, but rather about the strange, poop-like substance that FOX's cameras found on Rogers' hand last night. The problem is that there's not much to talk about. The facts are pretty clear. Kenny Rogers had something on his hand last night. In all likelihood it wasn't a mixture of dirt and rosin like he claimed. Tony LaRussa asked the umps about it, but Rogers wasn't on the field at the time, meaning there was nothing they could do. He washed his hands off in between innings, getting rid of the crap. Maybe he put it somewhere else on his body, maybe he didn't. Regardless of what happened, no one caught him with anything on the field. That means that while people can speculate all they want about it, nothing is going to come of that speculation. There's no way MLB will suspend Rogers for the rest of the series based on some TV stills. LaRussa is not making a big deal of it, nor are the umpires, which means that everyone that writes something about this (myself included) is wasting their breath, because we're never going to know for sure what was. The best take I've seen on the whole thing comes from the Uni Watch, who noticed that the Gambler has been wearing his batting practice cap all year. That seems like an innocuous detail except that the underbrim is black, making it a little easier to hide a foreign substance.

Anyways, this series is moving to St. Louis this week with Carpenter and Suppan taking the mound for the Cards. I've got a feeling this one's going down to the wire.