Sticky anniversary for Yankee Stadium

As the summer of love for doomed Yankee Stadium climaxes Tuesday night with the All-Star Game, don't think that you've somehow extracted yourself from the old yard's dense multi-layered history.

Soon enough, you'll be reminded that for all its baseball, football, boxing and even papal significance, Yankee Stadium is also where the cure for hemorrhoids was discovered.

Turned out to be pine tar. But don't try that at home.

We're drifting up against the silver anniversary of baseball's fabled Pine Tar Game, which frankly, had it happened in Seattle during a 10:05 EDT start, would have been forgotten by 1984. That it happened in broad daylight in Yankee Stadium is most of the reason George Brett's soiled bat today resides in the Hall of Fame.

Brett now jokes reliably that his role in Tar Wars that day, July 24, 1983, has cast him in the nation's perpetual sports highlight loop as the bug-eyed maniac sprinting from the visiting dugout, rather than the guy who got hemorrhoids during the World Series three years earlier.

Briefly, Brett had just slugged a two-run homer with two outs in the ninth to put the Royals ahead of New York, 5-4, when Yankees manager Billy Martin, acting on months old intelligence, advised the home plate umpire that Brett's bat violated what was then Rule 1.10 (b), limiting the amount of pine tar on any bat to the area within 18 inches of its handle. Umpires conferred, agreed with Martin, called Brett out, and ruled the Yankees had won, 4-3.

The Royals protested, first vociferously and then formally, and the American League ruled correctly in their favor, in part because the rule provides only for the removal of the bat in that situation (not for calling the batter out) and in part because the pine tar gave Brett no tangible advantage. How then, wags wondered, could he have delivered history's only game-losing homer? The game was completed Aug. 18 and the Royals held on to win, 5-4.

The significance of all that can't be understated, but as you bump up against its inevitable remembrances in the weeks to come, I would recommend a double dose of bemusement inasmuch as violations exactly like Brett's now occur every day.

In the recently completed Pirates-Cardinals series here in Pittsburgh, St. Louis' Troy Glaus and Adam Kennedy used bats in apparent violation of the 18-inch limit for pine tar and other grip-improving substances, as did the Pirates' Doug Mientkiewicz and Chris Gomez. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada reliably uses a bat with pine tar reaching nearly to the sweet spot.

Like Posada and Brett before him, Mientkiewicz does not wear batting gloves. Often enough, players who go to bat with their bare hands (that's right, the way God meant them to) will apply excess gunk on their bats, then intermittently pat the soiled area to improve their grip. They're not trying to cheat. Excessively pine tarred bats are not illegal, not unlawful, not of any real interest apparently except to the truly anal, but merely a messy little rule-violating nuisance.

The rule hasn't changed.

The bat handle, for not more than 18 inches from its end, may be covered or treated with any material (Preparation H if you want, ironically enough) or substance to improve the grip. Any such material or substance that extends past the 18-inch limitation, shall cause the bat to be removed from the game.

It further carries this note:

"If the umpire discovers that the bat does not conform until a time during or after which the bat has been used in play, it shall not be grounds for declaring the batter out, or ejected from the game.''

Obviously the George Brett Rule.

The Pine Tar Game and its nonexistent modern applications are now little but a quasi-useful reminder that baseball has long disdained many of the particulars of its rulebook and particularly to revisions thereto.

This season, for example, umpires were going to enforce the rules regarding where the base coaches must stand in relation to the coaching boxes. That lasted I think one day, until Dodgers third base coach Larry Bowa was ejected upon its first attempted enforcement, and again coaches roam foul territory indiscriminately. On May 21 of this year, the commissioner's office urged the enforcement of rules already in the book designed to speed up the game.

Take Rule 6.02 (b), please:

"The batter shall not leave his position in the batter's box after the pitcher comes to Set Position, or starts his windup.''

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

That one's violated 54 times per nine innings, approximately.

Not even the accompanying Comment on page 49 holds any sway:

"Umpires will not call 'Time'' at the request of the batter or any member of his team once the pitcher has started his windup or has come to a set position.''

Stop, you're killin' me.

Just about all you need to know about baseball and its rules happens in the last moments before the first pitch and it happens night after night when the first batter of the game is introduced. He arrives at home plate with only one obvious purpose, which is to violate Rule 6.03:

"The batter's legal position shall be within the batter's box.''

And even though the approved interpretation is that the lines defining the batter's box are within the batter's box, the first batter often rubs the back line into dirty nonexistence right under the umpire's nose.

And what does the august arbiter say to that?

Play ball.

(Contact Gene Collier at gcollier@post-gazette.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)