One way to handle cheating

They Yankees beat the Red Sox last night. They cheated. The Red Sox TV crew noticed that the Yankees pitcher, Michael Pineda, had something on the heel of his hand. Pine tar probably. Sweat and dirt, he says. Dunno, says his manager. In the fifth inning, it disappeared. Guess it must have gotten enough cooler as the evening wore on that he stopped sweating. Still, Mr. Pineda, I'd have your endocrine system checked out. Sweating like that isn't normal. This has turned into a great moral debate in the media. My esteemed fellow blogger Richard Bradley, who has on other occasions taken cheating allegations very seriously, has a no-big-deal attitude about this time. He's right for a change. Whether Pineda was disqualified or not would not have changed the outcome of the game. The Red Sox are not hitting. Some Red Sox players even suggested they were glad Pineda was cheating, because that meant he would be less likely to lose control of one of his fast balls and bean somebody. Pretty generous, given that it also meant that his slider was more effective. Like a lot of cheating, this is something for management to sort out. Farrell did not want to show up Girardi, not so much because "everybody does it" (they don't, to that degree), but because he knew that Girardi was on notice to fix the egregious cheating, and there was no reason to embarrass him or Pineda, or to cost Pineda a fine in the short run or a scarred reputation in the long run. I'd say Farrell acted like a grown up, everybody on both teams learned a lesson, and nobody got hurt. Good.