King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Derek Zumsteg, author of "The Cheater's Guide to Baseball," on the "calculated deliciousness" of rules being bent and broken.

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April 11, 2007 | Derek Zumsteg, Seattle Mariners fan, software designer and, according to his author bio, winner of the 2004 World's Smartest Human title in 2004, loves a good cheat. That blurb, which appears at the end of his new book, "The Cheater's Guide to Baseball," notes that he flimflams at "baseball, football, basketball, golf, poker, and his author bio."

The "Cheater's Guide," which the Los Angeles Times called "cheerfully amoral," will teach you how to cork a bat, doctor a baseball and steal a sign, but what it'll really do is give you a history of the underhanded, the illegal and the downright dastardly in baseball, from groundskeeping gamesmanship to the Black Sox scandal, from the hidden-ball trick to the steroids mess.

Zumsteg, 33, is one of the coauthors of the popular Mariners blog U.S.S. Mariner, but it was through a smaller blog for his book that he found himself on the edges of the national spotlight last week.

Zumsteg posted stills from MLB.tv video of Los Angeles Angels closer Francisco Rodriguez that he said showed a white blob on the underside of Rodriguez's hat brim as he pitched against the Texas Rangers. He noted that before certain pitches, K-Rod rubbed that white spot with his thumb, and then he argued that those pitches showed unusual movement.

Major League Baseball got wind of the charges, said it would investigate, then quickly cleared Rodriguez. "There was nothing to investigate," Angels general manager Bill Stoneman said discipline czar Bob Watson told him. The Angels had argued that the white spot was just rosin residue, transferred to the cap from K-Rod's fingers, not vice versa.

"It's easy for a guy sitting at his desk, watching television, to put pictures on the Internet," Rodriguez fumed to the L.A. Times. "But I hope he has something better to do than to mess with people. He has no clue what he's writing about. I don't even know who he is."

He's a guy who lives in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, writes about baseball and is looking for his next gig in the software field. I talked to him by phone Tuesday.

Between the time you and I scheduled this interview and now, you went and got famous with the K-Rod thing. There was some talk that Major League Baseball was going to investigate him, and then they weren't going to. They were satisfied there was nothing untoward there. What do you think of that?

I think it's funny. I think this is a case where the league doesn't want every fan anywhere in the country, every time they see a spot on someone's uniform, complaining. It would just be chaos. They don't want to start an investigation over this. There's a really huge incentive on their part to kind of look at it and go, "Eh, there's nothing there. This guy's crazy."

That said, I was disappointed. I'm not pointing it out to go after K-Rod. I pointed it out because I wrote a book on cheating and I think this stuff is fascinating. But you can see there's something under his hat brim that's not supposed to be there. And the argument that it's rosin just doesn't wash. You're not supposed to have a personal stash of rosin under your cap so you can just use it when you're on the rubber.

Next page: Gaylord Perry and "cheater's cheater" Billy Martin. Plus: Steroids, and the video-heavy future