IF ONLY THE UMPS SAW WHAT WE DID TV VIEWERS HAD THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE DURING THE ROGERS INCIDENT.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

How cool is it to be sitting at home on the sofa, watching a huge ballgame on television, knowing more about what's happening in the game than the people attending the game and even the people playing the game?

This doesn't happen as often as you and I like to believe.

But it happened to all of us watching Game 2 of the World Series, as TV cameras took their revenge on Cheatin' Kenny Rogers.

It was a case of life imitating art, or at least advertising.

Among the commercials on the Tigers-Cardinals telecasts is the clever one for high-definition TVs. A golfer at a major tournament hits a wild drive, and everybody at the course is hunting for the ball in tall grass. All over the world, people watching in high-def can see the ball plain as day, and the viewers are exasperated that the participants can't.

The whole nation knows the feeling after watching Sunday's baseball game.

In the real-life example, we not only knew more than the people at the park in Detroit. As things unfolded, we also felt smarter and more ethical. For an experience like this, normally you have to wait for a presidential debate.

In the first inning, as Rogers began what became a 3-1 Tigers victory, a Fox camera picked up a brown patch of skin at the base of his left (pitching) thumb. As Fox froze the picture, Tim McCarver said it looked like ``a discoloration,'' sounding like the friends in that ``Seinfeld'' episode making the same blandly ominous observation about a white dot on George's lip. What it was, as anybody in any living room could see, was the color of pine tar, and as the network was kind enough to spell out by displaying the relevant rule-book page, a pitcher caught with a ``foreign substance'' gets an ejection and 10-day suspension.

Fans in the stands wouldn't have known what was developing. Some reporters covering the game probably didn't know what was happening. The only people at Comerica Park who knew were unused players watching TV while staying warm in the clubhouses.

Apparently one of those players clued in Tony LaRussa, and St. Louis hitters mentioned funny movement on the ball, because the Cardinals manager went to the umpires.

But La Russa didn't demand that Rogers be searched, a move that might have led to the ejection of this October's dominant pitcher and swung the series to St. Louis. The umpires allowed Rogers to wash his hand and that was that.

Sitting on the couch, you're disappointed with LaRussa for not being more aggressive. Pressing the case might at least have unnerved Rogers. But maybe LaRussa never saw the evidence that you saw on TV.

Sitting on the couch, you're frustrated with the umpires for letting Rogers off the hook. A guy with sap on the thumb might deserve a slap on the wrist. But, again, the umps didn't see the TV pictures.

Sitting on the couch, you're howling when Rogers tells an interviewer after the game that the brown spot on his hand was just ``a big clump of dirt'' and that he removed it without anybody asking.

You're howling because you've already seen (courtesy of ESPN) the same, uh, clump of dirt in pictures from Rogers' playoff wins over the Yankees and Athletics, and you've already heard that umpires supervisor Steve Palermo said (to Fox's Chris Myers) the umpires ordered the hand washed.

Here was evidence that Rogers, who has gone from an 8.85 postseason ERA to 23 consecutive shutout innings at age 41, was using something funny to give him a tighter hold of the ball in the cold weather. Or to doctor the ball and alter its spin. Or to plant that fear in hitters' minds.

Gripping TV, right?

TV is rarely better than BT (Being There). But sometimes you do see more on TV than in person.

There's the story about Pete Axthelm covering the 1972 Olympics in Munich for Newsweek. Axthelm sent his article to the magazine's offices in New York. An editor on the phone said, ``Great job, and you're going to file a separate on Olga, right?'' To which Axthelm replied, ``Who is Olga?''

On the scene, Axthelm had no idea that television back home was making a star of Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut.

It happened to me in 2002 at the Angels-Giants World Series. Steve Dilbeck and I had front-and-center seats in the San Francisco press box. We watched Game 5, wrote our columns, and went to dinner. A couple of hours after the game, a colleague mentioned the incident in which Dusty Baker's 3 1/2-year-old son ran to home plate to retrieve Kenny Lofton's bat while a play was going on, and J.T. Snow had to save the boy from getting run over. The colleague had been in the auxiliary press section beyond left field, had used the TV monitors to follow the action, and had watched endless replays of Darren Baker.

Steve and I had no idea about Darren Baker, most of us in the main press box having followed the ball on that play and never glanced at the TVs. We didn't have to. We had the best seats in the house!

Don Shula used to complain, before the NFL started to use instant replay to reverse bad calls, that ``people sitting in their living rooms'' knew more than the people on the field. That's how it appeared in Game 2 of the World Series.

Kenny Rogers used to be one of the more forgettable characters in baseball. He was a good but dull journeyman whose biography was livened only by the 2005 outburst in which he shoved two cameramen and knocked a camera to the ground.

Now he's fascinating, a man who was able to turn around his October record because he decided to let his emotions flow. Unless it's because he decided to cheat.

Was The Gambler marking the deck on Sunday? Should the umps have taken a closer look instead of tiptoeing around a potential scandal? Should La Russa have screamed ``Cheater!'' instead of politely dismissing the whole thing as ``not important to talk about''?

Folks in Detroit seemed to think everything looked OK. You and I knew better.

heymodesti(AT_SIGN)aol.com

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Photo:

(color) KENNY RODERS

Morry Gash/Associated press