DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

On October 3, 1951, after a storied pennant comeback race in which Brooklyn lost a 13-and-a-half game lead over the New York Giants, the Giants finally beat the Dodgers in a tie-breaking game that ended with Bobby Thomson's legendary three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth and also produced an immortal radio moment -- Russ Hodges repeatedly screaming "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" -- a recorded event that has remained familiar to succeeding generations by being used on television series like The Wonder Years, M*A*S*H, and Sports Night.

It turns out that the Giants cheated.

In 2001 the Wall Street Journal's Joshua Harris Prager reported that Giants manager Leo Durocher cheated to steal Brooklyn's catchers' signals (though Thomson claims the cheating was not used on that particular pitch). They posted a coach with a telescope in the Giants' center field clubhouse and he signaled the pitches with a buzzer, not just in the last game but during much of the late season.

It's good that it happened in 1951. Otherwise, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter might be on the case.

Specter, former counsel to the Warren Commission and now ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is hot on the trail of the New England Patriots, who he accuses of cheating by surreptitiously taping practices of opposing teams. This is the latest of several disputes the senator has had with the Patriots. Specter is from Pennsylvania and some suspect he has never forgiven the Patriots for a Superbowl victory against the Eagles.

Let's think for a moment -- is it possible that there is something else that could usefully occupy the time of the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking GOP member?

Some folks have called for a committee probe of gas price fixing or an inquiry into FBI/ATF rivalry. But maybe Specter could undertake an investigation of Yoko's role in the breakup of the Beatles. I always thought she got a bad rap.

On August 16, 2002, when a major league baseball strike was threatening, George Bush made a public statement: "The baseball owners and the baseball players must understand that if there is a stoppage, work stoppage, a lot of fans are going to be furious, and I'm one. It is very important for these people to get together. They can make every excuse in the book not to reach an accord. It is bad for them not to reach an accord. They need to keep working."

Setting aside the puerile "it is bad" simplicity of Bush's analysis of the situation, what exactly was the urgency of this situation that called for bringing the enormous power of the White House to bear? The entire workforce of baseball doesn't amount to a significant portion of the economy and baseball hardly provides an essential service to the population. It's a game, not the steel industry.

But Bush did have precedent. There was Bill Clinton's involvement in the 1995 baseball strike. On one occasion that year, Clinton met with reporters and led off with a statement on an injunction: "And I would just say, if the injunction stays and the players do again state their willingness to go back to work, then I hope they won't be locked out. I think it gives us a chance at least to start the baseball season in a good way and without the replacement players."

To provide an indication of where baseball strikes fall -- or should fall -- in the list of concerns of presidents, consider this: After Clinton made his lead-off statement, he was then asked about the level of political violence in Haiti and whether the CIA had covered up a murder in Guatemala.

I don't know when this kind of thing started, but I suspect that a big benchmark in government policing of entertainment was the payola scandals of the 1950s. I wasn't very old then but even then I was puzzled why congressional committees were investigating whether Dick Clark played Duane Eddy's records because Clark owned a piece of Eddy's career.

And was it really a legitimate federal concern if television networks rigged quiz shows?

If so, then I want Nevada's Sen. Harry Reid to see what he can do about getting Simon and Garfunkel back together.