There is hope yet for Alex Rodriguez. If Kenny Rogers can be a hero, so can anyone.

The catalog of the soft-tossing Detroit pitcher’s sins entering this October is near infinite. Eleven runs in four postseason games with the Yankees; walking in the winning run in the 1999 National League Championship Series; last season’s shameful abuse of a beleaguered cameraman, and an earned run average, in seven postseason series, of 6.43. This was not a reputation earned in a bad moment or two, but one earned through a decade of being an occasional scoundrel, and a bum in the clutch.

So, naturally enough, Rogers has been utterly dominant in the playoffs. Having given up no runs in his starts against his former clubs, New York and Oakland, Rogers last night decided to top the trick by giving up no hits. He didn’t quite meet his objective, but not giving up a second hit until the 8th inning, and giving up no runs yet again, isn’t so bad after all, especially for Kenny Rogers.

Without meaning to be uncharitable toward any team or player, this postseason has featured the least impressive great pitching I can recall. It’s not so much that it’s the likes of Kenny Rogers, the similarly reviled Jeff Weaver and Jeff Suppan, effective enough but hardly overwhelming starters, who are doing so well, but it’s the nature of the way they’re doing it. Fastball inside, fastball away, fastball inside, changeup away, a slider or curveball every so often to keep hitters honest — for 150 years it’s been how you get batters out, but one would expect one of these pitchers to get hammered sooner or later, and it just hasn’t happened. It’s thrilling to see the marginal pitcher who seems at every moment on the verge of falling off the wire continue the delicate balance of teasing and tempting the hitter with pitches just out of reach, but at some point you have to admit that it’s not all the pitching. A lineup that leaves 428 runners on base against Weaver, as the Tigers did last night, cannot just tip to the opposing dugout and say, “Heck of a game.” Their weaknesses — a lack of left-handed power, general impatience, and a tendency to flail — have been exposed the last two games.

Weaknesses don’t matter when you have Whitey Ford on the hill, though, and that’s exactly who Kenny Rogers has looked like to me the last few weeks. Granting that I never actually saw the legendary Yankees ace, I still have a perfect picture of him in my mind — a smirking glare, a compact motion, a short fastball, a looping curve, a changeup that just stops at the plate, and a batter walking off the field just cursing at his bat, convinced a schoolgirl could have knocked the ball out of the yard. (Feel free to correct me.) Swap out the smirking glare for Rogers’s grizzled, trembly stare and that’s what you have, especially given last night’s gamesmanship involving some excess pine tar on Rogers’s pitching hand, a trick of which Ford would doubtless approve. Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa’s complaints about the dread foreign substance were just preposterous — on a cold, dry night a pitcher needs a little something just to get a good grip on a cold, dry, and rockhard ball, and the unwritten rule is that ancient soft-tossers like Rogers can pull out a belt sander on the mound without anyone really caring — and it was good to see his unsportsmanlike carping not pay off for him and his team, as the wily Rogers doubtless just went to his backup stashes of oily secretions. The Tigers have their weaknesses, but so do the Cardinals — especially with Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, and Jim Edmonds playing in various degrees of disrepair.This team simply can’t hit, Saturday’s seven runs or no. In the best of circumstances not many line drives were going to jump off of Redbird bats, and Rogers gave them nothing.

It may be hard to be overly excited about a World Series featuring an 83-win team (albeit an 83-win team that certainly made me eat humble pie with crow), but so far this one has had its pleasures. The wonderful thing about baseball reputations is that they are based on merit, and they are unmade as quickly as they are made. In the five boroughs, Kenny Rogers will always be the bum and choker who walked in Andruw Jones in 1999, but that doesn’t matter a whit to the rest of the world; he’s nails now, the grizzled sharp who in his senescence wheeled on out to the mound, loaded up the ball, and dragged his team on toward a championship.

Three good games is all it takes.

tmarchman@nysun.com