Pitcher-Turned-Law Student On Cheating In Baseball

An anonymous reader writes "As a 27-year old minor league pitcher who had never made it to "The Show" (ballplayers' slang for the big leagues), Garrett Broshius was advised by a coach to develop an 'out pitch' by cheating (doctoring or scuffing the baseball while standing on the mound). It was an ethical crossroads faced by many players past and present, and Broshius ultimately decided to give up the game. While a student at the St. Louis University School of Law, he wrote a paper that attempted to apply the tenets of legal theorists to the rampant cheating in baseball and other sports (click the 'download' button, no registration required). While Broshius' paper isn't brilliant or novel, it tours the techniques and issues surrounding cheating in baseball better than most. Broshius concludes with recommendations for how baseball should handle two classes of cheating: 'traditional' cheating of the type he was advised to do by the coach, which has achieved acceptance in some quarters as part of the game; and 'new era' cheating involving performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids, which has become prominent in the last 25 years. Oh, and Brosius remarks that in almost every baseball game he watches these days, he notices something suspicious — usually from the pitcher."

Re:Money

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former professional cyclist, I can attest to that as a certain fact.

Re:But thats OK!

[internerdj]

A baseball scholarship put my wife's oldest brother through an engineering degree. It is also putting my wife's youngest brother through school although he doesn't really know what he wants to do other than baseball. My kids are playing but I'm not sure I want them to be successful with it beyond college. Too much pressure to do amoral or destructive things to get an edge, but I guess that is the case with most high profile success areas.

Re:Money

[Dcnjoe60]

>Maybe if we changed the system so that we didn't reward the win at all cost mentality,

Nature is a system that favors the win at all costs.The winners (in wars) are the ones that write the history books. The winners in games are the ones the viewers. The winners in finance are the ones that make the most money. You are going to have a hard time changing the system because being the winner is what most people want.

Nature does not favor winning at all cost and usually is just the opposite. It is the cooperative or symbiotic relationship that prospers.

The writers of history have nothing to do with nature. Nor do the winners in games or finance. As for that being what people want, well what happened to Enron? What happened to Lance Armstrong? What happened to the Romans? All those embraced winning at all cost and all were toppled.

Society tolerates winning at all cost only to a point, then like bullying, they rise up against it. That is where anti-trust laws came from in business and anti-doping laws in sports and even the Geneva convention in war. Eventually, civilized people settle on rules of fair play.

So does nature. The giant redwood does take all of the nutrients in the forest, just those it needs. Same for the fox or a bear. In our own bodies, we call cells that take too much cancer and cut them out. Why? because even those those cells are the fittest, they destroy the body. In nature, if the animal at the top of the food chain eats all the food, the animal dies, too. So, in nature, a proper balance is maintained (unless man does something to upset it, like introduce a non native species or change the habitat or environment).

Not even Darwin believed in survival of the fittest. He used that expression only twice in the entire On the Origen of the Species. He actually proposed cooperation as the better model using human beings as the example since we were not the fastest or strongest nor did we posses the sharpest claws or teeth. Instead in cooperating we were successful in dominating the planet.

So, even in nature, the win at all cost model does not win.