Pitcher-Turned-Law Student On Cheating In Baseball 276
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."
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care what sport it is - when contracts worth millions of dollars are on the line, there will always be talented people willing to do whatever they have to in order to stay competitive and even excel.
Re:But thats OK! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just as long it is about sports, we don't care about right and wrong or morals.
IMO our society has a ridiculous fixation on sports.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Like international finance. My favourite sport.
MLB has much bigger problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Slow play and umps that can't find the strike zone with a telescope
Coaches should get red flag just like football so replay could be used. Replays should be done at MLB HQ like the NHL does it.
MLB should institute an automated strike zone and a pitch clock when no one is on base.
Walk Away (Score:5, Insightful)
There's only one solution to a completely corrupt system. Walk away from it. Broshius made the correct decision by leaving the game behind him.
You cannot change a corrupted institution from within. I'll repeat that. You cannot change a corrupted institution from within. There are too many people inside who have spent their lives justifying and profiting from their misdeeds, who are not about to turn over a new leaf or air their dirty laundry because you've made an appeal to their conscience. They killed theirs long ago.
The best thing to do is leave the rotten ship to sink all by itself. Every honest person who stands by a rotten game, or bankrupted bank, or broken political party is just propping up an at best amoral system, and usually an immoral and even illegal one. There is no obligation to stay loyal or remain in solidarity with a disloyal and dishonest organisation.
Broshius has done more for baseball as a law student that he ever could have as a player or a fan.
Says the guy who didn't make it to the show (Score:2, Insightful)
So a minor leaguer who didn't cut the mustard decides that everyone in the Majors is cheating? Color me surprised.
Re:MLB has much bigger problems (Score:4, Insightful)
The World Series starts after 9PM because much earlier than that and you leave out the west coast TV market. 9PM EST = 6 PM Pacific.
Perhaps I am an oddity, but I find basketball much more annoying to watch than baseball, and football really isn't any better. In terms of continuous action, I would put forth that the NHL is actually the most "gameplay" for the length of a game.
I'm not saying Football and baseball are "equal" in downtime, but if you start adding up the time between a play being declared dead and the actual start of the next play (not men lining up, but when the ball is snapped), I think that the amount of time that is spent not "playing" the game becomes more comparable. Yeah, there's a clock counting down, but what is the actual run-time of a typical football game at this point? 3.5, 4 hours?
Re:Isn't that the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stealing a base is more like taking your time when your opponent forgots to stop their clock in a game of speed chess. It's not cheating so much as taking advantage of inattentiveness.
Re:But thats OK! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're not interested in stuff other than engineering, you're going to be a terrible, terrible, terrible engineer.
What you call "distraction from your studies" is what makes you good at your job.
Re:But thats OK! (Score:2, Insightful)
IMO our society has a ridiculous fixation on sports.
The good news is, once you figure out that sports == crap, and ignore it? It frees up a metric ton of time and money for the stuff that's actually fun to do.
OTOH, I think it's not the fact that we have made-up conflicts as entertainment, but the fact that the conflicts themselves *are* the entertainment. Dress it up all you like, but people love to see conflict (and more importantly, love to see the realization of victory from that conflict, even if by proxy). That's what drives movies, books, TV shows (not just the "reality" flavor, either), and, well, you-name-it.
Gotta give props to the Romans, though... even though their ideas of public entertainment were bloody and brutal (and often deadly), they didn't try and dress it up much.
False positives (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone gets tested after a game, any single person come sup [sic] positive, then game is considered a loss. Happens twice, they give up 25% of merchandising for a year.
Fine, except that the tests are not perfect, and false positives exist. Think about it -- suppose the test was 99% accurate, but produced 1% false positives. There are 25 people on an MLB team, and the team plays an average of 6.3 games per week. That's an average of 25 * 6.3 = 157.5 tests per team per week, which will produce an average of 1.575 false positives per team per week, or 1.575 * 26 = almost 41 false positives in a 26-week season. Per team.
There are 30 teams in MLB, so under your proposal one is looking at (157.5 tests per team per week) * (30 teams) * (26 weeks per season) = 122,850 drug tests every season. The false positive rate would have to get down into the parts per million range to do anything other than punish random team owners for the finite quality of drug tests. The effect could, in fact, be counterproductive; with so many false positives, the actual drug users could be emboldened to hide among them.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Baseball is a negligible burden on the taxpayers. Modern baseball stadiums come quite close to breaking even to the city -- some profit slightly, some at a modest loss. A baseball stadium is used 80something times per year, so financial solvency is not so difficult.
The real villains are the football stadiums. Professional football teams used their stadium all of ~9-10 times per year. The stadiums are much bigger and more expensive. They are less comfortable and practical for any use other than football. A football team is a loss to the city/county to the tune of a few hundred million dollars, and the football team will come back for another handout every 20 or so years, whenever they decide their stadium is shabby.
As baseball teams transition to attractive baseball-only stadiums -- a delight to both fans (and perhaps taxpayers), the absolute absurdity of "welfare queen" football teams is more and more obvious.