Sometimes all it takes to be an Ethics Hero is being nice, especially if it’s in a way that most people like you have abandoned.
New Mets left fielder Jason Bay has moved to Larchmont, New York, where his presence is causing something of a buzz among the residents, especially the younger baseball fans. Gabriel Tugendstein, who is 11, was especially excited, and here we defer to his mother, writing in the New York Times…
“…Gabriel decided to write Mr. Bay a letter and wrap it around a baseball. I quote in part: ‘I am a huge Mets fan (like die-hard even in the years when they weren’t so good!) Here is a baseball. Can you sign it and return it to your mailbox this week between 2:25 and 3:15 (so I can retrieve it).’ He was going to put it in the Bays’ mailbox, but it was locked, so he stuck the letter and baseball between boards in their white picket fence.
I found something sweetly old-fashioned about all this. Gabriel wrote the note without any parental interference. He and his friends could walk past the home of a player on their favorite team, and it wasn’t a fancy mansion behind security gates. With the various scandals and multimillion-dollar salaries that sour many people on professional sports, it was redeeming to see their enthusiasm and hopes.
Gabriel went back to Mr. Bay’s house the day after he left the ball in the fence. It was gone. I assumed it had either been taken by someone else or simply tossed out. The following day he checked again. This time he was wearing his Mets T-shirt with ‘Bay’ on the back and No. 44. Again, no ball. I was rapidly losing interest and figured this would be another one of life’s sad little lessons.
On the third day he and a friend went by — and the ball was in the fence! Signed! Gabriel was overjoyed, and his friend immediately asked if he had another paper and pen, to leave his own message.
‘This is the greatest day of my life,’ Gabriel told my husband.”
Gabriel will have even better days, I hope, but this very, very special day will stay with him for the rest of his life. I know: I had a couple of those days myself. As he matures, memories of this day might even keep him, for a while or even forever, from falling into the grayness of perpetual cynicism and distrust that afflicts so many people today.
For Jason Bay’s part, what he did for Gabriel didn’t take a lot of time or effort, but such gestures are almost unheard of now, when autographed baseballs are worth hundreds of dollars in memorabilia shows, and millionaire athletes limit their contact with fans, young or not, to carefully choreographed photo opportunities. Bay obviously still recalls what it felt like to be 11, when the sports heroes seem ten feet tall and their drug use, DUI’s, sexual infidelities and contract battles are invisible to the innocent eye. So for no other reason than the fact that it was a nice thing to do, he signed a boy’s baseball, making one life a little brighter, and the world a little better.
(Special thanks to Craig Calcaterra at NBC Sports for finding this story, and writing about it.)
Ethics Alarms 
This reminds me of something that happened last summer at a marina near Cambridge, MD. We heard that a NY Yankee (or former Yankee) player owned and was staying on a boat near ours. The next day, he was out hosing down the boat, and a couple of kids on the trip who were big Yankee fans asked him if he played for the Yankees. He stopped what he was doing, stepped off the boat, talked with them, showed them his World Series ring, and had photos taken with them. They talked about it all day. Wish I remembered the guys’ name, but he was a big winner in my book, even if he was a Yankee.
Feels very “To Kill A Mockingbird” to me. Beautiful story, hadn’t heard it, thanks for sharing, Jack.