I know this is a long essay.

Yes, it involves baseball.

Bear with me. I think it is worth your time.

Last night, in Game 1 of the 2013 World Series, embarrassingly kicked away by the St. Louis Cardinals and won handily by some team called the Boston Red Sox,  an intricate ethics drama appeared, allowing us to see the painful process whereby a culture’s ethical standards evolve and change in response to accumulated wisdom, altered attitudes and changing conditions. An obviously mistaken umpire’s call was reversed by the other umpires on the field as the Cardinals manager argued not that the original call had been correct, but that reversing it was a violation of tradition, established practice and precedent….in other words, doing so was wrong, unfair, unethical because “We’ve never  done it this way,” a variation of the Golden Rationalization, “Everybody does it.”   You should not have to appreciate baseball (but if you don’t, what’s the matter with you?) to find the process illuminating and thought-provoking.

First, some historical background. Organized baseball has been around since the mid-19th Century, and umpires have always had a crucial and perilous role in making it function. Well into the 20th Century, they were in physical peril from players, managers and fans, who would sometimes try to exact violent revenge for game-altering decisions, right and wrong, in the game and after it. All referees in all sports have to make difficult judgment calls, but none have as many to make as umpires. Every pitch to a batter that is allowed to go over the plate without a swing requires an umpire’s call. The strike zone varies with height and “natural batting stance” of each batter, and there is no position where the umpire can stand that permits equal accuracy of measurement from all angles. If the umpire is standing straight up to see over the catcher’s head, he cannot quite determine how low a pitch is. If he crouches low, he must peek around one side of the catcher or the other; if he chooses one side, he has to guess at whether a pitch to the opposite side has crossed the plate.

On plays in the field, the problem is even worse. An umpire often has no idea how a fielding play will develop, and must guess at the best place to stand where the ball, the fielder’s glove, the base and the baserunner can all be seen clearly at the crucial moment when the runner is either “safe” or “out.” Sometimes there is no ideal spot. Sometimes a player blocks the umpire’s view; sometimes a player intentionally blocks the umpire’s view. There are also plays, including the safe or out call on a ball thrown to first base after a batter’s struck ball has been fielded by an infielder, the most common play in the game, where the umpire must be watching two locations simultaneously that frequently are too far apart to be seen simultaneously—the ball reaching the first baseman’s mitt, and the runner’s foot touching first base. On this play and others, spectators in the stands, as well as some players on the field and those in the dugouts, often have a better view of the play than the umpires who have to call it…or not. The umpires, at least theoretically, are neutral. Players,coaches, managers, spectators and broadcasters aren’t; they see what they want to see, as confirmation bias often overwhelms the senses.

Baseball’s reasonable and unavoidable solution to the inherent vulnerability of the umpires, and thus the game itself, to constant arguments over what really happened, often a Rashomon problem with no objective answer that can ever be settled definitively, was this: what the umpire decides is reality, is reality. The decisions are final, and are not reversed. Players and managers can argue until they are purple, there can be photographs and sworn statements to the contrary, it doesn’t matter.  Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem reputedly answered a baserunner who heard no call from the ump for many seconds after a close play at third base and asked, “Well, ump, am I safe or out?” by replying imperiously, “You ain’t nothin’ until I say you are!”

Many things naturally flowed from the institutionalized position that the umpire was always right. It meant that an umpire would never reverse his own call, even when, as occasionally happened (and happens), an umpire reflexively gave the wrong signal and knew he was wrong immediately. Since showing fallibility would undermine the stability of the game itself, the umpire would never admit the botch. (“I’m sorry, did I say strike? I meant ball. My bad.”) Similarly, an umpire’s code evolved: even if the other three umpires clearly saw that their colleague’s call was obviously, ridiculously incorrect, they would never intervene or overturn him as a matter of professional courtesy and loyalty. The exception was a rulebook interpretation. Baseball has strict, complicated and voluminous rules, and those have to be obeyed. If an umpire’s bad call is based on a misreading of a black-and-white rule, the umpiring crew will overturn it.

This utilitarian resolution of a structural problem made practical and ethical sense, as long as there was no definitive record of blown calls after the fact. Gradually, the increase in televised games, the advances in high-speed photography and the improvements in technology made the old solution increasingly unsatisfactory, and  no longer ethically defensible. In the 1970 World Series, for example, the evidence that this crucial play was called wrongly became undeniable once the photographs of the sequence were published:

Reds runner Bernie Carbo is called out by the home plate umpire, who can’t clearly see the play, despite the fact that Orioles catcher Elrod Hendricks tagged Carbo with his glove while the ball was in his other hand. These kinds of blatantly mis-called plays had happened before, of course, many times, but they were increasingly damaging to the sport as baseball became a bigger business and was more widely seen and followed. The outcome of games meant millions of dollars to cities, franchises, merchandizers  and players; without integrity, baseball’s credibility and popularity were at risk.

The evidence of crucial blown calls kept proliferating, both during the regular seasons and in the play-offs and World Series, where they were especially well-publicized and embarrassing. An umpire blew a critical and blatant interference call in Game #3 of the 1975 World Series that may have changed the outcome of that famously close battle; an even worse call at first base did alter the result of the 1985 Series, literally robbing the St. Louis Cardinals of a decisive game victory. As it always had, Major League Baseball moved at a glacial pace, and the old ways remained unchanged, though steadily under attack. The umpire’s union even got MLB to ban the showing of video replays in ballparks that had the new giant video screens on their scoreboards when an umpire had blown a call and the replay would prove it. But as so often happens, technology was relentlessly undermining what was increasingly seeming like a cover-up. Fans, broadcasters, managers, team owner and journalists were no longer content to accept it when games and championships were decided by mistaken umpire decisions.

The tipping point may have come in 2010, when a fine American League umpire named Jim Joyce robbed Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga of one of the most celebrated of baseball achievements, a no hit, no base on balls perfect game, by blowing the very last play of the game on national television. The umpire courageously admitted his error afterward, but the damage could not be undone. What should have been a highlight of a young pitcher’s career and the 2010 season as well as a great historic moment for Tigers and the game itself became, instead, an ugly blot. Although no formal system is yet in place that would prevent another Joyce-Gallaraga incident, the culture of umpiring, undoubtedly with the assistance of pressure from MLB, began to change. The important thing, we began to hear, was “getting it right”…and “getting it right” is a good description of ethics itself.

Increasingly, fans heard umpires emulate Joyce by admitting mistakes after games. More and more frequently, umpires gathered to discuss controversial calls, and occasionally reversed them. In 2011, MLB installed the first video review system, to be used only on the notoriously difficult fair-foul calls on batted balls and disputed homeruns decided according to the often baroque and confusing structural oddities and ground rules of the various ball parks and stadiums. This year, baseball announced that it would be installing some kind of broader in-game video review system that would presumably prevent incidents like the perfect game fiasco.

This is called progress. If winning and losing games according to what really happened rather than according to a mistaken but authoritative version of what happened is fair and just, it is also ethical progress….which brings us to last night’s moment of truth:

In this play, an attempted double play on a ball hit by Boston’s David Ortiz in the first inning, Cardinals shortstop Pete Kozma never had the ball in his glove, meaning that the runner, Dustin Pedroia, was safe. Umpire Dana DeMuth, who was right in front of the play, inexplicably ruled otherwise, that the fielder had gloved the ball, and only dropped it while transferring it to his throwing hand for the relay to first. Everyone else—literally everyone—could see this was wrong, and most importantly, video replays would show it was wrong forever, if the ruling stood. Since the context of the play could have well changed the outcome of the game, the umpires, after a vociferous protest by Red Sox manager John Farrell, went into a conference on the field and reversed the call.

Then Cardinals manager Mike Matheny argued equally vociferously against the reversal,  though he also saw the play, and even confirmation bias couldn’t have caused him to miss the fact that his player flat out missed the ball. What was he arguing? He explained in the post game press conference:

“That’s not a play I’ve ever seen before. And I’m pretty sure there were six umpires on the field that had never seen that play before either. It’s a pretty tough time to debut that overruled call in the World Series. Now, I get that trying to get the right call. I get that. Tough one to swallow.”

Translation: “This isn’t how past mistakes by umpires have been handled, and those of us who play the game have a right to know what the system is. The first game of the World Series is no time to change the system without notice. I don’t care that the umpires got the play right. It’s unfair to violate established precedent. My team, the Cardinals, was robbed of a World Series championship in 1985 when everyone saw the umpire blow a call that cost us Game Six. You guys didn’t overturn that horrible call. When did the system change? I missed that memo!”  Up in the Fox broadcast booth, color man Tim McCarver, like Matheny a former player (and Cardinals catcher), was saying the same thing. And the translation of the translation is really this:

“It’s unethical to do the right thing in this situation, because we’ve always done the wrong thing before, and there were good reasons why.”

This is not as absurd or unreasonable a position as it appears. Process is an ethical value. Participants in any system should be able to rely on a consistent process that does not change arbitrarily. The opposing position is that when the process results in an injustice, it is wrong to insist on the integrity of that process: “get it right!”  Does this dispute sound familiar? This is the 2000 Presidential election Florida recount case, in baseball terms.

That controversy was and is tougher, because there was no definitive videotape to show what “the truth” was: what the “correct” vote count in Florida was then and is now impossible to determine. In both cases, however, a variation from the established process was employed to try to “get it right” at a moment when simply accepting an error as “part of the game” was deemed unacceptable, unjust, and wrong.

There are other ethical issues here as well, as lawyer-NBC baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra points out in his post about the incident:

• “How often could other umps overrule their colleagues because they saw the play better? I suspect a lot.

• “How many blown calls are known to be blown by the other umpires but are never overturned because either the manager doesn’t come out to argue like Farrell did or because it’s not as big a situation as that one was on as big a stage as the World Series? Again, I suspect a lot.

• “If umpires are able to confer…as quickly as they did to get the call right…why does Major League Baseball lack confidence in a replay system driven by the umpires — say, a 5th one in the booth — and want a managerial challenge system so badly?

“I suspect that last bullet point is explained by the first couple of bullet points. Baseball worries about umpire ego and knows that, absent Farrell coming out to argue, they’re not going to convene and overturn their buddy out of some dumb code of umpire solidarity. As such, they want to make them do so (via video anyway) upon a manager’s challenge.”

So umpires are still struggling to lose the traditional attitude that their calls should not be challenged by colleagues. Managers and players feel that they should know what the process is, and that “getting it right” isn’t an excuse to change the system mid-game. For their part, fans just want the deserving team to win the game. Such a seemingly simple objective, yet it after 150 years, baseball isn’t quite there yet.

The same can be said of human civilization. It’s not there either, and the journey is often traumatic.

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Sources: NBC Sports 1, 2

Graphic: Bleacher Report