Another example of how the acceptance of cheating is seeping into American culture is being played out in the Major League All-Star Game voting. The American League squad supposedly elected by “fans,” will be announced tomorrow, and what the results will show is…
…that Major League Baseball, like the federal Office of Personnel Management, depended on technology with out comprehending technology, displaying unethical incompetence and harming those who had no choice but to trust it,
…that technologically adept computer dorks decided to rig the vote, harming the game, the sport, and deserving players, and
…that Major League Baseball is pretending there is no problem to minimize PR damage, its proven disastrous approach in other cheating scandals, such as the steroid infestation of the ’90s.
The ineptitude of the sport here is beyond belief, especially since this has happened before. When baseball originally allowed fans to vote for its All-Star teams, it didn’t take long for one enterprising fan base to engage in organized ballot stuffing. Thus when the 1957 team was announced, seven Cincinnati Reds players were in the starting line-up, with only St. Louis Cardinal first baseman Stan Musial breaking the Red color-line. An investigation showed that over half of the ballots cast came from Cincinnati because the Cincinnati Enquirer had printed up pre-marked ballots and distributed them with the Sunday edition of the newspaper. Using his powers to do whatever he felt was necessary to protect the intregrity of the sport, Commissioner Ford Frick named Willie Mays and Hank Aaron to substitute for two of the lesser Reds electees, and the incident resulted in fans being stripped of their voting privileges for the next eleven years. Managers, players, and coaches picked the entire team until 1970, when the vote again returned to the fans.
2015 became the first year the voting has been held without paper ballots, entirely online. Every fan, identified by e-mail, was limited to 35 votes. Did Major League Baseball think to put any safeguards in place to keep its system of tallying votes from being hacked? Nah! After all, who would try to fix the voting for an All-Star Game? Oh…right. That. Did anyone consider that some jerks with computer skills would generate skads of dummy e-mail addresses to let them vote thousands of times? Heck no. Whoever heard of computer nerds doing anything unethical?
Thus the sport was shocked when the initial voting tallies showed eight of nine Kansas City Royal players leading in their positions for the 2015 All-Star Game, the one non-Royal being Angels star Mike Trout, generally accepted as the best player in the game and the reigning American League Most Valuable Player. MLB has voided 65 million votes determined to be part of the Kansas City virtual ballot-stuffing scheme, but there is little doubt that the AL line-up is still going to be substantially determined by the cheats, not the votes of the fans who hewed to the voting rules and their spirit. Five Royals are now leading in the vote, and the team that will be announced tomorrow will probably include Omar Infante, the K.C. second baseman who is neither a household name or especially good. In fact, he is having a terrible season, but unless new Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred pulls a Frick, he will start ahead of Houston’s Jose Altuve, who won the batting championship last season.
The fraud is not inconsequential. The undeserving Kansas City players will necessarily push more deserving players off the squad. Many of those players have bonus provisions in their contracts for being named to the All-Star team, so they will not receive money that they would have earned without the Kansas City cheating. The team itself will be weakened, reducing the quality of the game as well as its interest to non-Kansas City fans. The sour taste of a rigged line-up largely composed of non-stars from one city may hurt ratings, which in turn will lower the game’s profitability for Fox, which broadcasts it, and sponsors. Moreover, the outcome of the All-Star Game matters: it determines the home field advantage in the World Series. This means, ironically, that the scheme may eventually hurt the Kansas City Royals, who are again legitimate competitors to go to the World Series.
As for Infante and the other fraudulent All-Stars, the scam means receiving hefty bonuses that are undeserved. Infante’s contract will award him an additional $500,000 over time as a direct result of the ballot stuffing.
Like a lot of sports ethics controversies, this one exposes the depressing state of ethics ignorance among sports fans and the even more depressing ethics void in the sports media. The general reaction to this episode by baseball writers is amusement. Yes, wide-scale cheating is funny to them. This reaction is based on their contempt for MLB (“Ha-ha! These idiots couldn’t see this coming!” Rationalization # 36, Victim Blindness), fans (“They always vote for the wrong players anyway!” #2. The “They’re Just as Bad” Excuse, or “They had it coming” ) and the All-Star Game itself. I suppose it is too much to expect journalists to realize that any form of accepted cheating helps make all cheating more acceptable. (That thinking is the fault of #8. The Trivial Trap or “No harm no foul!”)
For their part, fans, especially Kansas City fans, are chewing through rationalization on the Ethics Alarms list as if they were Cracker Jacks, among them:
#1. The Golden Rationalization, or “Everybody does it”: “Hey, all the cities vote for their own players, we just did it better!”
#3. Consequentialism, or “It Worked Out for the Best”: “The Royal are the World Champs and have the best record in the league! It will still be a great All-Star team!
#4. Marion Barry’s Misdirection, or “If it isn’t illegal, it’s ethical, ” and #5. The Compliance Dodge: “The rules don’t say anything about how many e-mail addresses you use!”
#7. The “Tit for Tat” Excuse, 11. (a) “I deserve this!” or “Just this once!” and 21. Ethics Accounting (“I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”) The argument here is that deserving Kansas City players were snubbed by voters in past years, so electing undeserving Royals in 2015 makes up for the deserving Kansas City stars of the past who never made it to the game. I’ve seen this one more than once, in print.
#15. The Futility Illusion: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will” “If we didn’t rig the votes, some other team’s fans would have done it, so it might as well be us.”
#22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things.” “Lighten up! It’s not like this is a Presidential election or anything!”
A discussion of the fiasco on MLB radio yesterday caused my head to explode inside the car—what a mess—when the hosts of the show “Power Alley” pooh-poohed the idea that Infante, the proud possessor of a .234 batting average and a .555 OPS, making him one of the worst hitters in the world, should politely decline a starting All-Star berth in favor of someone who actually deserves it. “It would be an insult to the fans!” quoth Ethics Moron A, whose name I have erased forever from my brain. No, you dolt, it would be a demonstration of respect for fans, a demonstration of fairness to fellow players, and a rejection of the handful of cheats who rigged the vote. “Why? This isn’t his fault!” sayeth Ethics Moron B, apparently unaware that those of us who can fix an ethics injustice should.
Ethics Quiz: Is knowingly accepting the benefits from someone cheating on your behalf and harming third parties by doing so more admirable than doing the cheating yourself?
Surprise, A and B! The answer is no, even when the benefits include a half-million dollars in bonus money. Not surprisingly, Infante agrees with them, telling Yahoo! Sports,
“I have to be happy. The fans vote for me. I’m happy about that. I can’t control that. I’m happy because if I’m there, the opportunity to go to the All-Star Game is great.”
Unethical, greedy and stupid with a .234 average is no way to go through life, son.
The Commissioner should void the results and have an independent panel decide which Royals players deserve to be on the squad. None should start as a waring to future conspiratorial fan bases, and the system should be reformed to one fan, one vote, with heavily weighted votes going to coaches and managers. (A and B didn’t like that reform, because, and I am not joking, “the vote totals would be as impressive.” You know, like those impressive vote totals under Stalin when you either voted for him or disappeared.
Cheating matters. There is no such thing as trivial cheating. Baseball has an obligation to fix this, and not next season, but immediately.
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Sources: USA Today, Kings of Kaufman, ESPN, Sporting News
Ethics Alarms 
I can’t comment on this, as “Jose Altuve’s Platform Shoes” was the name of one of my fantasy baseball teams last year. That counts as a conflict of interest, right?
Yes.
Fan voting. Stupid, stupid idea. Let managers and players and maybe sports writers vote. Fix the problem, MLB. And stop allowing exploding maple bats before someone gets blinded or killed.
An ethics blogger listening to sports radio? You must get great material there!
I am with you on this one. MLB should have egg all over its face for not thinking the fan online voting issues through. I would recommend throwing out the fan vote all together and let managers, players and sports writes submit ballots. If the fans can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and MBL if too dumb to figure out that fans aren’t necessarily going to do the right thing, then the fan vote should be disqualified, or if anything, used as a minor factor in determining election to the All Star teams.
This happened with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years ago, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened up the nominations and voting procedures to the world for induction in the RARHOF. There were no controls to prevent multiple votes. Rush, my personal favorite band in entire known universe, was on the ballot (for the first time) and won by a huge margin. Many Rush fans voted multiple times and were not ashamed that they had done so; in fact, many were proud of it, justifying doing so as a redress for past slights against the Canadian Tertiary Triumvirate by the Hall. The next year, there was no such fan participation. Therefore, fan participation in unethical manners spoiled fan participation in future years.
If there is a distinction between the All Star Game and induction to the HOF, it is that the inductees of the RARHOF don’t receive financial compensation for being inducted and they have to pay a significant fee to the HOF to attend the induction ceremony, but that is a minor difference. The ethics issues of skewing the vote are the same, especially where it would knock out other performers who are equally or more deserving from consideration because there are only so many slots each year (except that in Rush’s case, there is no one more deserving).
jvb
I really don’t follow sports, so my understanding, not to mention interest is minimal, but the bigger issue of the cheater culture and what it does to the people living in it is significant. The world is awash with cheaters. So much so that it’s common to believe that if a person gets cheated it’s their fault for being trusting. That is, unless you or your pet cause are the one getting cheated, then everything is unfair and the government must step in and fix it.
Someone or something is getting exactly what they want out of promoting the cheater culture. It’s pretty interesting to follow the “money” back to just who benefits.
I go tho KC each year for the Red Sox series and that organization makes a back yard wiffle ball league look like the epitome of professional decorum.
I’ve talked to some real KC fans – I think there is a dozen – who realize what a disgrace this is and how much of it is generated by an ownership steeped in WalMart tradition.
The last time this happened was in ’57 when the Reds (baseball ones) stuffed the ballot box as part of a radio promotion. I guess WKRP in Cincinnati really did exist. Fans lost the vote.
So…just pull internet service from the greater KC area for a year.
Wasn’t there a similarly misguided effort in the NHL to get an “average” player in the All-Star team a few years ago? You know, to recognize and honor all journeyman players in the league. Obviously no one in sports media saw anything wrong with that. Well, that good feel story can easily turn into this ugly monster. I guess the moral is to not cheat in a small scale, cause cheating in a larger scale is coming right behind.
The “funny” thing, is it were, is that apparently even some non-KC fans were talking about ballot-stuffing in favor of the Royals, just to show how messed up the system is (I’m starting to suspect that might be why Infante is still on).
That said, even the NL isn’t too much better about sending in deserving players (even if the cheating isn’t nearly as bad); I love my Cards as much as anyone else in St. Louis, but we don’t have anyone on the team putting on the “Easy Mode” video game numbers of a Scherzer or Harper so far this season (especially if we’re going all sabermetrics). That said, I’ll take having an overall good team over All-Star representation.
And hey, at least the people we have on the ballot are good players (sorry, Pete Kozma).
It’s heartening to know you are a Cardinals fan, Julian.
I don’t know; Jeff Luhnow might say that St. Louis has the best hacks in Missouri.
The way to counter this is to vote and vote the max 35 times you are allowed to vote.
The way to counter individual computer hacker-types voting tens of thousands of times is to vote 35 times?
You are allowed to cast 35 ballots per email address by the rules they have set out. I voted the max 35 times per my one email address.
The hacker obviously set up 100s if not thousands of fake email addresses.
Yes, that’s known as “exploiting a loophole” and “violating the spirit of the rule.” See “The Compliance Dodge.”
I would only consider it a loophole if you were suppose to only vote once and you found out you could vote 35 times and did so but they instruct you that you can vote 35 times so its not a loophole.
What? The loophole is that through dummy e-mail accounts established just for voting anyone can vote an infinite number of times, something the MLB organizers neither intended, approved or anticipated.
I agree that setting up a fake accounts and voting is exploiting a loop hole but since I didn’t set up a fake account and only voted the allowed number I don’t think what I did was exploiting it.
KC had the final four despite the best efforts of Manfred working all weekend on his TRS-80 computer with dial-up. Nice effort, Commish!
No, of course not. I’m sorry if I seemed to be suggesting otherwise.
Oh and if you look people are countering them by voting and some of the KC players are slipping in the votes.
Too late, however. Literally none of the KC starters deserve to be #1, and only a couple are worthy of the team at all.
Lorenzo Cain. Second among AL outfielders in WAR. Excellent UZR/150. I could make a case for him. I’d go Trout and Jones. Probably a toss up between Cain and Gardner. Reddick has also had a nice season. Alex Gordon should be on the team, but not as a starter. Cespedes is having a good season as he enters free agency. AL has a lot of good players who are very similar, but have no real “Wow” factor.
I’m sure Manfred has his minions at the keyboards the last few weeks attempting to counteract the KC vote.
Cain is the one starter who has an argument. No others.Gordon is a borderline sub at best.
Yes way too late. But I don’t like sitting back and doing nothing, even if I know my actions will be for naught, when I see someone or a group doing something I know is wrong.
The question I have is should the KC players who were voted in now refuse to play?
Cain at least shouldn’t refuse; he’s legitimately one of the best outfielders in the game right now.
Well, nobody should refuse, of the four. They are not completely off the charts by past standards, as Infante would have been. As long as an all-star is 1) a player having a great season 2) a legitimate star who fans will want to watch 3) an all-time great whether or not he is having a great season or even a good one, then being on the team is justifiable. Gordon and Cain are borderline stars, and the other two are somewhat below that, but none of them are embarrassments.
If there is going to be cheating, then all I wish for is that the cheating will keep A-Hole-Rod off the roster.