Chicago Cubs rookie third baseman Matt Shaw skipped the Cubs’ game against the Reds on Sunday after receiving a call from Charley Kirk’s widow. Instead, the player attended the memorial event for the assassinated activist at State Farm Stadium in Arizona. Shaw is not just a Kirk admirer: Shaw had something of a personal relationship with Kirk that he described as important to him, though they were not close friends.
During Tuesday’s Mets-Cubs game at Wrigley Field, game, Mets play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen said, “Shaw had Cubs world in a tizzy this weekend when he was not here for the Cubs game with the Reds — a game they lost (1-0) and in which his lack of presence was felt. It was later revealed that he had been given permission to attend Charlie Kirk’s funeral.”
Cohen added, “I don’t want to talk about any of the politics of it, but the thought of leaving your team in the middle of a race for any reason other than a family emergency really strikes me as weird.”
Naturally, Kirk-worshiping Mets fans erupted on social media, with some pledging to boycott any games announced by Cohen and others insisting that he be fired. Now, Cohen didn’t say anything negative about Charley Kirk at all. Moreover, he was 100% right. It is very weird, although weird would not be my word for it. Skipping an important game in the waning days of a baseball season when your team seeks your services is selfish and unprofessional. Shaw is a rookie and “only” makes the MLB minimum of $760,000; nonetheless, that salary commits him to being available to play if he is healthy. This wasn’t his wife giving birth or a desperately sick child or the death of a parent—the MLB Players’ Union bargained for special leave for such events.
Some wags have pointed out that the rookie is hardly a star: he’s about a league average hitter, though his fielding at third is outstanding. That misses the point. He was obligated to play baseball, not to go to a memorial ceremony. An actress bailed on an ethics program she was supposed to assist me on, with almost no notice, because her grandmother died. ProEthics, as in me, blackballed her after that, and I told her not to bother auditioning for any professional shows in the D.C. area I directed. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up, and I couldn’t trust this alleged professional to do that.
Shaw, meanwhile, refuses to apologize and uses the fact that his team mates supported his decision to justify it. (That’s a rationalization, a sub-rationalization of the biggest of all, “Everybody Does it,” #1E. Tom’s Delusion, or “Everyone agrees with me!” ) It is also true that the team gave him permission to skip the game, which, if I know my old school baseball thinking as well as I think I do, meant, “OK, kid, if you don’t care enough to want to play, we don’t care if you do. Have a nice trip!” I’ll bet 20 bucks right now that Shaw ends up being traded to the Colorado Rockies or some other terrible team for a bag of bubble gum and an old Gino Cimoli baseball card.
Maybe Shaw knows that he may have harmed his reputation and career by choosing to honor Kirk rather than doing his job. In that case, he was making a brave choice, though an emotional one rather than a strictly rational one. Some may think me ethically estopped from criticizing Shaw: I have related here before the tale of me walking out of a supposedly important Georgetown University Development Office staff meeting to watch the famous Yankee-Red Sox play-off game after the 1978 American League Eastern Division race ended in a tie. Yeah, I was being paid to be in the (useless) meeting, and I was fully prepared to be punished or fired; I didn’t care. In that moment, the Boston Red Sox were more important to me than that job (Director of Law Center Development). I have come to believe, in my experience, accumulated wisdom and study of ethics, that I was wrong in 1978. I wouldn’t do the same thing today.
Well, maybe not.
Meanwhile, Gary Cohen was criticized as a hypocrite on Outkick because in April of this year, he didn’t broadcast a game because his dog Lilly had died. Outkick’s Zach Dean mocks,
Hey, Gary Cohen – how about you piss right the hell off with the Matt Shaw hate. You no longer have any room to talk here. None. Zero. The absolute NUTS on you to badmouth Shaw for skipping a game for a funeral, knowing that you skipped a game in April because your DOG died, is insane. Truly insane. I’m sure Lily was a great dog. I’m sure it was a … tough … day for the Cohen family. But can we act like adults for one second here? My God. It’s a dog. Not a human.
“But dogs are like family!” No, they’re not. Shut up. Dogs are not comparable to family. They are not your kids. They are not your parents. They are not your brothers or sisters. They are an animal. Guess what? When I was 8, I walked into my bathroom one morning and found my 13-year-old dog dead. True story. You know what I did next?
I walked my ass to the bus stop and went to third grade. The end. Why are we skipping work because a 91-year-old dog died? Better yet, why are we shitting on players for skipping work for a funeral after you did THAT?
Again, I may be ethically estopped from criticizing the writer: readers here may recall that I taught a Zoom legal ethics seminar 90 minutes after finding my wife dead in the living room. But he is dead wrong about the importance of dogs to many owners. If we are going to accept the importance of bereavement leave for family members, recognizing how a dog’s death can cause equivalent grief shouldn’t be that difficult. The ethics principle is empathy.
There are also a lot of distinctions to be made here and the risk of flawed equivalencies is rife. Baseball announcers have back-ups, and a change in announcer doesn’t affect the outcome of the game. I am comfortable concluding that the Mets announcer was not wrong to question Shaw’s priorities. But having made a similar decision in my life, I can’t condemn them as emphatically as I’d like to.
And since Grace died, Spuds has been a comfort, a bulwark against depression and loneliness, and a godsend. If he died, I honestly don’t know what I’d do.
Ethics Alarms 
I’ve missed work for funerals. Did he let his employer know beforehand?
I see a lot of extremes here, and I must admit that I’m not comfortable with any of them.
At the end of all this, I really don’t find fault with anyone’s behavior, other than Zach Dean. He seems to be an asshole.
tmgentry1 Thank you!! I was in the midst of sorting out my reactions as I read through the comments and although not fully formed yet, my reactions echo yours, already carefully composed. So you saved me some writing time 🙂
And yes yes yes on Zach Dean. One thing that REALLY annoys me is people making inferences about what others feel after a loss if they don’t behave exactly how the person making a completely uninformed judgement behaved (or worse, IMAGINED they might behave) in similar circumstances. People are different. They grieve differently. They react to shock differently. And the bond with a beloved dog can be deeper and more important than the bond with a human family member.
The actress signed an agreement to do a job. No exceptions were in the agreement. In such circumstances, it would be up to me to waive the terms of the contract. I didn’t I told her she was committed and it was too late to back out. She did anyway. That’s an open and shut case. A players contract includes bereavement, paternity and other guaranteed options to miss a game of games, with pay. “Wanting to attend the funeral of someone I admire” is not one of them. The fact that the team let him go is moral luck: he shouldn’t have asked or wanted to skip his responsibilities.
I thought moral luck was a favorable outcome occurring without any involvement of the principals despite an unethical act. How is it moral luck if the team gave ok and how is it different than waiving a contract requirement?
Moral luck is a favorable or unfavorable outcome of conduct that influences one’s view or assessment of the conduct but shouldn’t. If Shaw’s ethical priorities were correct, he wouldn’t have asked to beg out a game his team needed to win. The fact hat he got permission doesn’t make the request any more appropriate. He should ave played in the game, and the consent of his team doesn’t change that.
Thanks for the clarification on moral luck.
I still fall into tmgentry1 camp. Baseball is a team sport requiring 9 of 26 players on the field. The manager can at anytime pull a player and substitute another if he thinks that someone else will help win. I see little difference in management allowing an absence if management feels it can use an alternate player. Thus, the loss or win is moral luck and should not be a factor. Cohen may have felt his lack of presence but how does he know that anyone else does sitting in the control booth? It seems like he was scapegoating Shaw to explain away the loss.
I can also understand why you felt it necessary to go on with the show immediately after Grace passed. You are critical to the event and cannot be replaced easily on short notice. Further, many who attend your events may travel some distance and incur other direct and opportunity costs associated by attending. You also recognize that it is possible that a failure to appear on your part could seriously jeopardize your business. I am not as sure that this would be the case with Shaw.
I do believe that being a professional means that you perform at the top of your game every time but people are not automatons devoid of emotion. Some are able to push negative emotions aside while others feel it necessary to embrace them and not let them eat away at them.
When it comes to how we deal with the effects of life on others we must be willing to show a bit of grace whenever possible so that the affected individual can get back in the game in peak form.
In 2022, Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo took the maximum paternity leave—three days—when his girl friend had their out-of-wedlock child. At teh time, the team was in a crucial period in its drive to make the play-offs, and also weakened by injuries.I argued (and still do) that because Verdugo could take the full three days didn’t make it right to do so. The outfielder continued to rub the team’s and the fans’ faces in his decision by making a baby-rocking gesture every time he hit a double.
My inside sources told me that Sox manager Alex Cora soured greatly on Verdugo after this incident, and the team traded him in 2023. When he was released earlier this year, no team signed him, despite good defensive credentials and his being relatively young.
Jack.
When Spuds dies, you grieve for a few days, and then you rescue yourself your next dog. It’s one of the great things about dogs. They aren’t replaceable, but you can get the next one. Just another way dogs are better than humans.
I wonder if he would’ve skipped a game for the funeral of any other friend who was important but not close. Would they have given permission for him to skip the game if Kirk was not a celebrity?
Great point, and I have no doubt whatsoever that if Shaw asked to skip a key game to attend the funeral of his old 7th grade English teacher, he would have been laughed out of the GM’s office, AND traded ASAP to the Rockies. So the Cubs were insulating themselves from the “not sufficiently troubled by Charley Kirk’s death” blowback! I bet that’s exactly what happened.
What are you? According to the latest National Security Presidential Memorandum, an associate of a known foreign terrorist.
Me. Because I’m intersex. And Australian, Australia being one of the 60+ countries on the list of places where organised terror groups are credibly alleged to operate.
Remember what the estimable Steven Michael Palin said about Intersex people on this blog back when he was the chair of the Harris County GOP?
That we were only tolerated to a point? That he is a member of the human race, while I am not?
No, I’m not expecting a JDAM to share my personal space any time soon. It would be legal now for that to be ordered though.
I don’t suppose you have a link to the text of this Memorandum, designating all intersex Australians as terrorists?
At a guess, she’s trusted false descriptions of this one. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/ It doesn’t actually do anything like she describes though.
Ordinarily, I would agree with you, Jack. You don’t take time off work to attend the funeral of a casual acquaintance. You find a way to pay your respects outside working hours, or you send flowers or the like.
But a literal call from his grieving widow? I’m not privy to the exact nature of their relationship or the contents of that phone call, but if a friend’s widow calls, do you not answer?
Cohen had the free speech to say what he did.
Erika Kirk “invited” Shaw.
Shaw chose to ask his employer if he could go.
The Club okay’ed his absence.
The baseball team lost their event.
The PUBLIC takes issue with Cohen and Shaw.
Everyone takes the worst view of the above events.
Shaw doesn’t apologize.
The Club doesn’t make a statement saying that they made a compassionate decision to prioritize the possibility that they would lose the contest.
Cohen does apologize.
Welcome to the Shaw-Cohen-Cubs ethics train wreck. Spotlighted by the certitude by everyone involved and the need to find fault with choices made. Oh and the dog, but I didn’t add him to the ethics train wreck, since his agency in all this was nil.
As Jack ended a previous post with , moving on.
P.S. the professionalism angle is a good one, but the Magnificent Seven article covered it better in my opinion.
”after receiving a call from Charley Kirk’s widow.”. To me this implies that she specifically asked him to come, then he took time off with permission.
To say you should be at work instead of being available to a friend is a disconnect with my personal hierarchy of priorities.
I realize many choose work as the top placement holder but there’s a cost to that and it shows. There’s a million little choices daily. Work or kids game? Work or wedding? Work or meal with extended family? Work or graduation? Work or call from friend? Work or family vacation? Even getting paid a ridiculous amount for a game doesn’t matter. These choices are ongoing. People don’t accuse others for missing anything due to work commitments. There’s always a cost.
Teaching millions of people (especially young women, these days) that work should be the top priority in their lives is probably the single biggest factor in the degradation of societal cohesion that we’re currently seeing.
It’s heartbreaking to think of how many innocent children were robbed of the most important ingredient of a successful life–prioritization by a committed, married set of parents, because one or both adults decided that work should be a higher priority than family. Yes, sometimes it does have to take priority (after all, usually at least one parent HAS to devote a big chunk of his/her life to providing the necessities of surviving), but we as a society have gone way too far toward promoting careers as providing meaning in life, rather than careers making a meaningful life possible.
Any person, in any job, anywhere, is replaceable. In fact, the replacement will usually happen very quickly, with minimal interruption, and with not a thought given to the departed ever again. The likelihood of that person’s absence ever materially impacting another person’s life is small. Contrast that with your personal relationships, especially within your family.
There is a lot of hay made today about how few people are having children. Usually, the discussion quickly turns to “well this is a good thing, because people who don’t want children shouldn’t be having children,” rather than the more salient point, which is “why do fewer people want children?” Or perhaps, “why is our society producing people who don’t want children?” I think the glorification of work is a huge part of answering those questions. I’m not sure whether it’s a concerted effort to increase our production or some more nefarious reason, but it’s heartbreaking.