I know people skip my baseball posts, but let’s look at the principle involved. Baseball’s umpires just changed how a rule was being enforced without telling anyone. It’s like double secret probation (if you don’t know the reference, you should). It’s unethical.
Baseball’s pitch-clock rule, which has shaved more than a ha;lf hour off of average game times, isn’t juist for pitchers. “Batters must be in the box and alert to the pitcher by the 8-second mark or else be charged with an automatic strike.”Alert to the pitcher means looking at him. In June, Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider criticized the habit of Yankees shortstop José Caballero, when he bats, waits until the last possible second to look up at the pitcher. It is widely believed that he does this to annoy pitchers. It works.
This week, Pirates pitcher Dennis Santana appeared to start his wind-up with nine seconds on the pitch clock and Caballero still looking down at his feet. The umpire stopped play to warn Santana he had to wait for eye contact. The pitcher was angry, and after Cabellero grounded out, Santana made a kissy-face at him. Benches cleared as Cabellero shouted back and the two seemed about to come to blows.
In the first game of the Yankees-Pirates doubleheader yesterday, Caballero did his usual last second act but this time was called for a pitch-clock violation. In the video, umpire Quinn Wolcott says to the Yankee player: “You don’t get to do the ‘three, four seconds in the box’ thing anymore.” “I was looking up at nine seconds,” Caballero replies. “You’re picking on me!”
Indeed he was. That near brawl, writers were told, prompted MLB to tell umpires to crack down. “It’s not allowed anymore,” umpire Adrian Johnson explained. “It was the cause of a benches-clearing situation on Monday night. Major League Baseball stepped in. They want it enforced.” Part of the rule prohibits “conduct by batters designed to deceive a pitcher into beginning their windup or coming to the set position.” Even though for years umpires have accepted that Cabellero’s late look up was just his way of getting ready for a pitch, they reversed themselves without warning the player.
(Caballero’s) been warned all season,” Johnson said. “We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him. That’s what it is. It’s a violation.”
Caballero argues, “(The umpire) said they were making new rules today, and it’s on me, because I was deceiving to the pitcher, which doesn’t make sense because, for me … deceiving means you’re trying to trick someone, and I’m not trying to trick someone, because I do the same thing over and over. If you’re gonna make a change of the rule, at least (notify) us before the game.”
All but the last part is ethically debatable. If Cabellero’s routine does confuse and annoy pitchers, and he certainly knows that, then whether his routine was originally devised to deceive pitchers or not, it does deceive them and he keeps doing it anyway.
Changing how a rule is going to be enforced without telling players that, however, is indefensible.
Ethics Alarms 
Definitely. If you’re going to change how you enforce the rules, you need to let people know. Actually, I think the constitution might have something to say about that. Not that MLB would want to pay any attention to that old, musty parchment.
What’s the old sing-song, grade school retort? “Cheaters never prosper. Nyah, nyah, nyah!”
On the the topic of Baseball in general, not so much changing rules silently: How do you feel about Banana ball and players like Amadou the contortionist. I am currently watch the Party Animals vs. the Clowns. The Clowns batter just performed the splits at the plate to eliminate the strike zone and got walked. So far it is much more fun and interesting than standard baseball.
I had not followed the expansion of the “Banana Ball” league, though I have followed and supported the original franchise, the Savannah Bananas. It’s parody baseball, or baseball satire, with firm roots in the game of early 20th Century ball through the 30s, when teams barnstormed, did comedy routines between innings, and sometimes even during the game. There are references to it in the Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra musical “Take me Out to the Ball Game” and “The Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars,” and the San Diego Chicken resurrected the tradition. “Banana Ball is to baseball as the Harlem Globetrotters were to basketball. Amadou would fit right in with the old baseball clown like Max Patkin.
The Clown Prince of Baseball. Our dad took us to see him at a Miami Marlins (Triple A International League iteration) game.
This issue stems from the Law of Unintended Consequences. Any time you introduce new rules, people will try to find ways to either circumvent the rules or to use the rules to their advantage. What is particularly problematic is that a small number of people make the rule, but then the hundreds or thousands of people that the rule impacts then have the opportunity to scrutinize it and find all the unconsidered, even neglected, possibilities the new rule creates. (In a way, it is like software development. R&D teams spend all kinds of hours testing their software and trying to find ways to break it, and within five minutes of going live, users have broken the software in ways R&D never imagined.)
So there is a rule, but the rule is not being enforced and hence consistently violated. At a given day the powers that be decide to enforce that rule. However they do not announce that in advance; instead the stepped up enforcement creates a lot of buzz in the news about the strict enforcement. The result is those interested are now well aware that the rule exists, and is now strictly enforced. Is that unethical?
Changing a rule or a law without announcing it is unethical. However I do not see why it is unethical to change the enforcement policy without announcement of an already existing rule. Baseball players ought to know the rules of their sport.
I think this principle also carries over to other context, e.g. enforcement of traffic laws. If the police decides to be very strict in enforcing speed limits at a certain spot, do they have to announce that in advance?
In baseball, there are a lot of rules that umpires decide for good reasons not to enforce, and they become unwritten rules, or in some cases, dead letters. One big one was the so-called “phantom tag” or “neighborhood rule”: in turning a double play, umpires treated just missing second base with the infielder’s foot as a force-out anyway, because the player would be dodging a sliding runner trying to knock him down (which was also a rules violation never enforced). Finally, after decades, MLB announced that 1) runners sliding into the fielder would be called interference (because it was) and 2) now that they no longer were in peril of being crippled for life, an infielder actually had to tag second base for real. The rule(s) didn’t change. But the new enforcement policy had to be announced and clarified.
I regard the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution as analogous.
I think the league, the umpires and everyone in baseball other than the Yankees decided something needed to be done about the Evil Empire’s short stop given what everyone had come to think he is.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1f9970c0-cbd5-4953-a7b7-0b68edba0f2a