U.S. Society

Baseball Ethics Batting Practice, Part 2: The Bad And The Ugly

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

[Part 1, “The Good,” is here.]

The Bad

If it weren’t that I was emulating the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, the title here would be, “The Terrible.”

This week, Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Fame-lock Clayton Kershaw was pitching a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins with just two innings and six outs remaining. There have only been 23 perfect games—no men on base at all, no hits, no runs, no walks, no errors— in baseball’s 150 year+ history. Kershaw has never pitched one, and at 34 he’s closer to the end of his career than the beginning. He had only thrown 80 pitches, meaning that he was likely to finish a perfect game, if he succeeded at pitching one, with less than 110 pitches thrown, well under what is considered risky for starters. Yet Dodger manager Dave Roberts took Kershaw out of the game. He’s done this before with pitchers in the midst of no-hitters, usually when their pitch count was high, but this time there were no reasons, just excuses.

What’s going on here? It’s the corporate approach to baseball. Roberts used a utilitarian argument, saying that what mattered most was getting to the World Series, not any single game. In other words, the fans don’t count; even if the chances of our ace being hurt by pitching two more innings is remote, the decision has been made organizationally that protecting long-term investments like superstars with multi-year guaranteed contracts has a higher priority than the game itself.

Watching a pitcher try for a perfect game or even an ordinary no-hitter is any fan’s dream; not only is it pitch-to-pitch suspenseful, but if you witness one, you have been a part of history. Your ticket and program become collector’s items. Baseball’s priorities as demonstrated by this sickening episode are literally upside down. In recent years, it has eliminated two of the most exciting plays in the game, take-out slide at second base to break up a double play and the collisions at home plate, and all but eliminated the prominence of star starting pitchers by reducing their workloads drastically. It’s a professional sport where its athletes are all millionaires, but as Roberts’ decision proves, it is unwilling to take any risks to keep the game exciting and memorable.

Utilitarian trade-offs only are ethical if competing factors are assigned the right values.

The Ugly

Then there are the MLB teams that don’t even try to win or field a competitive product. The strategy is called tanking. After World Series title runs first by the perennial cellar-dwelling Chicago Cubs and then the Houston Astros, tanking has become a popular way to rebuild. Instead of accepting mediocre play that holds little chance of pots-season glory, a tanking team will trade away high-priced veteran players for unproven prospects and, to be blunt, stink for season after season, with small payrolls and a series of 100-loss seasons. Such teams do not reduce the price of tickets or ballpark food, though what they are selling has lost much of its value. The practice alienates fans and enriches tanking owners. Players hate it, because in any season at least four or five teams have taken themselves out of the market for the best free agents.

The new, contentiously-negotiated agreement between the players and the teams was supposed to address tanking, which can only be effectively addressed by a mandatory minimum payroll rule. When ethics fail, law or rules have to step in. Baseball teams are supposed to serve their communities, but the contagion of elevating profit and single-goal success over integrity and concern for stake-holders has taken hold of baseball’s culture. Days after the owners ended the lock-out to allow the season to begin, two franchises with grand traditions of fielding exiting teams held fire sales, slashing their budgets and signaling that they were joining the tankers: the Oakland A’s and the Cincinnati Reds. Good job, everybody!

In Cincinnati, fans and sportswriters were vocal in expressing their anger, so last week the team president, Phil Castellini, told them to stuff it, saying in part,

Well, where are you going to go? Let’s start there. I mean, sell the team to who? That’s the other thing — you want to have this debate? If you want to look at what would you do with this team to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. And so be careful what you ask for…I think we’re doing the best we can do with the resources that we have. We’re no more pleased with the results than the fans. I’m not sitting here saying anybody should be happy. I’m not polishing trophies in the office right now, and that’s what we’re here to do. 

His rant did not go over well.

Later the same day, after the team’s PR director had grabbed him by the throat and screamed, “What the hell’s’ the matter with you?” the Reds CEO issued a pro forma apology:

I apologize to Reds fans and regret the comments that I made earlier today,” he said. “We love this city, we love this team and we love our fans. I understand how our fans feel and I am sorry.

Right.

Rueful Observations On The Grand Rapids, Mich. Police Shooting

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

…and reactions to it so far.

So occupied was the  news media with crowding out all other news events with the Ukraine war that you may have missed the latest justification for a Black Lives Matter protest, and the latest reason we may have to use robots to police the streets soon, since no sane human being would want the job.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Patrick Lyoya, black and 26, was pulled over on April 4 after a police officer saw that the license plate on his car did not match the automobile he was driving. Lyoya tried to run away after the officer questioned him and asked for his driver’s license.

The officer quickly caught up to him, and there was a struggle. The Grand Rapids police department said that the officer’s body camera was deactivated during physical contact. Video from a bystander’s cellphone shows the officer trying to control Loyoya and kneeing him in the back while shouting at him to let go of the stun gun. (The officer appeared to have tried to use the stungun on Loyoya, without success. Finally the officer reaches for his gun and shoots once, killing the motorist. As day follows night, Black Lives Matter and other activists organized a protest, and the usual parties issued the predictable statements.

Rueful Observations: Continue reading →

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I know I can’t keep up with all the ethics stories and controversies, so I’m assuming the commentariat will have a lot to offer in this race for ethical enlightenment.

Start your ethics engines!

Baseball Ethics Batting Practice, Part 1: The Historic and The Good

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Historic

Not only is April 15, 2022, Opening Day for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, it is also MLB’s Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the date  baseball’s apartheid was ended forever when Jack Roosevelt Robinson (1919-1972) took the field for the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers. It was the most important of baseball’s many influences on the national culture and society at large, by far. As for Robinson, a remarkable man and exactly the athlete for the difficult role assigned to him, he was among the first admittees to the Ethics Alarms Heroes’ Hall of Honor, with this post from 2012.

In 1997, Major League Baseball retired Robinson’s number, 42, and has dedicated all games on April 15 to Robinson. On this date all players wear 42 instead of their usual number, making for mass confusion for fans who don’t know the individual players on sight. It will be especially strange in Fenway Park today, for Opening Day and Jackie Robinson Day have never coincided before. The tradition individual introductions in the pre-game ceremonies, as the whole Red Sox team lines up along the first base foul line—“Playing left field, #8, Carl Yastrzemski!”—will be weird, as every player will be wearing 42.

There have been a lot of posts here about or relating to Jackie Robinson, which you will find at the Jackie Robinson tag.

The Good (and also historic!)

Alyssa Nakken became the first woman to take the field as a coach in a Major League baseball game this week. She coached first base after one of the San Francisco Giants coaches was ejected in a game against the San Diego Padres. The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York now has her helmet, which will soon go on display.  Continue reading →

Ethics Breezes And Gales, 4/14/2022: The End Of A Conspiracy And The Beginning Of Conspiracy Theories [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

April 14 will always be the date that I associate above all else with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which occurred 157 years ago.  Lincoln and the audience at Ford’s Theater laughed uproariously, as John Wilkes Booth knew they would, at the line “Why you sockdologizing old man-trap!” in the play the Lincolns and their guests were watching, “Our American Cousin.” Booth fired a single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln’s skull, dreew a dagger and stabbed Major Rathbone, also in Lincoln’s box along with Mrs. Lincoln and Rathbone’s fiancee, in the arm, and dramatically leaped down onto the stage, shouting Virginia’s motto,“Sic semper tyrannis! (Thus ever to tyrants!) The South is avenged!”  Booth caught his spur on a draped flag on the way down and broke his leg, but limped across the stage and out to waiting horse through a back stage exit. Lincoln never regained consciousness.

Not only was it the first and still most spectacular of the four Presidential assassinations [Notice of Correction: I originally wrote “five,” not because I can’t count, which is what usually happens, but because I was counting Reagan, because he was actually shot. Moron. Thanks to Steve-O-in NJ for alerting me, or I’d have to ban myself from the blog for passing on “misinformation”], Booth’s act and subsequent events, oddities and coincidences launched perhaps the first widespread political conspiracy theory. I wrote in 2010,

[A]s a teenager, I became fascinated by the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. A best-seller at the time was “Web of Conspiracy,” an over-heated brief for the theory that Lincoln’s War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, and others in the military were in league with John Wilkes Booth. The author, a mystery writer named Theodore Roscoe, was constantly suggesting sinister motives by asking questions like “The sealed records of the official assassination investigation were destroyed in a mysterious fire. Was the War Department afraid of what the documents would prove? Would they have implicated Stanton? We will never know.”  This tactic is on view regularly today, used generously by the purveyors of modern conspiracies…

Then again, sometimes conspiracy theories, even unlikely ones, turn out to be true. There was sure a lot of smoke around Lincoln’s assassination (after all, there really was a conspiracy, as Booth had at least five co-conspirators working on his plot for months), and it didn’t help when Robert Lincoln, Abe’s son, was caught burning his papers and told the man who interrupted him (allegedly) that he was doing so because the contained proof that a member of his father’s own cabinet was involved in his assassination. Yet none of the components of the Lincoln conspiracy narrative have held up to scrutiny, except as tantalizing suspicions.

1. First, the rest of a story...Two weeks ago Ethics Alarms covered the story of Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine, who appeared to admit in a tweet that she deliberately caused pain and discomfort to a patient because he had mocked her  “preferred pronoun” pin. After her tweet was seen, circulated and attacked on social media, she deleted it in an attempted cover-up. Wake Forest suspended her pending an investigation, which is now complete. It’s conclusion: Del Rosario was grandstanding, implying that she stuck the patient a second time when she had turned the job over to a supervisor. “Our documentation verifies that after the student physician was unsuccessful in obtaining the blood draw, the student appropriately deferred a second attempt to one of our certified professionals. The student did not attempt to draw blood again,” the university stated. 

But had she deliberately missed the vein the first time to punish the “transphobic” patient? Wake Forest believed her statements that she had not, saying, “Our review revealed that the description of the patient encounter on social media does not reflect what actually occurred. We also determined that all of our procedures were followed while caring for this patient.” For her part, Del Rosarion, who expects to be reinstated, said,

“For the event mentioned in the tweet, I was performing a blood draw on a patient and during our conversation they had shown dismay at my pronoun pin,” she said. “I calmly shared my thoughts about pronouns and did not escalate the situation further. When I was doing the blood draw, I missed the first time due to my inexperience as a student, and per our policy, my supervisor performed the successful blood draw the second time….[I] never intended to harm the patient.”

She also wrote an apology to the school for her inflammatory tweet, admitting   to “poorly representing” the school and the healthcare system. [Source: Campus Reform] Continue reading →

One Small Step For South Dakota Toward Justice For Its Despicable Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg, With Two Big Steps To Go

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you only skim the daily (well, almost daily) ethics warm-ups here, you might have missed this disgusting story, brought to you by the corrupt legal and political system in South Dakota. I’ve posted about it twice, so here is a summary to bring you up to date. On September 14, 2020, I wrote in part,

South Dakota’s Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg–he’s a Republican— reported hitting a deer over the weekend. In fact, his car hit and killed a man whose body wasn’t discovered until the next morning, the Department of Public Safety said today. Governor Kristi Noem confirmed that the Attorney General had been involved in a fatal crash. Ravnsborg told the Hyde County Sheriff’s Office that he hit a deer on the highway. At this time it is not known if Ravnsborg stopped to confirm that he hit a deer…It is unknown as of now whether if Ravnsborg called 911 or someone else, but the press has requested recordings of all calls related to the accident The body of 55-year-old Joe Boever was discovered the next morning.

On Feb. 26, 2021, I posted this update:

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was engaged in a fatal hit-and-run accident as discussed briefly on Ethics Alarms last September. He told law enforcement that he thought he had hit a deer on his way home from a social event. Prosecutors announced that they were only pursuing misdemeanor charges against him, which is beyond outrageous, especially since detectives found a pair of broken reading glasses inside Ravnsborg’s Ford Taurus.

They belonged to the man he killed, though Ravnsborg said he didn’t know he had hit a man until the following day, when he returned to the scene and found the body of Joseph Boever, 55, in a ditch. This means that either 1) he then took the glasses as a souvenir, which is creepy 2) the deer he hit was wearing…no, that doesn’t work, never mind, or 3) the dead man’s head came through the windshield, as one of the detectives concluded in an interview released by the South Dakota Department of Public Safety on Tuesday.

Incredibly, Ravnsborg says that he will not step down! “At no time has this issue impeded his ability to do the work of the office,” his spokesman said in a statement. WHAT? The fact that the public now knows that its top law enforcement officer is a liar, a drunk driver (this was why he didn’t stop, of course), guilty of manslaughter and a coward doesn’t undermine his ability to do his job? If he really thinks that, let’s add “idiot” to the list.

This week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers filed two articles of impeachment against Ravnsborg and South Dakota Governor Kristi L. Noem (R) called for his resignation. That’s a start. Now let’s see the hacks that only charged Ravnsborg with three misdemeanors for conduct that would have anyone else facing homicide charges lose their jobs and law licenses.

Continue reading →

Unethical—And Funny!— Quote Of The Week: BLM Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure — this nonprofit system structure. This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”

—-Patrice Cullers, co-founder and former executive director of Black Lives Matter, referring to the Federal laws that require all charities and non-profits to disclose their finances and activities to the public .

Yeah, I bet the laws requiring Black Lives Matter to keep records of its donations and how they are spent make you feel unsafe, Patrisse.

As Ethics Alarms discussed in February, Black Lives Matter is being slowly but surely exposed as a scam, as its fundraising arm can’t account for much of the $90 million it raised when the group pulled off a massive white guilt-fueled shakedown of corporations and individual donors. Cullers helped rip the veil away herself when she spent $3.2 million on real estate across the United States after BLM closed out 2020 with $60 million in the bank. Though BLM denied that Cullors spent BLM funds on her personal properties, the organization and other activist groups under Cullors’s control offered contracts to an art company run by the father of her only child. A coincidence, I’m sure.

Continue reading →

The Great Stupid And Seattle Transit

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

In Michael Crichton’s”The Lost World,” a “Jurassic Park” follow-up not to be confused with the “Jurassic Park” film sequel of the same name and not one of the writer’s best, there is an interesting discussion of how some species of dinosaurs may have caused their own eventual extinction by developing toxic habits, like not caring for their young. It was the first thing I thought of when I read about the ridiculous transit system crisis in Seattle.

Oh-oh.

It shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, that the city that encouraged woke support for the destructive George Floyd riots in 2020 has adopted other unethical policies that make the Left’s anointed feel good even though the policies can’t possible work and constitute irresponsible leaps onto ruinous slippery slopes. 

The Seattle light rail public transit system has no turnstiles: passengers are supposed to  buy a ticket or tap their pre-paid card. It’s an honor system, but in woke Seattle, the ideal purpose of government is to for almost everything, so 70%—Seventy per cent!!—of the riders are freeloaders. This means that fares cover just 5% of the system’s operating costs. 40% was the minimum Sound Transit set as a requirement.

All public transit systems lose money (though they are approved after estimates that routinely overstate likely ridership), but they will help us avoid death by climate change, see, so they are essential and wonderful per se. However, if a city just lets riders cheat, such systems cause wider problems in the social contract.

(Do we really have to keep explaining this?)

Seattle’s Sound Transit stopped even minimal enforcement of fare requirements after a study revealed that blacks were disproportionately getting fined. Ah HA! The system was racist then! How far a jump is it to apply the same logic to other laws? It is how San Francisco. ended up legalizing shop-lifting.

I’m sorry: my tone is snarkier than usual this morning. But this is all so infuriating. And unethical. And stupid. Continue reading →

At Yale, An Unethical Question And An Ethically Ignorant Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx) was recording a live episode of his podcast “Verdict” at Yale with his co-host, conservative writer Michael Knowles. The topic was the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the next member of the Supreme Court, but a student, “Evan”, asked Cruz a question that was juuust a bit off-topic.

“Assuming it would end global hunger, would you fellate another man?” Evan queried as the audience guffawed. Hahahaha, you’re an asshole, Evan. The question is rude, unserious, and designed to embarrass a U.S. Senator. It’s Golden Rule breach, of course, because the question is of the “when did you stop beating your wife?” variety. For a conservative like Cruz, any answer would get him into trouble.

I would have shut the student down, myself, and asked him to leave. A question like that is the live equivalent of trolling. Instead, Cruz threw the question to his co-host.

Big mistake.

Continue reading →

“Jen Psaki’s Job Is Not An Easy One (Easy One!)”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well! Jen Psaki has been hot as a firecracker lately! Before we get into details, however, let’s add a verse to that immortal Gilbert and Sullivan song above, shall we?

When Joe Biden utters something idiotic (Idiotic!)
Or he babbles what his puppeteers forbid (They forbid)
Jen Psaki must deny he even thought it (That he thought it)
And insist he never did what he just did. (What he did!)
Though her figurative pants may be on fire (Pants on fire!)
Do admire her for the tales she’s boldly spun. (That she’s spun)
It’s a chore to be Joe’s designated liar (She’s his liar!)
Jen Psaki’s job is not an easy one.

OHHH!

Since deceptive propaganda must be done, must be done.
Jen Psaki’s job is not an easy one…Easy one!

There, now that I’ve got that out of my system, Jen’s latest hits!

First, the “Putin Price Hike” lie…

This goes beyond mere lying, which is what Psaki does every day. The claim that gas prices and the skyrocketing inflation are the fault of the Russian Ukraine invasion is gaslighting. Funny, I seem to recall both gas and other prices heading up at today’s trajectory long before Vlad decided to become a war criminal. Must be my imagination…

How stupid does the Biden administration think American are? Very stupid, apparently. Psaki has been repeating “Putin Price Hike” for quite a while now: obviously it was decided upon by some focus group exercise as the Democrats’ best chance to hypnotize Americans into believing that spending trillions the nation doesn’t have and blocking energy production to make Greta Thunberg happy haven’t caused the price hikes in everything, because it’s all Putin’s fault (and greedy American corporations). Of course, polls showing about 40% of the public still thinking Joe is doing a bang-up job does encourage the “these people will believe anything!” conclusion. Continue reading →