U.S. Society

Afternoon Ethics Afterthoughts, 6/16/2021: Baseball Free Zone [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

no baseball

You really didn’t think I was only going to write about baseball today, did you? Now, if I operated like CNN and the other networks, I might skip the current baseball ethics story entirely, since it’s not what my audience wants to hear about, obviously. But it is, in fact, the newest, most generally revealing and best ethics story out there, and Ethics Alarms isn’t here for profit or popularity. ALSO obviously.

Unfortunately, this has some unintended consequences, like my choice, 25 years ago, to concentrate my professional efforts on ethics. Despite all lip service to the contrary, law firms, Fortune 500 companies, professions, local governments and businesses generally don’t regard ethics as a high priority, so when the lock down made these and other entities cut “non-essentials,” ethics training was one of the first to go. ProEthics has weathered this period better than it might have thanks to legal ethics consulting and expert witness work, but right now we’re in our worst and scariest cash crunch ever, thanks to a wave of unexpected expenses arriving at exactly the wrong time. The reason there were no posts up yesterday afternoon and this morning is that I have to solve this problem, and the time and effort it requires risks interfering with Ethics Alarms.

Like William Saroyan, I resent that the need for money conflicts with doing what we want to do in life, but then, having chosen ethics as my vocation over many more traditional and lucrative options open to me (except theater: ethics is a lot more lucrative than theater), I set my self up for the Hyman Roth lecture: “This is the life we have chosen…” I give myself that one at least once a week.

But enough about my problems. On to Not Baseball!

1. Are you sick of this unethical narrative? I sure am. On today’s NYT front page, we are told that then-President Trump, “defying norms”—there’s that phony “norms” charge again—urged the Justice Department to investigate “false claims” of election fraud after the 2020 election. Well.

A. There is no norm for what a President should do if he genuinely believes that an election was rigged, stolen, or that there is a strong possibility that it may have been. The office is charged with protecting the Constitution, and such entreaties to the DOJ seem to me to be absolutely consistent with a President’s obligations.

B. The Times cannot say such claims are false, because the Times doesn’t know they are false.

C. As Nate Silver noted recently in another context, the constant refrain that a claim is false by those implicated in that claim without an accompanying desire to investigate the matter raises a rebuttable presumption that the claim may not be false after all.

Continue reading →

Baseball Has A Cheating Problem …It Is Relevant To More Than Baseball (Part 2): Unethical Quote Of The Week: Boston Red Sox Manager Alex Cora

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Cora

“I come from suspension and I know how embarrassing that is and how tough that is, not only on you as a person but your family, your friends and the people that love you. Ten games, a year, two years, three years, it doesn’t matter. Being suspended is hell and you don’t want to go through that. I was very open to them and hopefully they understand that.”

—Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora on Major League Baseball’s threat of 10 game suspensions for pitchers  caught cheating by using sticky substances on baseballs , a practice that has been against the rules  for a hundred years.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote that Alex Cora, then serving a one year suspension from Major League baseball, didn’t “get it,” it being why cheating is wrong, what ethics is, and why it is important to act ethically in all aspects of life. He still doesn’t get it. Cora (you can catch up here) was suspended because he engineered and oversaw a  season long sign-stealing scheme as bench coach in 2017 for the Houston Astros, who used it to inflate their offense and ultimately win the World Series. When it was finally discovered, Cora was the acclaimed manager of the Boston Red Sox, who succeeded the Astros as World Champions in 2018. The Red Sox had been cheating in their triumphant season too, though not as extensively, and  an investigation blamed it all on a low-level coach., not Cora, though Cora was his supervisor, and the whole thing seemed oddly reminiscent of Cora’s cheating in Houston. Continue reading →

Baseball Has A Cheating Problem That Is Old, Was Supposedly Addressed Decades Ago, And Is Strangling The Game. It Is Relevant To More Than Baseball (Part 1: Introduction)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Baseball sticky

Since about four other readers pay any attention to my baseball ethics posts, let me say right up front why this a mistake. Baseball’s current pitchers using foreign substances on the ball problem is, ethically, exactly the same as our nation’s election cheating scandal, or the illegal immigration crisis. It arises from the same dead-headed rationalizations, intellectual laziness, and self-serving deception. We can and should learn from it. But we won’t.

If you want to ignore the latest baseball ethics scandal as a niche problem unrelated to greater ethics principles, be my guest. You will be missing an important and still developing lesson.

Baseball’s hitting is way down this year, and pitching is more dominant than it has been since the mid-1960s. There is a reason: almost every pitcher is using some kind of sticky substance on the ball. This increases “spin rate,” which before computers and other technology was impossible to see, much less measure. The faster a pitcher can make a ball spin, the more it moves, curves and dives at higher speeds. Sticky substances allow a pitcher to do that. Using them is against the rules; it’s cheating. But for years now, the same kind of ethics-addled fools who allowed Barry Bonds and other cheats to use illegal steroids and wreck the game’s home run records as long as they lied about it have let pitchers illegally doctor the ball.

This week, the whole, completely avoidable ethics train wreck became an engine of destruction for the National Pastime.

Unfortunately, one has to understand the context to comprehend what is going on now, and that means looking backwards, in this case, to 2014. Here, with some edits, are two Ethics Alarms essays that provide the context. The first was titled “The Abysmal Quality of Ethical Reasoning in Baseball: A Depressing Case Study.” The second, Pineda-Pine Tar, Part II: Baseball Clarifies Its Bizarro Ethics Culture, appeared 13 days later. Yes, what is happening now was foretold by conditions that were evident seven years ago. The remaining parts of this series will bring you, and the train wreck, up to date.

***

What happened was this: During last night’s Red Sox-Yankee game in Yankee Stadium, the Boston broadcasting team of Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy noticed a glossy brown substance on New York starting pitcher Michael Pineda’s pitching hand. It was very obvious, especially once the NESN cameras started zooming in on it.   “There’s that substance, that absolutely looks like pine tar,” play-by-play man Don Orsillo said. “Yeah, that’s not legal,” color commentator and former player Jerry Remy replied.

Indeed it isn’t.  According to rule 8.02(a)(2), (4) and (5), the pitcher shall not expectorate on the ball, either hand or his glove; apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball; [or]  deface the ball in any manner.

The Red Sox, who probably knew about the gunk on Pineda’s hand, didn’t complain to the umpires, and just went about their merry way, losing the game. Asked about the stuff on his hand, Pineda demonstrated the full range of body language indicating that he was lying his head off. “It was dirt,’ he said. Later, when the ick appeared to be gone,  Pineda explained, he had just sweated his hand clean. Right. Whatever was on his hand—beef gravy, crankcase oil, chocolate syrup…the majority of pundits think pine tar—it wasn’t “dirt.” Pineda’s manager, Joe Girardi, was brazenly evasive.

The Yankee pitcher was cheating. This isn’t a major scandal, but cheating is cheating: sports shouldn’t allow cheating of any kind, because if a sport allows some cheating, however minor, it will encourage cynical, unscrupulous and unethical individuals on the field, in the stands, and behind keyboard to excuse all other forms of cheating, from corked bats to performance enhancing drugs. Cheating is wrong. Cheating unfairly warps the results of games, and rewards dishonesty rather than skill. Cheating undermines the enjoyment of any game among serious fans who devote energy and passion to it. Any cheating is a form of rigging, a variety of lying.

And yet, this clear instance of cheating, caught on video, primarily sparked the sports commentariat, including most fans, to cite one rationalization and logical fallacy after another to justify doing nothing, and not just doing nothing, but accepting the form of cheating as “part of the game.” I’ve been reading columns and listening to the MLB channel on Sirius-XM and watch the MLB channel on Direct TV since this episode occurred. Here are the reactions:

Continue reading →

Monday Mid-Day Ethics: “It’s A Grand Old Flag!” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

And if the American flag triggers anyone…

Betsy Ross flag

…they can, as George Washington used to say, “bite me.”

It was George, according to legend, that asked Philidelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to make the first American Flag with stars on a blue field along with red and white stripes. Historians have been unable to conclusively prove or disprove this story, but if ever there was a case where “print the legend” was appropriate, this would be it. The design wasn’t George’s: the Continental Congress adopted a resolution during the Revolutionary War stating that “the flag of the United States be thirteen alternate stripes red and white” and that “the Union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.” Each new state accepted into into the United States after independence got its own stripe and star, but it quickly became clear that this plane would end up with a flag having either very thin stripes or being longer than it was wide. In 1818, Congress enacted a law stipulating that the 13 original stripes be restored and that only stars be added to represent new states. (Good idea.) It was on June 14, 1877 when the first Flag Day observance was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes. The flag was flown from all public buildings across the country. In 1949 Congress officially designated June 14 as Flag Day, a national day of observance.

1. “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” Are you sick of reading that? Not as sick as I am of having reason to write it, I bet. Researchers analyzed reporting from major TV networks and newspapers during the first 60 days of the five most recent Presidencies. They found that only 19% of Biden coverage was negative. When you consider almost all of the less than enthusiastic coverage had to come from Fox News, one has to conclude that ABC, NBC and CBS was nearly 100% positive. Meanwhile,, 62% of stories on former President Donald Trump were negative.

“Why have journalists stopped being adversarial to Biden?” the Washington Examiner asks without giggling (though a newspaper can’t literally giggle)….

“Biden is the least accessible president in a century, serving 64 days before holding a press conference. “Does that matter?” a USA Today headline shrugged. When Biden finally spoke, reporters didn’t inquire about the COVID-19 pandemic, instead asking “time-wasting questions,” noted journalism think tank Poynter.While Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki holds regular briefings, she rarely gets grilled. When Dr. Anthony Fauci’s trove of concerning emails was made public, no reporter asked about it. If interrogated, Psaki deflects and says she’ll “circle back.” Or she offers mind-numbing non-sequiturs, such as when the stock market faced a crisis due to the GameStop fiasco. “Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary,” Psaki smirked.”

My Facebook friends think Psaki is wonderful.

Continue reading →

How Newt Gingrich Taught Me Why We Don’t Have An ACLU Any More

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

NewtGingrich

Many years ago, when I was just a little tiny ethicist and ran a research foundation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, I was invited to a Chamber executive retreat. By far the most interesting feature was a working lunch with young Congressman Newt Gingrich as the speaker. This was long before most American knew about Newt, who was considered something of a wonk and proved it that afternoon.

Rep. Gingrich gave the clearest presentation of organizational structure and function I had ever heard or have read about since as part of his seminar on long-range planning. He handed out a chart showing a pyramid with “MISSION” at the point, “GOALS” beneath, “OBJECTIVES” beneath that, “STRATEGY” next going down, then “TACTICS,” and finally OPERATIONS as the long base. He went through many examples of failed and successful organizations, making many fascinating points, including (I still have my notes somewhere):

  • You can’t have a strong organization without a strong and clear mission.
  • An organization in which the goals start to become inconsistent with the mission will lose its integrity and direction.
  • If the organization’s strategies are polluted by parochial and personal goals of staff and leadership, the goals will become eccentric and scattershot, and mission will become meaningless.
  • Even the best mission cannot survive inadequate operations, which is why idealists and ideologues so often make poor leaders.
  • The best operations imaginable won’t save flawed mission (Newt’s example: Nazi Germany), and
  • “If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s easy to get there, but it won’t be worth the trip.”

I hadn’t thought about Newt’s private seminar for a long time, but it popped back into what passes for my head when I read this piece, “Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis.”

Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/13/2021: All Sorts of Stuff!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Junk

Today in ethics history, in 1971, the New York Times published stolen documents in order to try to turn public opinion against the Vietnam war and the administration of Richard Nixon. On June 30, On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had the right to publish the material, a leap down a slippery slope that may have been (barely) justified with a responsible, trustworthy, objective and non-partisan news media, but has, as some predicted at the time, provided a motive for criminal activity, such as leaks by government lawyers for partisan goals, that has done incalculable harm to the nation.

The New York Times published portions of the 47-volume Pentagon analysis of how the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia grew over a period of three decades, especially during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It had been stolen by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst turned antiwar activist who gave them to the Times. The Times was also an opponent of the war and especially of President Richard Nixon. Though the controversy was framed as a “the public has a right to know” issue, it was also a partisan and ideological strike by the Times. Now, of course, the paper does little else when political matters are involved.

1. Let’s start with some good ethics news. Uber driver Latonya Young picked up a passenger named Kevin Esch. They got to chatting, and Latonya, 43, disclosed that she had dropped out of school at age 16 when she gave birth to her now 26-year-old son. She wanted to re-enroll in classes at Georgia State University, but didn’t have the funds to pay the necessary $700. Without informing her, Esch paid the $700 for her, allowing Latonya to re-enroll, She finally graduated with a bachelor of science in criminal justice.

Continue reading →

The Unethical Ingredients Of The West Point High School Valedictorian Fiasco, Part II: What’s Going On Here? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Valedictorian

Who are the ethics villains, heroes, fools and otherwise in the West Point High School graduation honors debacle?

Observations:

Number One, and nothing else is even close: If society were capable of looking at human beings as human beings and not as members of teams, groups and tribes, this would have still been a mess, but a much less toxic one. There are groups, political parties, activists, irresponsible scholars and race-hucksters of all kinds who benefit and profit by dividing the United States along racial fault-lines, and they will do it for as long as they can, no matter what harm it does to the nation, families, individuals, institutions, values and the enjoyment of life. This is an example of what we have to dread in greater frequency and damage if we don’t find a way to stifle these villains, for that is what they are.

Related to this are accounts that the president of the local NAACP was elated. This isn’t a team sport: two young women were honored for their achievements, not their race. If it would be offensive for a local group to express pleasure that two white students received an honor, it is equally obnoxious and inappropriate for the NAACP to be making racial comments.

2 If the school counselor was really the culprit who used the wrong standard, he or she needs to go. Yes, the whole school is responsible, including the principal, but if ever a scapegoat was called for, however, this is it. Because of the predictable chain reaction, it was an inexcusable mistake. In Mississippi? In a predominantly black student body? The ethics alarms should have been ringing at ear-splitting volume before the grade calculations ever started. Quite simply, this was a mistake that must not be made.

3. Suspicions that race was a factor in using the wrong standard are inevitable at a time when so many standards are being attacked, eliminated or changed for not yielding the “right” results by the measure of “equity and diversity.” The fact that two black students were elevated above the white ones by the “mistaken” use of the wrong standard under the rules and tradition could have been a coincidence, but the white parents, and objective critics, have every reason to wonder, just as the black parents have every reason to suspect racial bias when the value of their children’s honor was cut in half to satisfy two white families.

Continue reading →

The Unethical Ingredients Of The West Point High School Valedictorian Fiasco, Part I: A Perfect Storm

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

High school graduation

This ugly episode should not have become another racial controversy, and in a healthy culture it would not. But in 2021 it could not have been otherwise with these facts, and American have to decide if they want to live in a society where this happens, or whether they want something better.

The story is told well here, but the main facts are:

1. Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple were named 2021 valedictorian and salutatorian for West Point High School in Mississippi on Seniors Awards Night. Both are African-American.

2. The parents of two white students in the class, Emma Berry and Dominic Borgioli, objected. They had been carefully calculating their children’s grade point averages, and by their records, Emma and Dominic had earned the honors given to Ikeria and Layla.

3. By the school’s own handbook, they were right. Ikeria and Layla had been awarded the honors based on a calculation of quality point average or Q.P.A.,which calculates grades by giving extra weight to advanced placement and dual credit courses. Dominic and Emma were the top two finishers based on an unweighted grade point average, and according to the rules, it was that distinction, not the Q.P.A., which should have been used to decide the class’s valedictorian and salutatorian. A school counselor charged with ranking the class had made a mistake and used the wrong standard…or at least that’s the school’s story.

Continue reading →

Friday Already? Well, It’s Time For The Ethics Alarms Open Forum, Then!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

high_noon

Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’s! Keep it on topic, keep it civil, and be brilliant…

Judging A Website By Its Commenters

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Citizen Free Press

The comments on leftist websites—-yes, I include the Washington Post and the New York Times—often make me reconsider my criticism of Michael Savage’s best selling book title, “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.” The comments on most conservative websites, however, make me want to have my human race credentials revoked.

Take the comments on Citizen Free Press…please. The surging conservative news aggregator has taken a lot of clicks from The Drudge Report since the latter went ostentatiously NeverTrump. It is occasionally a useful resource, but the more I use it, the more showers I have to take. For example…

Isimemen Etute, 18, of Virginia Beach, a Virginia Tech freshman football player (I assume he was also a student?) has been charged with second-degree murder for beating a man to death after discovering that the 40-year-old he met on Tinder as “Angie,” was a man, Jerry Smith, rather than a woman. They had apparently had some kind of sexual contact on their first meeting, but on the second a month later, the ruse was revealed. Etute told police he punched and stomped on Smith’s head and “heard gurgling” before leaving him to die.

Don’t ask me how one could have a sexual encounter with a man and believe he was a woman, but there are stranger versions of this plot.

But the comments on the story on the Citizens Free Press link are more than depressing; they are frightening. The people who wrote the vast majority of them would need a serious upgrade to reach “deplorables” status. Ready?

Continue reading →