baseball

Employee Ethics and Professonalism: The Anthony Rendon Saga

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Los Angeles Angels (it’s a baseball team. Sheesh…) are in talks with long-time disappointment third baseman Anthony Rendon about buying out the final year of his contract. Rendon wants to retire, but doesn’t want to forfeit the final year, $38 million bucks of it in his seven-year, $245 million long-time contract that has become an albatross for the Angels and a bonanza for him. Rendon spent the entire 2025 season recovering from hip surgery, as was typical of his Angels tenure. He was paid all the same.

The 35-year-old has been limited to playing in only 205 of a potential 648 games since 2020, due to injuries to his left groin, left knee, left hamstring, left shin, left oblique, lower back, both wrists and both hips. He has never played as many as 60 games in any of the four 162 game seasons. When Rendon was able to play, he wasn’t very good. The Angels had made Rendon the game’s highest-paid third baseman in December 2019, whereupon he performed well in the pandemic-shortened 2020 MLB season (which I don’t think counts) and that was the end of his productivity.

Rendon has famously stated that he doesn’t really like baseball, he just happened to be good at it. It’s just a job to him, not a passionate pursuit that he cares about; he doesn’t care about the accolades or attention either. Did his lack of passion contribute to his failure to suit up and take the field because of all the injuries? Nobody can say.

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End of the Baseball Season Ethics Recap, 11/2/25, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

If you missed last night’s Game 7 of the epic World Series just completed, you have my sympathy; if you missed it, or the entire Series really, because baseball isn’t part of your life you have my pity. Let me quote here the late, great Roger Angell, baseball’s Bard, writing about the only better World Series I’ve ever watched, the 1975 edition where the Cincinnati Reds beat (barely) the Boston Red Sox, also in seven games. He was effusing specifically about Carlton Fisk’s famous home run in the 12th inning (I was there!) in his New Yorker essay “Agincourt and After”:

“Carlton Fisk, leading off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy, the eighth Reds pitcher of the night—it was well into morning now, in fact—socked the second pitch up and out, farther and farther into the darkness above the lights, and when it came down at last, re-illuminated, it struck the topmost, innermost edge of the screen inside the yellow left-field foul pole and glanced sharply down and bounced on the grass: a fair ball, fair all the way. I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw—Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair, forced it fair with his entire body. He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them—in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all four Manchesters; and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway—jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on backcountry roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy—alight with it.

…What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

Caring is an ethical value.

I’ll get to the other ethics news in Part 2…

Baseball, Ted Williams and Ethics Zugzwang

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Baseball has an potential ethics problem involving baseball legend (and Red Sox icon)Ted Williams that I don’t think can be resolved.

Williams, or “Teddy Ballgame” as he liked to call himself (He also called himself “Ted Fucking Williams the Greatest Fucking Hitter Who Ever Lived”) is renowned as the Last of the Four-Hundred Hitters, Batting .406 in 1941. (He also lost the MVP vote that year to Joe DiMaggio because Joltin’ Joe hit in 56 straight games, a statistical anomaly.) That .406 average looks especially impressive in 2025, when only one player in the National League, Trea Turner, even managed to hit .300.

But just for fun, let’s imagine that Turner hit exactly .400. Ted Williams would no longer be the last of the .400 hitters, right? But there is a problem. When Ted hit .406, baseball counted sacrifice flies—when a batter makes an out with a fly ball that is deep enough that a runner on third base can tag up after the catch and score—like any other out. They counted against a player’s average. In 1953, though, baseball changed the rule so a “sac fly” didn’t count as an out. If Williams’ sac flies had been hit under the new (and current) rules, his average (he had 8 that year), would have been .413. If Turner were playing under the 1941 rules—-he hit 2 sac flies this season—those two outs would drop him below the .400 mark.

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Moral Luck and Baseball: The High-Profile Ruinous Ball-Strike Call Comes AFTER The Problem Has Been Addressed

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments


Next season, Major League Baseball will implement the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System. For the first time in regular-season history, batters, catchers and pitchers will have the right to challenge balls and strikes. Teams will begin each game with two available challenges and can continue challenging until they lose challenges twice.

The system has been desperately needed for many years, ever since each player’s strike zone could be seen on television screens during game broadcasts. As usual, baseball dragged its metaphorical feet addressing the problem, with the idiotic “bad calls by the umpire are part of the game” argument that traditionalists and ex-players are still using. That logic makes as much sense as defending medical malpractice because “everyone makes mistakes.” Sure, before video technology could prove a key ball or strike call was a bad one, tolerating home plate umpire mistakes (like the one that cost the Boston Red Sox Game 3 of the 1975 World Series and conceivably the Series itself) were part of the game, because nothing could be done about it. Now something can.

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Baseball Ethics Dunce: St. Louis Cardinals Manager Oli Marmol

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On this date in 1941, Ted Williams got six hits in eight at-bats during a season-ending doubleheader in Philadelphia, boosting his average to .406. He became the first player since 1930 to hit .400., and no one has done it since. Of course, Connie Mack, the Hall of Fame A’s manager, could have walked Williams every time up and prevented him from reaching the .400 mark on the theory that he was the best Red Sox batter and that not letting him swing the bat would help Mack’s lousy Philadelphia team win one or two meaningless games. Mack didn’t do that, of course, because it would have cheated Williams, cheated the fans, and cheated baseball

Fast-forward to 2025. Yesterday, the Chicago Cubs led the Cardinals 7-3 with a runner on third and two outs in the bottom of the 8th inning. Michael Busch was up, and he was flirting with baseball history: the Cubs player was 4-for-4 with two home runs already, and needed just a single to complete a cycle—a homer, triple, double and single in the same game. Cycles are for hitters what no-hit games are to pitchers: rare historic accomplishments, in fact, there have been almost exactly the same number of each in baseball history. But Cardinals manager Oli Marmol ordered that Busch be given an intentional walk, ending his pursuit of the cycle. The Cubs fans booed, and I’m pretty sure that Cardinal fans would have booed the decision too if the game had been in St. Louis.

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Mets Announcer Gary Cohen Was Right and Cubs Rookie Matt Shaw Is…What, Exactly? And What Am I?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

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.

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The Villain In The Phillies-Marlins Ball Heist Was NOT the Obnoxious Phillies Fan…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, indeed.

The incident that has “gone viral” from the stands at a Phillies-Marlins game in Miami is covered in the videos above. Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader hit a home run into the left field seats. The ball hit the bleachers and rolled around as four fans tried to nab the souvenir. A man appeared to win the battle, returned to his seat and gave the ball to his young his son, who rewarded him with a hug.

Enter Cruella DeVille. A woman who had been scrambling for the ball, wearing Phillies gear, confronted the man and demanded the ball, claiming she had a hold of it before he got it. The father complied, taking the ball out of his son’s glove and handing it to the woman. Of course the incident was filmed and posted on social media, with the unidentified woman being quickly dubbed “Phillies Karen.”

Sensing a public relations opportunity, the staff at the Marlins’ LoanDepot Park (another horribly named baseball park: money isn’t everything, guys!) wanted to make things right, so they sent a stadium employee to give the son and his sister a goody bag full of baseball stuff.

Awwwww…

The villain in this incident was not the horrible woman. (She doesn’t know her baseball ball-chasing rules, incidentally. In those scrambles for bouncing balls, whoever gets a firm grip on the ball first wins fair and square. I have been in many of these tussles, one of which featured a little old lady snatching the ball from me —a Mickey Mantle foul!—just as I thought I had it in my grasp….) No, the villain was the weenie father.

What a disgrace. This guy gave up in the face of an unjust and unreasonable confrontation because he didn’t have the guts to tell the woman to buzz off, de-gifting his son of a prize—it was his birthday!—in the process. In that moment, he taught to boy many things, none of them good. Don’t fight for what’s yours. Let bullies win. Avoid unpleasant confrontations at all costs, even when it means letting unethical tactics prevail.

He also taught his son that his father is a weenie. Good to know, I guess.

Wow…Not For the First Time, President Trump Doesn’t Know What the Hell He’s Talking About…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The topic, fortunately, is baseball, not the economy, foreign policy, or making America great again. Still, it is not a good sign when the leader of the free world spouts off like an ignorant fool professing absolute certainty without any genuine expertise whatsoever. If he does this about baseball…well, you can complete that sentence.

President Trump now demands that Roger Clemens be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame despite enough evidence that he used banned steroids late in his career to put him in the Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Sammy Sosa et al. Rogues Gallery of cheaters with great stats who fail the Hall’s character requirements. In a post on Truth Social today, Trump said that he had just played golf with the 11-time All-Star pitcher, and apparently this makes him an authority on The Rocket’s dubious past.

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Was Jen Pawol the Most Qualified Umpire or Was She Just “Historic”?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Over the weekend, minor league umpire Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire in a Major League Baseball game, handling the bases in Game 1 of an Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins doubleheader then moving behind the plate to call balls and strikes for Sunday’s game. Of course, MLB made a great hullabaloo over the momentous occasion. At various times during the season, minor league umpires are brought up to the big leagues to fill in for umpires getting their union-dictated vacations. Pawol is the only woman currently umpiring in the minor leagues. Thanks to baseball’s (and Commissioner Rob Manfred’s) wokeness obsession, she took her place in baseball history with a lingering and unavoidable doubt: would a man with her record and credentials have been chosen by MLB for the weekend umpiring chores? Were there more qualified and deserving male umpires who were passed over because they had y-chromosomes?

This is the scourge that the DEI fad has created. I feel sympathy for Pawol, but there is no avoiding it.

Naturally, MLB was ready for the questions and the suspicion. “Jen Pawol’s MLB debut is no PR stunt — she earned it the hard way” blared a Fox News headline, following an MLB press release. Methinks they doth protest too much. My suspicions were raised because just a few days earlier, the Boston Red Sox created team “history” by having an all-female broadcast team for a game. Why? Well, you know, because. The women were fine, professional play-by-play and color announcers, but nothing special except for their high voices. I’m sure there were plenty of long-time minor league male broadcasters who would have loved the chance to do a big league game, but, again, they wouldn’t be “historic,” so they were out of luck.

As with umpires, almost all baseball broadcasters are male and white. There’s no demonstrable discrimination at the heart of this: it’s self selection. Women don’t play hardball; blacks tend to be drawn to other sports as well. Why should that circumstance provide a special advantage to the minorities who do enter the field? Baseball doesn’t benefit from diversity of umpires: what matters is getting the calls right. Baseball fans want engaging, knowledgeable game broadcasts, and couldn’t care less about the sex and color of those providing it.

Meanwhile, there is still room for Manfred to carve out some more gratuitous history: baseball still hasn’t had a heterosexual female ump in the major leagues.

I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!…That Major League Baseball Is Facing a Gambling Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Cleveland Guardians (you know, the Indians?) pitcher Emmanuel Clase has been placed on non-disciplinary administrative leave through August 31 as part of Major League Baseball’s ongoing investigation into gambling. Clase’s teammate, pitcher Luis Ortiz, was the first player placed on leave under the ongoing investigation.

“The Guardians have been notified by Major League Baseball that as part of their sports betting investigation Emmanuel Clase has been placed on non-disciplinary paid leave per an agreement with the Players Association,” the team said yesterday in a statement. “We have been informed that no additional players or Club personnel are expected to be impacted. The Guardians are not permitted to comment further at this time, and will respect the league’s confidential investigative process as we continue to fully cooperate.”

Clase, an elite closer (the relief pitcher who pitches in the 9th inning when his team is ahead) signed a five-year, $20 million extension in April 2022. He’s being paid $4.5 million this year and has a $6 million guarantee for the 2026 season under the terms of that contract. Why would anyone making that much money risk it all to get involved with gambling in a sport where doing so guarantees banning from the game? That’s easy: professional athletes are not, as a rule, very bright, but are greedy,and have the ethics alarms of 12-year-olds.

I covered this issue in a longer post in February. I was right, the professional sports leagues are wrong, any fool could see it (but these organizations are not run ny just any fools, but very special fools), and the result is unavoidable. The embrace of gambling by sports organizations is going to be a disaster. It is hypocritical, incompetent and irresponsible.