“You gotta understand, there were only 28 people who had my job in the whole world. And thousands of people wanted those jobs, and every year, there were guys trying to take my job. So I needed to do anything I could to protect my job, take care of my family. Do you have any idea how much money was at stake? Do you?”
—Former Mets and Phillies star Lenny Dykstra, explaining why he used banned and illegal anabolic steroids throughout his career Continue reading
Jim Joyce, the American league umpire who cost Armando Galaraga a perfect game by missing the what should have been the final out of the game, achieved immediate respect for admitting his mistake and apologizing to the pitcher and the public. Now another umpire, Gary Cederstrom, following Joyce’s lead, has admitted and apologized for a botched call, a wretched called strike on Johnny Damon that ended another Tigers game with a strikeout when it should have been a game-tying ball four (the bases were loaded at the time.)
ESPN commentator John Kruk and baseball blogger Rob Neyer have expressed dismay at the apparent trend, but it is a legitimate cultural shift in ethical standards. Continue reading
Applied to an international soccer match, the argument that players, fans and broadcasters should be broad-minded and tolerant of the peculiar conduct of various national groups is a good one—up to a point. The point is reached when a custom begins ruining the game for everyone else. The vuvuzelas–those small plastic horns that produce an ear-splitting atonal drone like a horde of cicadas— go well beyond that point at the World Cup, and in any other sports setting are the equivalent of racist taunts, 400 pound naked men, on-field trespassers and giant fart machines. Continue reading
To cut to the chase: there is now irrefutable evidence that Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time hit leader who is currently banned from the game for betting on baseball, used a corked bat. How often he used it, how many other bats were similarly doctored, and what results he got from the illegal bat (s) are all unknown, and probably unknowable. The long, interesting and well-researched article about Rose’s bat on the website “Deadspin” points out that:
The last point cuts no ice with me. Continue reading
In this video, a grown man reaches over and intercepts a tossed baseball obviously intended to reach a specific little boy with a glove in an inning-ending gesture by New York Mets third baseman David Wright. The fan snags the ball just as it was about to land in the shocked kid’s glove, and then hands it to his own child.
There are rumors, unconfirmed, that after being berated by surrounding fans, he returned the ball. It doesn’t matter if he did or not: doing the right thing after you have been caught, shamed and threatened is not an ethical act, just a pragmatic one. The deficiency of values displayed by the act of taking a baseball from the child, and the stunning lack of kindness, empathy and fairness it shows, would be sufficient to dissuade me from hiring such an individual for a job, allowing him to marry my daughter, or associating with him socially. I think he should have been thrown out of the park.
Many ethical decisions require thought and reflection. Deciding that it’s wrong for an adult to take a gift from a child is not one of them.
Polls say the vast majority of baseball fans wanted Commissioner Bug Selig to over-rule umpire Jim Joyce after the fact and award Armando Galarraga a perfect game. The point of view is purely emotional, and as an ad hoc break with the rules, traditions and practices of the game would be so devastating to baseball’s integrity that I did not expect anyone outside the sport to adopt it. I was very wrong about that. Ex-pitcher, ESPN commentator and blogger Curt Schilling and Sports Illustrated baseball writer Jon Heyman were just a few of the voices calling for Bud to announce that Joyce’s epic mistake, among the thousands and thousands of terrible judgment calls by umpires in the game’s history, should be the one that is changed after the game is over.
But an ex-pitcher who threw a no-hitter himself, Milt Pappas, did us all a favor by showing the ethics wilderness this kind of thinking can cause to sprout overnight. First, Pappas wistfully suggests that if Galarraga’s lost perfect game can be saved by Selig, maybe his 38-year-old not-quite-perfect no-hitter can be similarly burnished. Pappas also believes that a perfect game is so important, umpires should consciously try to one along. if I interpret his “logic” properly, he thinks that on Joyce’s erroneous call the umpire should have called the runner “out” on a close call even if he was safe. Continue reading
Suddenly, a lot of writers, baseball players and commentators are calling for Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to step in and reverse umpire Jim Joyce’s blown call that cost Armando Galarraga a history-making perfect game on what should have been the last play of the game. Disturbingly, it seems that the Commissioner might be listening. The argument: the Commissioner has broad power to take action “in the best interest of baseball.”
The problem with this argument: it wouldn’t be in the best interests of baseball, or the principles of ethics, either. Continue reading
When Umpire Jim Joyce apologized to Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga, the man whose perfect game he destroyed with an erroneous “safe” call on what should have been the 27th and final out, he gave him a hug and graciously accepted it without rancor. In interviews, Galarraga has said, “What else could I do?” A great many of his colleagues would have had some alternatives, and they would have not been pleasant. Galarraga is handling his disappointment, frustration and bad luck with superb grace and kindness, in the best tradition of the Golden Rule.
“Nobody’s perfect,” he told ESPN, accepting Joyce’s mistake as human and not malicious. But Armando Galarraga was perfect, both on the mound in Detroit, and in his noble response to misfortune.
The irony is that a less honest and courageous umpire would have made the correct call. Continue reading
As if to give ethical guidance to conflicted umpire Joe West, a similarly conflicted judge has shown Country Joe the way by quitting the bench to avoid ethical conflicts.
Admittedly, the ethical issues surrounding independent filmmaker/ New Jersey Judge Kenneth Del Vecchio are a little bit different from Joe’s. One of his creative efforts was called “O.B.A.M. Nude,” and was a satirical critique of the President, though Del Vecchio played the Obama-like hero himself. A judicial ethics panel opined that his film exploits raise the specter of an ethical conflict under the Code of Judicial Conduct, presumably including the section that reads, Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 