baseball

“Baseball Super-Agent Scott Boras Has Another Super-Conflict And There Is No Excuse For It,” The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sharp-eyed Ethics Alarms readers who pay attention to my baseball posts might recognize this one. It is like the most inexcusable lazy Hollywood franchise film, a sequel that is nearly identical to the original. I’m going to see how much of the post’s predecessor I can duplicate without having to change anything

Twelve years ago, Ethics Alarms began a post about baseball agents in general and Scott Boras in particular engaging in a flaming conflict of interest that harmed their player clients this way…

Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.

I could have written that paragraph today. Nothing has changed. Literally nothing: as baseball general managers  huddle with player agents in baseball’s off-season and sign players to mind-blowing contracts, the unethical tolerance of players agents indulging in and profiting from a classic conflict of interest continues without protest or reform.

I may be the only one who cares about the issue. I first wrote about it here, on a baseball website. I carried on my campaign to Ethics Alarms, discussing the issue in 2010, 2011 (that’s where the linked quote above comes from), 2014, 2019, and in 2019 again,  and last year, in 2022. There is no publication or website that has covered the issue as thoroughly as this one, and the unethical nature of the practice is irrefutable. But I might as well be shouting in outer space, where no one can hear you scream. The conflict of interest, which is throbbingly obvious and easy to address, sits stinking up the game. Continue reading →

“Jeopardy!” Ethics,” 2023

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Jeopardy!,” the apparently eternal TV game show that has persevered even as its once difficult questions have become increasingly pitched to the less-than-astute, ended its 2023 with a surprise. Mayim Bialik, the actress who is also (for an actress) unusually credentialed educationally, announced this month that she has been let go as a host of “Jeopardy!” Since 2021, Bialik, who had previously portrayed “Big Bang Theory” head nerd Sheldon’s girlfriend on the series, had shared the role of host with legendary “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings. Bialik was the more reliable and professional of the two, perhaps because of her long performing background. Jennings was at the center of far more gaffes and controversies, though Bialik had her share. This season, for example, she disallowed all three contestants’ answers of ”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” because she found their pronunciations of the Russian writer and dissident’s name insufficiently accurate.

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Ethics And The 700 Million Dollar Baseball Player

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In Mike Flanagan’s latest horror epic, the Poe mash-up in which “The Fall of the House of Usher” is repurposed into a nightmare scenario for the Sackler family of Oxycontin infamy, the avenging demon named Verna, who sometimes appears as a raven, lectures a soon-to-be victim on the evils of greed:

So much money. One of my favorite things about human beings. Starvation, poverty, disease, you could fix all that, just with money. And you don’t. I mean, if you took just a little bit of time off the vanity voyages, pleasure cruising, billionaire space race, hell, you stopped making movies and TV for one year and you spent that money on what you really need, you could solve it all. With some to spare.

Yes, Verna is a communist and deluded, but it was impossible to read about the $700 million ten-year contract the Los Angeles Dodgers just gave baseball free agent Shohei Ohtani without that speech creeping into my thoughts. $700 million dollars?

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Cultural Literacy Competence Fail!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As frequent vistors here know, I would argue that competent citizens should be sufficiently aware of cultural history to know who Bill Russell, Bob Feller and Bob Gibson are at very least. The elderly female contestant was alive and conscious while Bob Gibson and Bill Russell were active and frequently in the news. Surely someone presuming to appear as a contestant on “Jeopardy!” should have this level of U.S. sports history knowledge.

But perhaps you disagree…

Case Study:”When Ethics Fail, The Law Steps In”— The 2023 Major League Baseball Season

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

After the Arizona Diamondbacks win tonight, everything but the World Series will has been settled in the 2023 MLB season. (The Texas Rangers had already defeated the cheatin’ Houston Astros for the American League pennant, thus proving that the Baseball Gods read Ethics Alarms.) The season will be most noted in history notable for the fact that several game-changing new rules were introduced, all designed to cut down on dead time and speed up the games, which had gradually stretched out to an average of more than three hours.

MLB had tinkered around the edges of the rules in recent years in an effort to fix the dragging games problem. It (finally) banned one-batter mid-inning pitching changes, a curse visited on baseball by a combination of statistics-obsessed managers and the rise of left-handed pitching specialists, by requiring relief pitchers to face a minimum of three batters. It also made intentional walks automatic, with batters being sent to first with pitchers actually having to throw four balls outside the strike zone (that one shaved about 3 seconds off the average game time, maybe).

These new rules had little measurable effect, however, so for 2023, baseball dropped The Big One by instituting a pitch clock that limited the time pitchers had to throw a pitch to 15 seconds with the bases empty and 20 seconds with runners on base. Rules were attached limiting the number of time-outs a batter could call during his at-bats to one and requiring batters to step up to the plate when a pitcher was ready to throw the ball, thus ending psychological stalling tactics. Baseball had always taken pride in the fact that it was the one major sport without time limits, but that virtue had become a liability as players increasingly abused the privilege. Another rule stopped more tactical abuse: pitchers had begun throwing alleged pick-off throws to first base sometimes for no apparent reason, again, stalling to compose themselves are to unsettle the batter. Starting in 2023, a pitcher got three shots at trying to pick-off a baserunner, and if the third failed, the runner advanced to the next base anyway.

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Baseball Ethics: Is It Time To Stop Booing The Houston Astros? Hell No…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Tonight, the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros, from the same American League Division and with the same regular season record (a modest 90-72), will begin playing the American League Championship Series to decide which team will represent the league in the World Series. If you’re a baseball fan or an ethics fan, you will root for the Rangers. The Astros are ethics villains, and among the worst ethics corrupting teams in all of professional sports history. They do not deserve to be forgiven, for the multiple blights they inflicted on the game are still causing tangible damage, and despite the exposure of the team’s rotten culture in 2019 ( exhaustively discussed on Ethics Alarms) they were never sufficiently punished, and the main perps in the team’s scheme have never adequately acknowledged that they did anything wrong.

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More Thoughts On Baseball Play-Off Ethics.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I raised this issue in the last pot-potpourri post, noting that, horrors, I agree with Keith Olbermann: the current system, now combined with the “balanced schedule,” is unethical (Keith didn’t exactly say that, since “ethics” isn’t in his vocabulary), because it is unfair to teams that have achieved the best record over the course of the season. As I explained in a comment thread,

“I detest any system where a team that was decisively clobbered by the team that won the division is ever in the position to eliminate the clearly superior team. That devalues the season. “….As long as the divisions had significantly different schedules, there was an argument that a superior record in one division(or league) didn’t necessarily mean the team finishing second in another division wasn’t as good (or better). The seeding means that the teams that have to play in the first round may actually have an advantage over the better teams that get to sit out the first round [because the extra days off may in fact be a handicap]….With 30 teams, there is no good solution, but it still stinks.”

Forget about your baseball biases: this a basic fairness question.

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The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck: It Has Everything: #MeToo, Kinky Sex, Ethics Zugzwang, Predatory Women, ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent,’ “The Asshole’s Handicap,” Legal Ethics And Baseball! [Part I: The Story] (Updated And Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This story broke a couple of days ago, and readers have been chiding me for not posting on it. I must admit, I was stalling, because it is a total mess that will take two major posts to unravel, and to cap it all off, my baseball posts don’t attract enough interest to meet the time/reward minimum. Nevertheless, this disaster raises major ethical issues. Ignore at your peril.

1. Background: Trevor Bauer: I have written a great deal about Trevor Bower, a talented Major League starting pitcher who, somewhat like Curt Schilling (recently discussed here), had a well-earned reputation for being an eccentric, and kind of a jerk. Bauer was also Donald Trump-like on social media, with similar, if more narrowly focused, results.

He once knocked himself out of a crucial post-season start by cutting a pitching hand finger playing with a drone (he loves drones). In 2018, while pitching for the Cleveland Indians, Bauer appeared to carve “BD 911” into the pitching mound during a game. That has been Truther short-hand for “Bush Did” the 9-11 bombings, and Bauer was widely criticized for the stunt. He then angrily denied that the message meant anything political, but never explained what it did mean. This also did not make him popular in a sport that is branded as patriotic and embodying core American values. In 2019, a sportswriter started claiming that Bauer’s tweets made him a “problem” because he had a contentious exchange with a female Twitter user. He was accused of harassment. It wasn’t harassment, but a pattern was set that eventually bit Bauer, hard.

In 2019, after allowing seven runs, Bauer threw a baseball over the centerfield wall after seeing his manager Terry Francona come out of the dugout to remove him from the game. Bauer apologized profusely, but it was the final straw for Francona, and the Indians traded him. Bauer was among the most vocal critics (and one of the few player critics) of the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal (see here), and cheating in baseball generally. This is also not the way to be popular in the clubhouse. In 2021, MLB announced that umpires would be checking the balls more carefully and regularly to ensure that the rule against doctoring pitches wasn’t being violated. The first pitcher to have his thrown baseballs collected for inspection based on suspicion of doctoring was…Trevor Bauer, Anti-Cheating Crusader. Bauer reacted sarcastically to the report on his Twitter account, and noted that many baseballs were being collected from games across baseball, not only from him. I wrote that this was an ethics red flag for me, as was his reaction when baseball announced the new policy, saying that there would be no way to determine who doctored the balls.

Luckily for Bauer, the SOB can really pitch. In the shortened season of 2020, Bauer won the National League Cy Young Award as one of the two best pitchers the Major Leagues. The King’s Pass reigns supreme in baseball (as in other sports): if a player is good enough, he can get away with almost anything. Almost. The Dodger signed Bauer to a rich, three year contract.

2. The Scandal. Bauer had a much larger scandal coming. A restraining order was taken out against him in late June of 2021 by a former sex partner. The woman claimed she had what started as a consensual relationship involving rough sex with the pitcher, but in a 67-page document, alleged that Bauer assaulted her on two different occasions, punching her in the face, vagina, and buttocks, sticking his fingers down her throat, and strangling her to the point where she lost consciousness twice, an experience she said she did not consent to. After the second choking episode, the woman claimed she awoke to find Bauer punching her in the head and face, inflicting serious injuries. She contacted police, and an investigation of Bauer by the Pasadena, California police department began.

Baseball, which had made the NFL and the NBA look bad (they are bad) by cracking down on domestic abuse by players, placed Bauer on indefinite “administrative leave” although her allegations were unsubstantiated. At the time, I wrote,

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Ethics Dunce: Ex-Pitching Star And Big Mouth Curt Schilling

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

It’s been more than a month since the last baseball-related post. I fear it’s because the whole topic has left a bad taste in my mouth since the Red Sox essentially choked away what should have been a fun season right about the time I wrote the last one, which was childish of me. But I can’t ignore this ugly ethics story.

Curt Schilling, the former Orioles/Houston/Phillies/Diamondbacks and Red Sox starting pitcher justly credited as being the hero of Boston’s “Curse of the Bambino”-banishing World Series championship in 2004, revealed on a podcast last week that former Red Sox team mate Tim Wakefield is being treated for “brain cancer” and that Wakefield’s wife is being treated for cancer as well. This led to an outpouring of support for Wakefield, the knuckleball specialist who is as beloved by Red Sox Nation for his community work as much as for his always entertaining pitching as the last of the great knuckleballers. However, the Wakefields hadn’t authorized anyone to reveal their medical issues. The Red Sox felt compelled to issue a statement:

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The “Immaculate Inning” Conundrum: A Fairness And Integrity Challenge

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yes, this perplexing ethics issue arises in baseball, but the principles it involves are applicable in other contexts. Attention should be paid.

Although there is no official definition, an immaculate inning in baseball occurs in baseball when a pitcher strikes out all three batters he faces in one inning throwing only nine pitches. This has only happened 114 times in Major League history, and been done by just 104 pitchers. The first immaculate inning was thrown by John Clarkson of the Boston Beaneaters against the Philadelphia Quakers on June 4, 1889. No-hitters, which automatically get a pitcher’s name in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, are three times more common that immaculate innings. Throwing an immaculate inning is a career landmark for any pitcher.

A week ago, Tampa Bay Rays reliever Robert Stephenson threw nine pitches to three Cleveland Indi—I’m sorry, Guardians batters and struck them all out on three pitches each. But whether or not this constituted an immaculate inning is still being debated. Within the controversy is a welter of ethics lessons and problems.

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