Country music has a weakness for cheating songs and Houston is smack dab in Honky Tonk territory. How long until someone comes up with a little ditty about the two-timing, double-dealing, mean mistreating ballclub there?
Maybe something like this…
The team that once wore rainbow clothes
Was named for a gun but changed to Astros;
Finally won the title as best of the pros
Until a guy blew a whistle on the con.
..
Old gamesmanship, a brand-new plan
Using video, a bat and a garbage can
To count the fingers on a catcher’s hand
And that ball, folks, is goin’, goin’, gone!
..
So now everybody is sighin’ and cryin’
All of a sudden, there’s purists not buyin’
“If you ain’t cheatin then you ain’t tryin’”;
What once got praise now gets a loud moan.
It’s safe to say that we’re all in agreement that the Astros were involved in hornswogglery on their way to the 2017 World Series title, and that they deserve condemnation. But I have a confession: I’m not sure I’m as shocked by the revelations of the Astros’ dastardly, elaborate scheme to steal signs as I am by how shocked the baseball world claims to be—from opposing players and league officials to Major League beat reporters.
As Brian Phillips noted in an essay for The Ringer, “Sports isolates competitive, driven, and obsessive human beings….attracts the people with the strongest desire to dominate…[and] tells them that their desire to dominate is a good, even a heroic, quality.
“It then places these phenomenally competitive and ambitious people inside an environment that’s largely free of true negative consequences while promising them immense rewards—money, fame, status—for defeating each other.”
Robert Prentice, writing for the University of Texas business school website Ethics Unwrapped, cited six plausible explanations for the Astros’ misbehavior—among them the “slippery slope” of baseball’s full acceptance of sign stealing as long it is accomplished without the aid of technology; and the rationalization that “stealing signs might have seemed mild when compared to the steroid scandal of a few years ago.”
The interesting P.S. to that sort of whataboutism was the recent advice—if that’s the right word—offered by former Yankee Alex Rodriguez, that the Astros should have expressed “remorse” for their digressions. Fans, he said, “want a real, authentic apology. And they have not received that thus far.”
Interesting guidance from a man not only guilty of his own bad manners, repeatedly violating doping rules, but also of putting forward public apologies for his steroid use that proved to be insincere. Twice. Not only did Rodriguez go back on his 2009 mea culpa but was continuing to juice even as he served as a spokesman for the Taylor Hooton Foundation’s campaign that cautioned young players against demon drugs.
In journalism—my profession—we are cautioned to stay this side of the sometimes-thin line between skepticism and cynicism, so I’ll resist the temptation to assume any of the Astros’ outraged opponents might also have engaged in some form of illicit corner-cutting at some point. Decades of covering Olympic sports confronted me with a widespread belief—though not the proof—that “everybody uses performance enhancers.”
As if that makes some instances of cheating acceptable.
Thomas Fox, a Houston attorney and self-proclaimed “compliance evangelist,” asked in an online post, “Why do we have ethics in sports?” and considered reasons both noble and self-serving.
“Is it to teach youngsters the importance of fair play as a social construct?” he wondered. “Is it to create a level playing field so those who compete do so based on hard work, ability and skills alone and not some nefarious ‘edge’? Is it to protect the billions made by baseball and will be made in the future? Or is it because it simply is the right thing to do? Do you play fairly so you will not be called ‘cheater’ the rest of your life?”
Forbes columnist Henry DeVries, in as essay related to the Astros case, suggested that one can “take a virtue (right or wrong) approach, a duty-based approach, or a utilitarian (consequence) approach,” and that, “if you are more worried about winning and making money than you are of being a benefit to society as a whole, that is utilitarian ethics at play.” To have chosen the last of those, stealing signs as a path to the World Series title, DeVries wrote, was to somehow justify that it “will benefit the Houston fans.”
Can’t say I’m astounded. But cheatin’ songs always are sad songs.