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Pitcher-Turned-Law Student On Cheating In Baseball
An anonymous reader writes "As a 27-year old minor league pitcher who had never made it to "The Show" (ballplayers' slang for the big leagues), Garrett Broshius was advised by a coach to develop an 'out pitch' by cheating (doctoring or scuffing the baseball while standing on the mound). It was an ethical crossroads faced by many players past and present, and Broshius ultimately decided to give up the game. While a student at the St. Louis University School of Law, he wrote a paper that attempted to apply the tenets of legal theorists to the rampant cheating in baseball and other sports (click the 'download' button, no registration required). While Broshius' paper isn't brilliant or novel, it tours the techniques and issues surrounding cheating in baseball better than most. Broshius concludes with recommendations for how baseball should handle two classes of cheating: 'traditional' cheating of the type he was advised to do by the coach, which has achieved acceptance in some quarters as part of the game; and 'new era' cheating involving performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids, which has become prominent in the last 25 years. Oh, and Brosius remarks that in almost every baseball game he watches these days, he notices something suspicious — usually from the pitcher."
I don't care what sport it is - when contracts worth millions of dollars are on the line, there will always be talented people willing to do whatever they have to in order to stay competitive and even excel.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Just as long it is about sports, we don't care about right and wrong or morals.
IMO our society has a ridiculous fixation on sports.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Slow play and umps that can't find the strike zone with a telescope
Coaches should get red flag just like football so replay could be used. Replays should be done at MLB HQ like the NHL does it.
MLB should institute an automated strike zone and a pitch clock when no one is on base.
There's only one solution to a completely corrupt system. Walk away from it. Broshius made the correct decision by leaving the game behind him.
You cannot change a corrupted institution from within. I'll repeat that. You cannot change a corrupted institution from within. There are too many people inside who have spent their lives justifying and profiting from their misdeeds, who are not about to turn over a new leaf or air their dirty laundry because you've made an appeal to their conscience. They killed theirs long ago.
The best thing to do is leave the rotten ship to sink all by itself. Every honest person who stands by a rotten game, or bankrupted bank, or broken political party is just propping up an at best amoral system, and usually an immoral and even illegal one. There is no obligation to stay loyal or remain in solidarity with a disloyal and dishonest organisation.
Broshius has done more for baseball as a law student that he ever could have as a player or a fan.
May the Maths Be with you!
So a minor leaguer who didn't cut the mustard decides that everyone in the Majors is cheating? Color me surprised.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Stealing a base is more like taking your time when your opponent forgots to stop their clock in a game of speed chess. It's not cheating so much as taking advantage of inattentiveness.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
If you're not interested in stuff other than engineering, you're going to be a terrible, terrible, terrible engineer.
What you call "distraction from your studies" is what makes you good at your job.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
IMO our society has a ridiculous fixation on sports.
The good news is, once you figure out that sports == crap, and ignore it? It frees up a metric ton of time and money for the stuff that's actually fun to do.
OTOH, I think it's not the fact that we have made-up conflicts as entertainment, but the fact that the conflicts themselves *are* the entertainment. Dress it up all you like, but people love to see conflict (and more importantly, love to see the realization of victory from that conflict, even if by proxy). That's what drives movies, books, TV shows (not just the "reality" flavor, either), and, well, you-name-it.
Gotta give props to the Romans, though... even though their ideas of public entertainment were bloody and brutal (and often deadly), they didn't try and dress it up much.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Everyone gets tested after a game, any single person come sup [sic] positive, then game is considered a loss. Happens twice, they give up 25% of merchandising for a year.
Fine, except that the tests are not perfect, and false positives exist. Think about it -- suppose the test was 99% accurate, but produced 1% false positives. There are 25 people on an MLB team, and the team plays an average of 6.3 games per week. That's an average of 25 * 6.3 = 157.5 tests per team per week, which will produce an average of 1.575 false positives per team per week, or 1.575 * 26 = almost 41 false positives in a 26-week season. Per team.
There are 30 teams in MLB, so under your proposal one is looking at (157.5 tests per team per week) * (30 teams) * (26 weeks per season) = 122,850 drug tests every season. The false positive rate would have to get down into the parts per million range to do anything other than punish random team owners for the finite quality of drug tests. The effect could, in fact, be counterproductive; with so many false positives, the actual drug users could be emboldened to hide among them.