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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
after he gave up drinking for a time to please Marge:
I never realized how boring this game is.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Amen. And electronic scoring of pitches!
Karma: Bad
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!
I've been trying to download this "baseball" game all morning and all every website I visit just shows me a bunch of sweaty dudes in pajamas.
They're using wooden controllers (!) and even worse, they're outside. Is this a beta? wtf
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
So the guy has an ethical dilemma with an out pitch but not with becoming an attorney? I have yet to meet an attorney that didn't employ at least a few ethically questionable tactics.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A baseball scholarship put my wife's oldest brother through an engineering degree. It is also putting my wife's youngest brother through school although he doesn't really know what he wants to do other than baseball. My kids are playing but I'm not sure I want them to be successful with it beyond college. Too much pressure to do amoral or destructive things to get an edge, but I guess that is the case with most high profile success areas.
baseball needs more cowbell
FTFY
FCKGW 09F9 42
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
Aren't there bears outside?
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.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Einstein loved sailing and music (was a great violinist), both of which he was avidly involved with in college and said helped him take a break, relax, and focus later on his studies.
Feynman... well, here's one of his most famous quotes: "Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”
And Hawking was a coxswain at Oxford. In fact, he has admitted he was somewhat of an academic slacker there, but his extracurricular activities helped him socialize and avoid boredom/depression given he was younger (and smarter) than most of his peers.
I'm pretty sure for almost every brilliant person you could find multiple examples of them having strong interests outside of their academic field. What you call "distractions" most others consider essential to the creative process.
I have a lot of friends who were involved in collegiate athletics - some on scholarship, some not, some actually played professionally later, but most went on to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, even a couple of PhDs. I know my experience probably wasn't typical these days, but it is still common at many highly selective successful private universities. Athletics, music, and other non-academic activities have been a integral part of advanced education from ancient Greece and Rome through the Renaissance in Europe and the Enlightenment extending to America. This isn't some recent modern development.
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.
On the one hand, it is unfortunate that these kids are being ripped off.
On the other hand, why are they pursuing athletic careers at academic institutions?
Because despite what you seem to think, 95%+ of college athletes do not go on to play professional sports, but go into the working world like everyone else. It's not a career for the vast majority, it's an extracurricular activity they love and have been doing since they were little kids. And if they studied and committed themselves in college (as many do, again despite what you think), they come out with a bachelor's degree.
My objection is that athletes that have no interest in higher education are forced into academic pursuits (necessarily displacing others, assuming full enrollment) as a part of their career track. This makes about as much sense as forcing software developers through MLB in order to be employable. In my eyes it's idiotic, but it's possible that I'm just not seeing the logic. I've been asking repeatedly for someone to state in clear and understandable terms why this seemingly absurd system is in society's best interest. I haven't gotten a satisfactory response yet.
Your basic problem here (and the reason no one has given you a "satisfactory response") is that your assumptions are just wrong to start, so there is no response that would make sense to you. You are making an incorrect and stereotypical assumption that all college athletes are on some professional sports career track and don't study or benefit from a college education (or could even be as smart or smarter than non-athletes).
As a personal example (maybe not *typical*, but also far from *unique*), my freshman roommate was on full scholarship for football and actually was one of the lucky few who drafted into the NFL, playing for a few years. He also had a 1300 SAT, an BA in economics, and is now very successful in a completely non-football related business. He's a smart guy, who has used and enjoyed both his athletic and academic abilities. What's wrong with that?
Or if you want the purely numerical reason why it's in the *schools'* best interest (and to some extent students and taxpayers funding the school) - well, I already went over this in detail in another post, but here's the short summary of an example: UTexas football made $133M last year and paid their players $5M in scholarships; after all expenses they made over $90M for the school. An average NFL team makes about $250M a year and pays their players about $125M in salary. The equivalent (~50% revenue to players) for UT would then be about $500K per player, or an extra $60M over what they pay in scholarships. Instead that $60M is part of the $90M going to other school programs and expenses. Even paying the players salaries commensurate with professional programs (which won't happen, though paying something more might) nets the school $30M. The schools in the NCAA just aren't going to walk away from that. Sure, it's largely about money, but what in education, government, business, etc isn't these days? That answer may not be satisfactory to you, but it's the truth...