Want to play the "Baseball Ethics" game? Two randomly selected actual ethical incidents from baseball's storied history are listed below. Please tell us which one you consider to be "worse." In other words, select the one you think is less ethical than the other. As more people vote, each incident will, over time, develop its own winning percentage. When voting is complete, the full list of 133 incidents will be listed from "best" to "worst" on the Hardball Times site.
You can read more about the American Studies course at Carleton College that covered this ethics project in this article. The entire bibliography of sources is on this page.
Here are your first two choices. Select the less ethical one and you'll be given the opportunity to make even more choices. Thanks for helping.
| 1. Stuffing |
| Some batters go up to the plate looking to get hit by a pitch. Take the time in 1908 when Hall of Fame catcher Roger Bresnahan waddled up to bat with what appeared to be stuffing under his uniform. Bresnahan then stood right over the plate, at the very front of the batter's box. Umpire Hank O'Day quickly ordered the bloated batsman back to the bench and instructed Bresnahan to rid himself of the extra padding before he returned to finish his at-bat. Even in today's game, batters openly wear thick pads on their arms and elbows, a legal act. See any Barry Bonds at-bat late in his career for details. Some baseball observers believe such body armor ought be banned. (Murphy, p. 82) |
| 2. Extra ball |
| There are many examples from baseball's early years in which a ballplayer carried an extra ball in the pockets of his pants, or hid one in the high outfield grass, just in case. The logic was that if the actual game ball went over his head or was otherwise hard to locate, the ball player could deftly substitute the other ball while hoping that the lone ump didn't notice. Matters got quite confusing when two crafty outfielders failed to coordinate with each other. In one such instance from baseball's early years, two Oriole outfielders each fired balls back to the infield at the same time. The umpire was unimpressed with their duplicity; he decided to award the game to their opponents, the St. Louis Browns. (Gutman, p. 4, 196; Wulf) |