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. Sosa corks |
| Slugger Sammy Sosa is fifth on the all-time home run list with 609. As the 2008 season was set to begin, Sosa only trailed Bonds, Aaron, Ruth and Mays. Did he cheat? On June 3, 1998, in a game against the Devil Rays, Sosa's bat broke into pieces after he lined a single. Umpires checked the cracked bat. They quickly noticed that it was corked, and tossed Sosa out of the game. Putting cork inside a hollowed-out bat is illegal. Sosa later claimed that he always kept one corked bat for batting practice, to try to put on a dramatic show before the game for his legions of admiring fans. He said he had accidentally used the wrong bat in the Devil Rays game. All his other bats were inspected; none was corked. There are many other examples in which players have been caught with, or admitted to using, a corked bat. (Zumsteg, pp. 128-129) |
| 2. Bought and sold |
| Throughout most of baseball's storied history, owners made large profits off of baseball, but the players themselves were bound to their teams. This was known as the reserve clause. A player had to re-sign with his team, and could only change teams if he were released or traded. This left the players with no leverage to negotiate contracts. The best a player could do was to hold out. But that strategy had limited effectiveness in that the player had no choice but to re-sign or leave baseball. No surprise, the players were often exploited by owners who colluded to keep salaries low. Baseball star Curt Flood attempted to battle the reserve clause in the late 1960s. He was traded from St. Louis to Philadelphia but refused to report to the Phillies. Instead he demanded that he be made a free agent. In a 1969 letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Flood wrote, "After twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel I'm a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes." Flood took Kuhn to court, eventually losing in a 5-3 Supreme Court decision. Flood never played baseball again but he paved the way for others. The reserve clause was finally over-ruled in 1975. |