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. Early racism |
| The man widely thought to be the first black major league player was Moses Fleetwood Walker. The son of a physician and an erudite man himself, Walker had been a Latin and Greek scholar at Oberlin College before turning to pro ball in the 1870s. A catcher, Walker was routinely smashed into and otherwise physically abused by players on other teams. One time, the Chicago White Stockings, led by Cap Anson, threatened to refuse to take the field if Walker played. A sportswriter termed him "the coon catcher." Other black players of that era regularly heard taunts like "Kill the nig#@*r!" In 1887, the owners gathered in Buffalo, New York, and reached an informal agreement to keep blacks out of organized baseball. (Scheinin, pp. 44-46) |
| 2. Mutuals and Haymakers |
| In the early days of baseball, when salaries were low (or even dished out in secret), and the game more free-wheeling, gamblers often sought out players who would be willing to lose a key game in return for money. For example, in 1865, one unscrupulous gambler successfully bribed some players on the New York Mutuals to lose a game against the Brooklyn Eckfords. Eventually, the scheme was exposed and the players were thrown out of the league. Just a few years later, they were back competing again. Similarly, in 1869, a team known as the Troy Haymakers conspired with gamblers to throw a game against their nemesis, the Red Stockings. That game triggered a riot. There are many other examples from the early era of baseball. Baseball analyst Bill James found that 38 different players were involved in scandals, often fixing games, in the time period between 1917-1927 alone. (Zumsteg, pp. 171-172, James, p. 136) |