Cheating …
Posted: February 3rd, 2008 | Filed under: Baseball | 23 Comments »
For reasons that probably say bad things about my ethics, I have simply not been able to get riled up about Spygate and the various new rumors and revelations that have emerged. I do not especially like New England coach Bill Belichick, of course, and I would probably be more than a little amused if it would be proven that he was, in fact, a lousy coach who simply cheated his way to the top, sort of the football version of Richard Crenna the gin rummy player in Flamingo Kid.
But I just can’t get my moral indignation going on this. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’ve never really bought into the whole clandestine mentality of the NFL –all this hand wringing over spying like these coaches are devising plans to create a new kind of hydrogen bomb or something. They all run the same plays, the same defenses, the same everything — but they have their practices in maximum-security facilities, and players have their playbooks in suitcases handcuffed to their wrists, and whenever you ask a coach anything during the week he will give you his name, rank and serial number. Please. When one of these coaches actually comes up with something NEW, like dressing up players in Star Wars storm trooper outfits or sending out Magilla Gorilla to be quarterback, then I’ll say, “OK, well, I can see why they wanted to keep that secret.” Until then, the fact that you have a new three-receivers package doesn’t especially impress me as a state secret.
Also, the whole idea of spying just sort of seems to me quirky rather than dark and sinister. I know it’s cheating and all, but to me this is exactly like when Joshua Prager broke the word in The Echoing Green that the New York Giants cheated to come back on the Brooklyn Dodgers in ‘51. They were stealing catcher signals using an elaborate spy-through-the-scoreboard system. I probably should have been outraged about it and demanded an asterisk on Russ Hodges “The Giants Win the Pennant” call*, but I was really mostly amused. I don’t think that speaks well for me. But there it is.
*There’s a long drive … it’s gonna be, I believe … The Giants win the pennant with an asterisk! The Giants win the pennant with an asterisk! The Giants win the pennant with an asterisk! The Giants win the pennant with an asterisk, and they’re going crazy, they’re going crazy, they don’t even care that the Giants cheated, HEEEEE-YOH! I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I do not believe it! Well, I do believe it because he knew a fastball was coming. Bobby Thomson knew a fastball was coming thanks the elaborate cheating system devised by Leo Durocher and hit a line drive into the lower deck of the left field stands, not far from where the cheating dog was spying on the catcher and getting signals!
There’s also a very long history of football coaches spying on other team’s practices — even flying planes overhead — and while it’s pretty despicable, it’s also pretty funny, a charming part of football history, and maybe in the end that’s the main reason why I just can’t get worked up.It just sort of seems cartoonish to me — filming somebody else’s sideline is something that, like, Bugs Bunny would do.
All that said, I will tell you that the one argument I cannot abide is the “Well, the Patriots would have won anyway” argument that lots of people are throwing out there these days. That’s the one thing that does get me riled up. There are two reasons for this. Let’s assume the worst — that the Patriots stole signs and filmed walkthroughs and, hell, bugged offices.
One, we have no idea if the Patriots would have won anyway. And we have every reason to presume they would not have won. Obviously, the Patriots felt like they needed to cheat to win. I think once you cheat, you are pretty much admitting that the other guy was going to beat you. You don’t get a do-over. If you cheat on a test, you forfeit the right to say afterward, “Oh, well, I didn’t even need to do that, I knew the material well enough to get an A.” If you shoot someone in the hospital, you don’t get to say they would have died anyway. If you cheat at checkers and get caught, the other guy wins.
But two, more to the point, if you think cheating is wrong, if you think it’s actionable, then really the rest of it is irrelevant. You don’t get to play it out to see what might have happened. The clock stops right there at the cheating moment. In other words, it doesn’t MATTER if the Patriots would have have won. They cheated. That’s the crime. That’s the whole story. They are not on trial for winning. They are on trial for cheating.
So I guess my advice to the NFL and to people defending the Patriots would be this: Less of the, “Oh, it’s no big deal, they would have won anyway” defense and more of the, “You’ve got to admit, it’s pretty clever and funny,” defense.
Speaking of potential cheating, I hope you ran across this article which revisits an old 1997 STATS Baseball Scorecard story that used a Bill James system to predict what Barry Bonds’ final totals would look like. This was obviously before Bonds, according to conventional wisdom and the currently accepted story line, started using steroids. Here’s what they predicted his final numbers would have looked like:
.275 avg., 10,740 ABs, 2,136 runs, 2952 hits, 647 homers, 1975 RBIs, 2512 walks, 670 SBs.
Two things on this.
1. The three big differences between these projections and reality are batting average (.298 to .275), home run (762 to 647) and stolen bases (514 to 670). His career OBP of .444 might have dropped about 15 to 20 points. and his slugging percentage might have dropped from a Jimmie Foxx-like .607 to a more Joe DiMaggio-like .580. Of course, by projection, he would not have the single season or career home run records, but he would still have the career walks record, and he would rank 11th all-time in stolen bases.
The question here is: Was it worth the risk? I’m not asking the moral question … I’m asking more from a pure baseball and history point of view. If we are to believe the worst, if we are to believe that at some point Barry Bonds started taking performance enhancers and started working out like a madman in order to secure a legacy as the greatest player of all time … was it worth it? How would people have viewed Bonds had he finished out his career by the projections?
I think, in the most cynical way imaginable, it was worth it. Because while Bonds’ projected numbers leave him as perhaps the most complete player in baseball history — Top 10 in homers, Top 15 in stolen bases, all those gold gloves, an on-base percentage as good as Mantle’s, a slugging percentage better than Musial — I don’t think the general public would have ever viewed him as a baseball God like Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Mays. Too many people disliked Bonds. His achievements would have been too esoteric — nobody’s going to bow down to the man with the most walks. I could see the temptation he felt to do something so great, so titanic, so monstrous, so NOTICEABLE that nobody could turn away. He did that. I suspect I will never see a hitter as good as Barry Bonds from 2000-2004.
He got caught — or at least allegedly got caught. But I think I can understand why he risked it.
2. Those projections would have made Bonds a first-team Hall of Famer, of course, and again would have tested the Baseball Writers’ goofy desire to make sure that nobody goes in unanimously. It’s hard to imagine anyone voting against a clean Barry Bonds. Someone would have, though. Probably several people. Can’t put Barry Bonds in unanimously when you didn’t put in Willie Mays unanimously, can you?
But my second point is … much like I don’t think the Patriots’ greatness is relevant in the cheating scandal, I don’t think Bonds’ projected numbers are relevant when you think of him as a Hall of Famer. I know there are those — and I had my moments pondering this as well — who would like to vote for Bonds, because he no doubt would have been a Hall of Famer, while keeping out Mark McGwire, who might not have been a Hall of Famer.
Well, I’m completely off that boat. To me, if you think steroid use and cheating is enough to keep a player out, then what their numbers might have been or should have been doesn’t really matter. I go back and forth, back and forth on the steroid era and how players and the time will be judged, but I will say this — I won’t vote for Bonds and not McGwire or vice versa. To me they are in this thing together.
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I’m not morally aghast about Spygate either, but I think you missed one major reason for this: It seems like lots of NFL teams film their opponents. It is bad; it is cheating; everyone does it. I know that steroids is the most used modern example of cheating, but can’t we use greenies in baseball insetad? This is/was blatant cheating, that everyone knows/knew about, and everyone does/did. Did it help your performance? yes. Did it give you a competitive advantage? that’s a bit murkier if it is considered common practice. No one is going to admit to spying unless they get caught, so the public will never find out how widespread it is. I’m just not the least bit surprised that someone might try to cheat.
Kills me you won’t vote for Bonds. There were clearly a high percentage of players on the juice, and Bonds truly just happened to be one of them caught. I honestly believe if you don’t vote for Bonds, you can’t with good conscience vote for anybody during the ’steroid era’.
He didn’t say that. He said that if he votes for Bonds, he votes for McGwire, and if he doesn’t vote for McGwire, he doesn’t vote for Bonds.
Two points:
1) Sorry, Joe, but I just can’t go along with your theory that a team, by cheating, is basically admitting that they think they would have lost the game. Not when the only documented instance of filming, so far, was the first game of this season when the Pats played the Jets. The Pats were going to win that game. You knew it, I knew it, the Jets knew it, and Belichick certainly knew it. I gravely doubt that the Patriots thought they would lose that football game without a little video assistance.
2) It is now entirely possible that the following scenario will occur. Eric Mangini, still irritated that the Patriots would not allow the Jets to use a second camera during last year’s playoffs, decides to get even by ratting out his former boss. Said ratting out leads to an investigation by the NFL and Congress during which it is learned that the Patriots filmed the Rams before Super Bowl XXXVI. That video was then dissected by Patriots defensive assistants into the wee hours of the morning, one of whom was…..defensive backs coach Eric Mangini. If this should occur, and the NFL decides to sanction those assistants, Mangini included, it’s entirely possible that my laughter will actually induce my ass to fall off of my body.
“They cheated. That’s the crime. That’s the whole story. They are not on trial for winning. They are on trial for cheating..”
A perfect encapsulation, as you note, of the steroid argument. I think these people arguing that steroids have little effect on performance are more right than wrong. But it’s mainly an academic exercise. The point is the cheating, not the stats. Even if it could be proven that, say, HGH has no benefit to athletes, it’s still against the rules.
I would also make a a comparison to the Pete Rose scandal. A lot of people (still) say, “well, he bet on the team to win”. But betting is the crime. It doesn’t matter what the bet was.
I can’t get worked up about it either and really haven’t bothered reading or listening to anything about it.
Bonds will and should go in 1st ballot.
I have said this all NFL season long–in baseball, signs are being stolen, or are trying to be stolen almost every pitch of every game, yet no one is outraged. It’s called GAMESMANSHIP. It’s one thing to tape HAND SIGNALS, it’s certainly another to decipher them into something you can use versus another team, but for some reason, it’s not gamesmanship—it’s an outrage worthy of a Senate Judicial Investigation (and if I was a resident of PA, I’d be ASHAMED of my Senator wasting valuable tax payer time and dollars when he should be trying to fix the rising costs of energy, the staggering amount of home foreclosures, and oh, THE WAR) and it’s worth a #1 pick and half a million dollars…can you say absurd?
The Bonds – McGwire thing is moronic. If “they’re in it together,” then you’re either evaluating their careers as they stand, PED use and all, or you’re evaluating their careers while trying to correct for PED use (as the James projection does). In either methodology, Bonds is a stone HOF lock, one of the best ballplayers ever. As the two stand now, Bonds has two thousand more total bases than McGwire, a thousand more runs scored, five hundred more RBI, OBP fifty points better, SLG twenty points better. Two batting championships to none, seven MVPs to none, eight gold gloves to one, twelve silver sluggers to three. These two players aren’t “in it together,” they aren’t even in the same league. Subtract your estimate of PED effects from both careers and they aren’t on the same planet.
Oh, and a note: Betting on your own team to win would be harmless, legal or not, if you *did it every game*. Rose bet on the Reds (to win) sometimes. He, as manager, had a greater personal stake in some games than others, and as a bettor he gave that info to bookies. That’s game fixing. McGwire and Bonds, meanwhile, (presumably) did what hundreds of other players did, with the goal of improving their own performance. Not the same at all. Of course, if you’re somebody who argues that “cheating is cheating,” the distinction is lost on you — and you are either in the process of turning yourself in and preparing to serve time for what you’ve done in your own life or you’re not worth listening to on this subject (not that an argument that ignores substantive differences in any phenomenon ever has much intrinsic worth).
Rose was caught gambling when he was a manager. As a player, he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Put him in, pronto.
Great piece, Joe. To me the best analogy to Spygate is the Sammy Sosa corked bat affair. As you recall, after Sosa was caught corking his bat, all kinds of physicists were trotted out to prove that, in fact, a corked bat doesn’t help you hit homers all that much. It was pretty persuasive evidence — enough, I thought, to exonerate Sosa as an athlete. However, it didn’t exonerate Sosa as a human being. After all, HE didn’t think corking a bat was pointless; otherwise he wouldn’t have done it.
I feel the same way about the Patriots’ taping sessions. They probably didn’t help the Pats much, if at all. But just like Sosa, Belichick seemed to have proven himself unquestionably successful at his sport but still somewhat questionable as a human being.
I’m still pissed off that the NFL didn’t suspend Belichick. To me, caught cheating=suspension, automatic. How are you supposed to face the poor patsies who test positive for steroids (because they’re obviously the only guys in the NFL on steroids) after letting management walk when they got caught red-handed?
Football is fine as a game, but the coaching and management side always seems so sleazy and sordid.
Paul White:
1) You knew the Pats would win? Everyone knew? Just like “everyone knew” they’d beat the Giants, right? Joe’s right, the “they’d win anyway” is not a defense for cheating.
Two quick things:
1) The newest “Spygate” info seems to suggest that the Pats didn’t stop at taping signals–they taped entire walk throughs (which are supposed to be secret, since they must occur on the same Super Bowl field), and they did it for the championship game. Oh, and they won by 3pts in the 2nd largest upset ever (according to the Vegas line).
2) Why didn’t the media talk about Rodney Harrison’s PED suspension? Seriously, that story was dropped for most of the season. If you add this to the on-going “Spygate” saga, and this Pats team definitely starts smelling fishy.
As for Arlen Specter calling out Goodell, he’s within the law to do so. Congress has given the NFL an anti-trust exemption, the terms of which state that the games are real and fair competition, and thus provide _real_ sporting entertainment to the US public through federally regulated airwaves. If the NFL knew that the Pats cheated in the Super Bowl, which billions of people watch and makes the NFL pots of cash, this would seemingly violate the spirit of the anti-trust exemption, right?
Kyle –
Pretty creative reading on your part. Let me clarify a couple of your broader jumps.
First, I didn’t use “they’d win anyway” as a defense of cheating. I’m not defending the act of cheating by stating the belief that cheating, in and of itself, shouldn’t be viewed as an admission by a team that they couldn’t win without it. Some teams cheat even when they are pretty damn certain they’re going to win. To use Joe’s example, do you think the ‘51 Giants turned off their sign-stealing lights when, say, the Pirates came to town? Pretty unlikely. That doesn’t make the cheating right, but it also doesn’t mean the Giants were going to be swept on their home field by the lowly Pirates without it.
Second, I didn’t say “everyone knew” the Patriots would beat the Giants yesterday, as your quotes imply. I used that phrase to describe the Patriots’ season opener against the Jets. If you care to equate the Super Bowl champion football Giants with the 4-12 Jets, knock yourself out.
Seems to me that baseball used to go by the maxim “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” I remember when I played ball, the only thing I would do on the bench was try to pick off the steal sign.
Anyways, point being, baseball is a game where cheating has always gone on in some form. We shouldn’t try to act like it is the purest sport possible. I mean, it could be, but its history suggests otherwise.
By the way, should we kick everyone out of the HOF that did greenies? I mean they are more alert every day and no doubt quicker on the trigger at the plate. Where does it end?
On the other hand, I think the Rams had a reasonable expectation to privacy for their final practice and so I do think the Patriots were in the wrong here if it is true (and I have no doubt it is).
the reason it’s a bigger deal in football than in other sports is that football is the ONLY sport where strategy can be MORE important than talent. baseball is the only sport that approaches, but even still it’s left in the dust.
even if you know a fastball is coming, you still gotta hit it. with football, you have to coordinate 11 guys all working toward the same goal. if you have obatined knowledge secretly, and can figure out what the QB is going to do when the right guard moves a particular way, you can stop that play.
Paul,
First off, I do apologize for the misuse of quotation marks. I quoted “everyone knew”, instead of my intended everyone “knew”. Thus I misattributed your connotation about the outcome of a game (be it SuperBowl or regular season) being predetermined and writen in stone. I hoped that my slight grammatical error wouldn’t hurt the gist of my arguement, but apparently it did.
Secondly, the point still remains, cheating is implicitly acknowledging that an opponent *has a reasonable chance* of winning. Otherwise, why would you do it? So no matter how heavily favored the Pats might have been to beat the Jets (cheating or not), the cheat was an attempt to eliminate even the small upset chance away.
Kyle,
No argument from me about what the Pats were trying to do. I was just disagreeing with Joe’s assertion that “once you cheat, you are pretty much admitting that the other guy was going to beat you”., which I don’t believe is the case. What the cheater is admitting is that the other team’s chance of beating him, no matter how small, is more than he can personally live with, so he cheats to eliminate or reduce it. I think the Pats knew that their chance of losing to the Jets on opening day was pretty slim, approaching zero, but Belichick cheated anyway. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a compulsive cheater. If those exist, maybe Belichick is one.
Kyle and Paul. There’s a condition known as OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) Which CLEARLY Belichick suffers from. Though I enjoy your exchange I think you’re both (And Joe) are discounting the fact that some people (Belichik) would try and find an edge even if they were 1000000% certain of victory. Thus, I do believe there are a large set of folks who cheat even when believeing the other team has no chance of winning. But the info gained might help them at another time in another game etc… Also, in certain conditions the behavior becomes so routine that it is done by rote more than specific intent.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a very interesting post. I do want to make one final point. I am not saying that Bill Belichick, to use him as an example, was really “admitting” that the Jets (or any other team he cheated) were going to beat him, not in a literal sense. I’m sure Belichick would never admit that … I doubt he will admit the Patriots lost the Super Bowl. I’m saying that when you are caught cheating, in my book, you are COMPELLED to admit that you would have lost. That to me is the punishment of getting caught cheating. You don’t get to use the, ‘Oh, I didn’t have to cheat” defense.
Thinking about the ‘51 Giants analogy… Correct me if I’m wrong (and I’m not saying that rhetorically; someone like Derek Zumsteg might want to correct me here), but I don’t think it was against league rules for the Giants to steal signs the way they did. Seamy and unethical? Sure. But, surprisingly, not illegal. As far as I know this is different from what the Pats did, for there are NFL rules that expressly forbid taping the other team.
Certainly you have heard the adage “It’s not cheating if you don’t get caught.”
Ergo, it is cheating when you do get caught.
The whole topic can be viewed from many different angles. I’m not a Patriots fan, and I’d allways love for that particular team to take a slap in the face, but they were watched extra close from the time they got caught to the end of the season and they still went undefeated in regular season. If Bellichick were a bad coach I don’t belive that would be possible.
As far as other teams filming their opponents, I can’t say I blame them. All is fair in love, war, and competition as long as you don’t get caught.