It's kind of a forgotten incident now, but if you're a baseball fan you may remember the time Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat. I looked it up, and that was just ten years ago. But that seems so long ago because it was just so quaint. A corked bat, you say? My, what a cheater. Why those things will make the ball go one, maybe two yards further than a legal bat.
It's hard to believe now that actually hurt Sosa's reputation. If Alex Rodriguez were caught with a corked bat, it would be the most popular thing he's done in years. So why did I think back to that now-irrelevant incident? It was a question posed by a sports pundit afterwards: Why is it that people get incensed over corked bats, but just laugh off spitballs? Gaylord Perry was reputed to have used the illegal pitch his whole career without being thought of as a cheater. And spitballs/doctored baseballs actually make a performance difference, unlike corked bats which most physicists agree have only placebo effects.
Now that we have cheating on a much bigger scale, this distinction seems moot. But it's still true that fans, media and players have very different attitudes to different types of cheating. Faking being hit by a pitch, out-of-the-basepath takeout slides, that's totally expected. Of course, those are on an entirely different magnitude, and I don't expect them to generate the same amount of anger now being directed at Rodriguez. But the important distinction is that small scale cheating isn't merely not-condemned, it's actually endorsed and congratulated. It's considered playing hard, doing what it takes. Commentators gleefully repeat the line, if you're not cheating, you're not trying.
So I wonder if this is an example of the Broken Windows theory (that tolerance of small law violations will lead to greater incident of serious crime.) But in this case, people aren't merely allowing vandals to break windows, they're cheering the vandals on.
No comments:
Post a Comment