The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

There’s a lot in ESPN’s coverage on cheating today that’s worth noting, but I wanted to particularly mention Wright Thompson’s article on Shoeless Joe Jackson (“The fight goes on to clear Shoeless Joe’s name“). It’s a sentimental little piece about how people in South Carolina carry a torch for Joe.

The article doesn’t deal with the actual charges against Jackson, glossing them over in passing (“they point to his batting average during the World Series…”) as if they have merit, and there’s a good reason for him to do this: baseball historians who look at the 1919 White Sox evenly, who delve into the evidence and what happened when, and why — people who wrote books like Eight Men Out, Shoeless Joe, the list goes on and on — find that Joe at the very least entered willingly into a conspiracy to throw the series for money, and that his performances in the World Series followed the conspiracy’s motivation at the time, including poor offensive and suspicious defensive failings.

And that’s really just the start of it.

I sympathize with those who want to think the best of the dead, and the desire to believe in the innocence of someone you’re personally connected to. I can even sympathize with Jackson himself, who at the time thought it was no big deal to take the money in a sport overrun with corruption. But none of that changes what he did, and it’s a disservice to write a wistful story about believing in innocence without acknowledging the guilt that lies at the heart of the scandal.

In light of the Torii Hunter/Mike Sweeney champagne payoff, I wanted to ramble a little about how a different sport handles this kind of thing. Baseball, with an eye to the extremely corrupt era before the post-1921 cleanup of the sport, has extremely harsh rules about transactions between players — technically, the punishment for Hunter and Sweeney was a three year suspension — but other sports take a radically different approach.

Take pro bicycling. Bicycling’s a much more complicated team sport, with many teams of differing strengths and weaknesses competing against each other at once. Every day stage is like a game, every race like a season.

There, payoffs are entirely normal, and it doesn’t undermine competition at all. A small, underfunded team might be employed by one of the stronger teams to perform a certain task: to attack at a certain point, or to take the lead and buy the stronger teams’ riders an easier day to recover, and so on. It means that the smaller teams make money, helping their long-term fortunes, and the stronger teams end up spreading the wealth while adding an additional layer of strategy and competition.

I think there’s a perfect baseball parallel: September games. When teams get to carry 40 players on their active roster, the game changes. Teams out of contention field lineups that are intentionally, knowingly not the best present-day competitive squads, because they want to see what some 20-year-old outfielder has, and armed with twenty pitchers, they can afford to burn two every inning playing petty matchup games if they want.

You’ll hear about it if a competitive team faces a squad way out of any race: if the out-of-it manager is old school enough, he’ll put his veterans out there and try and put up a good fight to “preserve the integrity of the game” while other franchises will argue it’s in their best long-term competitive interests to field younger squads and screw around to see what their prospects have.

This can affect playoff races. Say a week into September, the wild card teams in the AL are Detroit, Chicago, and Oakland, and they’re separated by a game or two. The White Sox face the Twins, the Indians the Angels, and Oakland the Rangers.

What lineups those teams face could determine who goes to the playoffs and who doesn’t. If the Rangers try out some fresh-faced starters and get socked around by the A’s, if the Twins hand out playing time to prospects up from their deep farm system and the White Sox score at will on their way to a series sweep, or if the Tigers face a Mariners team eager to get on with rebuilding, well, any of those teams could swing the race.

Why not, then, allow teams to openly pay off a team to beat their opponent, even to – to borrow more directly from pro cycling – to hire them to play the team that has the best chance to be competitive?

It would provide a way for the A’s to ensure that if they lose the wild card, it won’t be because the Tigers rolled over a half-asleep Mariners team.

You’d have to work out a way to make it above-board and if not public, at least disclosed within baseball. You could file, for instance, with MLB, and say “We agree to pay the Twins $1,000,000 per win against the White Sox, with an additional $500,000 if they sweep the series.”

The downside, of course, is that a team like Kansas City might use that as blackmail, setting a price per game and threatening to run out some AAAA-level pitcher if their price isn’t met. You could simply prohibit any offer except by paying teams, though that wouldn’t stop the kind of negotiation-through-media we see in other situations.

And moreover, the other problem is that it could be (as it is in cycling) a larger advantage for rich teams in races against poorer teams: New York could easily afford to spend the money to make sure a wild card opponent faced stiff competition through the end of the season, but Minnesota doesn’t have the kind of budgets to pay teams off to play hard against New York in the same way.

Besides, I don’t think it’s that huge a deal: the difference between giving the Royals an incentive to run out a lineup with a better chance to win that day and saving the money wouldn’t be all huge a difference. It’s certainly a lot less than the interleague draw, for instance.

There’s no chance that anything like this happens, but what turns out to be really interesting is bicycling’s approach to another one of baseball’s deadly ills: performance-enhancing drug use. It’s even weirder, and I think it’s the direction baseball will end up having to head.

There were two things I didn’t do in the original champagne post – I didn’t discuss whether I thought there was any wrongdoing, and what I thought an appropriate punishment might be. I ended up discussing this at length in radio interviews last week, and hopefully writing this up will help clarify things. In the future, I’m going to try and be much more complete in discussions like this, and try to offer that – it may be part of the reason the discussion on Yankee Stadium dimensions was pretty level-headed, while others haven’t. I freely admit this is going to be an ongoing process.

First, then: was there any wrong-doing associated with the gift? It’s pretty clear there wasn’t. For one, I’ve never met anyone with a bad word to say about Torii Hunter or Mike Sweeney. There’s no evidence there was any kind of untoward actions.

However, in the same way there’s no evidence that Rose did bad things to the Reds when he was caught betting on baseball, part of the problem is that bets/gifts create the possibility of wrongdoing, or the perception of wrongdoing, and undermine confidence in the integrity of the game. The rule and penalties aren’t there just to punish wrongdoing, they’re there to prevent actions that start down that slippery slope.

At the same time, a number of surprising things came out of this story:
- These kind of gifts happen more than we know, they just don’t make stories where they can be seen by the general public
- Both Hunter, Sweeney, and other team personnel, including GM Terry Ryan, were ignorant of the rule until the story broke. I find this a little hard to believe, especially since the rule’s posted in every clubhouse. And I find it weirder that Hunter, especially, who certainly knows his baseball history, wouldn’t know this. But if it’s a common practice, then it’s likely that either this is true or they just didn’t think it was an enforced rule.

And I agree (and I’ve talked about this elsewhere) that modern baseball has turned the rule into something of an anachronism. When players made little money, payoffs from other teams could make a huge difference in their lives, and could drive drastically different action. Today, when even the player making the minimum clears 300k, they’re immunized to a certain degree against bribery. A couple bottles of nice wine isn’t likely to make a modern player bat an eye.

But the rule remains. Baseball, through free agency and the rise of salaries, saw fit to keep the misconduct rule on the books.

What then is an appropriate punishment? I think baseball had two possible actions:

Significant action. Whether or not it happens other places, whether or not other people were doing it, it violates the rule, and the rule’s there for a reason. They might mitigate the punishment, but if baseball’s serious about enforcement of the rule (and their continued treatment of Rose would indicate they are) then every discovered instance needs to be acted on. If they’ve slipped on enforcement before, then they begin enforcement with this instance.

Token action, admit culpability. If baseball is going to let them off the hook, it should be part of a larger action. I’d have said “Having talked to everyone involved, we realize that there was no improper intent, and we’ve found no actions taken.” And then you admit the larger failures:
- We’ve failed to adequately inform the players and teams about the rule and its implications, and will be issuing a clarification memo and working with the MLBPA to ensure everyone’s well-informed about what constitutes a violation and knows the punishments
- We’ll be re-examining the rule in the off-season to discuss if there are revisions we should make: whether there’s room for gestures such as this, possibly a limitation on a gift’s value, or whether any gift allowance creates the room for perception of improper conduct and should remain prohibited

I’m entirely in favor of the latter. It allows baseball to avoid having to suspend two players for being unfortunate enough to be caught, but allows them to choose where they want to draw that line in the future – and where they put that line would be as much a public relations issue.

In general, I’m in favor of having a set of rules that are clear and applied fairly, and being aggressive about resolving contradictions and sections (like the game suspension/calling) that are likely to cause problems in the future, instead of waiting for a scandal. Anyone should be able to read the rules on anything – like the strike zone – and see the game called according to that rulebook. I don’t believe there should be different strike zones for different pitchers, for instance, though in the book I talk about how pitchers work that to their advantage, and as long as they’re allowed to do that, I applaud them for seeking that extra edge.

Or Gaylord Perry – one of the things I most admired about Perry is that each time the rules about what he could do on the mound changed, he adapted his routine to fit. He was a rule-abiding cheater, if you understand what I mean by that.

Baseball’s actual response – to get the gift returned and then do nothing about it at all – sends a really strange message:
- It’s wrong to do this
- If you do it and get caught, we’ll force you return it
- Though it’s wrong and we’ll act if you’re found out, we won’t enforce the penalties associated with the rule

It’s another part of a larger problem with baseball’s enforcement of many rules, which is that it’s okay to break rules unless we decide to enforce them — this is a future post, but it’s a lot like the rules about the DL, which teams regularly violate, MLB knows that a lot of the injuries are exaggerated or entirely made up, and the only time a team gets dinged is if the New York head office is mad at them for something unrelated.

If this had been Jose Canseco and Albert Belle in 1994, would Selig have been so forgiving, so quick to accept that a simple return of the gift would suffice?

This post’s run a lot longer than I thought it would. I hope that’s a reasonable explanation of the context I didn’t provide when I wrote about the incident and the history of Rule 21.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Monday afternoon, the Twins received a telephone call from the commissioner’s office. The Twins contacted the Royals, who agreed to send all four bottles of Dom Perignon back to Minnesota. Yes, Twins General Manager Terry Ryan said, those bottles are still unopened.

“I’m to blame as much as anybody because I didn’t know the rule,” Ryan said. “We’ll end up righting the wrong. We’ve already contacted the Royals. They’re going to return the goods, and hopefully that’ll be the end of it.”

The general manager of a major league team didn’t know the rule on misconduct posted in every clubhouse? The rule on betting and bribery? I’m surprised that would be the case.

The paper does quote Ryan on why it’s important:

By letting Hunter’s gesture pass, MLB would have to consider the precedent.

“Integrity of the game; it’s as simple as that,” Ryan said. “This is an honest, trivial exchange, but it could grow into something different if you let it get away.”

We’ll see what happens.

From today’s Kansas City Star, on Mike Sweeney:

Sweeney found four bottles of Dom Perignon in his locker after the game. They represented the completion of a promise from last season by Twins outfielder Torii Hunter: a champagne party for sweeping the Tigers in the final series last season, which enabled Minnesota to win the American League Central Division.

This is dangerous. It’s prohibited in Rule 21, Misconduct:

(b) Gift for defeating competing club. Any player or person connected with a Club who shall offer or give any gift or reward to a player or person connected with another Club for services rendered or supposed to be or to have been rendered in defeating or attempting to defeat a competing Club, and any player or person connected with a Club who shall solicit or accept from a player connected with another Club any gift or reward for any services rendered, or supposed to have been rendered, or who, having been offered any such gift or reward, shall fail to inform his League President or the Commissioner or the President of the Minor League Association, as the case may be, immediately of such offer, and of all facts and circumstances connected therewith, shall be declared ineligible for not less than three years.

Did Sweeney inform Selig when Hunter made the offer? Did Selig tell him it was okay? Or are we going to see both Sweeney and Hunter sit out for three years? Orrrr is baseball going to ignore this?

Three years seems a harsh penalty, but there’s a reason behind it. As I discuss in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, the misconduct rules, which cover gambling, payoffs, and other like behavior, came into being as baseball tried to move away from the close ties to gambling and crime interests that led to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Howard Rosenberg documents more incidents of these kind of payoffs than I can easily recount in his Cap Anson series, particularly Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport’s First Media Sensation and Baseball’s Original Casey at the Bat, and Ginsburg’s The Fix Is in: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game Fixing Scandals.

When teams made friendly bets on who would win a series, it was mostly innocuous, but it was in these same kind of bets and payoffs that some of the worst cheating was forged. By paying off another team to take out a divisional opponent, teams affected the strategies used and tampered with the game’s outcome: if there’s a large monetary reward to beat the team you’re playing today, there’s a huge incentive to do everything you can, even if it means you’ll be much worse off when you face the next team.

Those kind of bets and payoffs led to the constant noise in baseball up to the Black Sox scandal, when many division races were affected (or just as damningly, from a public perspective, rumored to be affected) by one competitor paying a third team, out of the race, to beat their rivals for the pennant. It wasn’t far from paying a team to beat another to paying them to lose to you, and when teams were taking money coming and going from outside sources in other teams, it wasn’t a big jump to take money from gamblers and other interested parties…

This is why baseball put such huge penalties around gambling, and these kind of friendly wagers and promises of gratitude: it’s a remnant of baseball’s hard-won experience fighting corruption. As time’s passed, baseball’s forgotten those lessons. For a long time, baseball wouldn’t associate at all with casinos, even exerting pressure on former players to refuse work as greeters, and now they’re happy to run ads for casinos in stadiums.

We’ll see if they take any action on this violation of the misconduct rule. I’d bet on no.

For a ridiculous amount of additional information on gambling, there’s a whole chapter in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, or you can check out the Rosenberg or Ginsburg books for entire volumes devoted to it.

hat tip to Ian for the pointer to the article

So he tells ESPN.

There are holes in this. It’s hard to know why anyone takes Rose statements seriously, or at the very least, doesn’t take some time to contrast them against fairly-well-established evidence.

Harder to understand is Rose’s reasons for doing this – why he’s constantly telling mostly-truths with obvious ommissions, or taking steps towards coming clean but trying not to admit to the worst of it (for instance, the “I bet on baseball but never from the clubhouse” statement).

I don’t know how Rose manages to get taken off the ineligible list at this point. If Selig does retire, he’ll get another shot at it, but every time he does an interview it seems to set his case back.

Yup. He thinks fans want it.

I discuss Rose at length in the book.

So, what happens if the Commissioner loses his mind and reinstates Rose?

He’s eligible to take jobs in baseball.
Rose argues he’d then be eligible to be on the next Hall of Fame ballot, that because he wasn’t on the ballot his eligibility doesn’t lapse. The rules seem… less on his side.

From the HoF website:

3. Eligible Candidates — Candidates to be eligible must meet the following requirements:

1. A baseball player must have been active as a player in the Major Leagues at some time during a period beginning twenty (20) years before and ending five (5) years prior to election.

So.. was he active as a player in the major leagues at some time between twenty years and five years prior to election?

Last played in 1986. Which is… whoops.

What else?

2. Player must have played in each of ten (10) Major League championship seasons, some part of which must have been within the period described in 3 (A).

Yup. Nice reference back to that rule.

3. Player shall have ceased to be an active player in the Major Leagues at least five (5) calendar years preceding the election but may be otherwise connected with baseball.

He’s clear there.

4. In case of the death of an active player or a player who has been retired for less than five (5) full years, a candidate who is otherwise eligible shall be eligible in the next regular election held at least six (6) months after the date of death or after the end of the five (5) year period, whichever occurs first.

Not applicable.

5. Any player on Baseball’s ineligible list shall not be an eligible candidate.

And finally, he’d be okay on this one.

The good news is that he’d be waiting for a Veteran’s Committee election.
The bad news is someone would almost certainly give him a job, and that would mean all kinds of noises about redemption, and new starts, condemnation and hair-rending and then, when he’s eligible, we go through it all again.

Fortunately, there’s no sign Selig might consider this latest push any more seriously than any other.

In the book, I mention Hal Chase’s abominable reputation for cheating, both while he was an active player and afterwards. I don’t dwell on it there, but Chase was the most corrupt player I’ve come across. What’s interesting and appalling, though, is that while Chase was active, while everyone knew, no one really went after him. It’s a testament to how corrupt and how tolerated that kind of thing was that you can’t find contemporary outrage, calls for his banning, columns constantly attacking him when he came to town, even though the writers knew as well as people in baseball what he was made of.

But as the Black Sox scandal unravelled (and Hal Fullerton entirely vindicated for his coverage after the 1919 series), you can start to see that scandals are more easily aired. For instance, I came across this throwaway mention in the February 10, 1921 Sporting News:

The divorced wife of Hal Chase might make a good witness in the trials of the accused White Sox. In testifying for her divorce in Cincinnati recently she swore Chase told her a lot about how he had been mixed up in baseball cheating. She “knew his nature,” she said and her knowledge led her to believe that when there was any crooked work being done Chase was in on it.

Now, it required something to be out there for them to point to, but it’s also clear reading this that the Sporting News isn’t dismissing her allegations and in fact wants people to look into them.

This is a huge change from 1919. Then, reporters like Hugh Fullerton who wrote about the Series or the aftermath were mocked and savaged by voices of establishment publications. Baseball Magazine, for instance, took many opportunities to fire at Fullerton. Eight Men Out quotes them at one point taking a story about Lee Magee, thrown out of baseball for his connection to Hal Chase rumors (Magee also finished 1919 on the White Sox but was not in on the fixing, it seems):

Magee, after all, has not hurt the game in which he will no longer have a part. The greater harm was done by sensational writers like Hugh Fullerton, men for whose actions there was not the slightest excuse.

But only a year later, the Sporting News openly encouraged investigation of the man Magee was thrown out for associating with.