The Morality of Hardball

As you know, I was born and raised in South America. So, no baseball there. I know nothing about baseball. But maybe we can use the ethics of baseball to talk about the morality of business.
First, the facts. Last Wednesday night in a game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Derek Jeter, the Yankee shortstop and generally perceived as a nice guy, a guy who has good character traits, feigned being hit by a pitch. He pretended that the ball had ricocheted off his hand. But as stop-action replay made evident, it actually hit the knob of his bat. Still, his charade fooled the umpire and he was awarded first base. The following batter, Curtis Granderson, homered, putting the Yankees in front.
Rays fans chanted the convenient rhyme “Jeter, Cheater.” Sports blogs and talk radio were congested with upright indignation.
Two days after, Jeter remained befuddled at the reaction to it: “You’re all acting like this is the first time this has happened,” he said. “You think that’s the first time it’s happened? Anybody? I really don’t see what the big deal is.” In addition, he says, "“It seems like people think I turned around and told him that the ball hit me.” Jeter said. “What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it didn’t hit me. Please let me continue to hit?’ I mean, really!”
Yankees Manager Joe Girardi suggests that fans hold Jeter to some different standard of purity than they hold other players. Because of the kind of guy he is. “I think if it wasn’t Derek Jeter, and it wasn’t that series, I don’t think people would talk about it,” Girardi said. “This happens all the time (...) I think because of who it is it’s become a big deal.”
On the other hand, Joe Maddon, the manager of the Rays, was ejected from the game for arguing over the Jeter call. He said: “If our guys did it, I would have applauded that, too. It’s a great performance on his part.”
Now, besides the ESPN clip discussing Jeter's behavior, there is an op-ed by Bruce Weber in the New York Times today that is worth reading (link here). Let me summarize his argument but I strongly recommend you read the whole piece (it is short!):
- "Can we please just call a halt to the professional-sport-as-a-metaphor-for-life thing? Morality is complicated and context-based, isn’t it? The difference between right and wrong is not automatically transferable from one arena (so to speak) to another, from the context in which an actual score is kept and the idea is to win, to the larger context, in which duping other people has actual, potentially harmful consequences or undermines the purpose of effort."
- "About the morality of sport generally and baseball particularly. To begin with, deception is inherent to competition and it is fundamental to games of all types, including hide and seek and chess."
- "That one player or one team might be interested in putting one over on an opponent is one reason, a big reason, that organized sports have officials — who have no expectation, by the way, that the players are guided by the honor system. Indeed, I’d argue that a prime function of officials is to relieve players of the burden of honor. After all, on a bang-bang play at first base, when the runner is called safe but knows in his heart he was out, he does not feel compelled to correct the umpire’s misimpression."
As you post comment on this post, I would suggest you integrate what you have already learned in this class. Specifically, we discussed how to do ethics in a descriptive and a normative way. The former refers to character attributions and experiments in social psychology about character and situations. The latter about the morality of roles and the analogy of business with sports and games.