Careful! Don’t Get Too Good at Cheating
Major League Baseball’s most recent scandal is a reminder of our peculiar practice of accepting arbitrary boundaries for cheating in sports.
If you’ve ever golfed — and even if you haven’t — you may appreciate a study that psychologist Dan Ariely conducted in 2009. It went like this: Dr. Ariely asked thousands of golfers a series of questions about how they play the game (and, more importantly, how they cheat). He profiles the study in his book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty:
“Imagine that as the average golfer approaches their ball they realize that it would be highly advantageous if the ball would lie 4 inches away from where it currently is,” he asked participants. “How likely do you think the average golfer would be to move the ball by these 4 inches?”
Importantly, Ariely asked this question in three different ways, each describing an alternate approach for improving the ball’s placement. He asked: “How comfortable do you think the average golfer would be about moving the ball (1) with his or her club; (2) with his or her shoe; and (3) by picking the ball up and placing it 4 inches away?”
The results? Respondents stated that the average golfer would move the ball with a club 23 percent of the time. Kicking the ball with his or her shoe? 14 percent of the time. And picking the ball up? A mere 10 percent of the time. These findings, he suggested, indicated that dishonesty in golf is influenced by the psychological distance from the action. In other words, it doesn’t “feel” as much like cheating when we aren’t in direct contact with the ball (such as using an instrument like our club to move it). But the more deliberate the act, the more egregious the sin. It’s hard to ignore the intentionality of picking the ball up with our hand to move it. And, thus, this feels the most like cheating.
But, of course, here’s the rub: the end results are identical. In each version of Ariely’s question, the golfer improves his or her ball placement by an advantageous 4 inches. Why should it matter how deliberate or purposeful the means were when we arrived at the same conclusion?
As first reported by The Athletic, the Houston Astros were caught conducting one of the most deliberate, purposeful acts of cheating in the recent history of Major League Baseball. During home games in 2017, the team used a video camera in centerfield to steal opposing teams’ signs. A feed of the camera footage was sent to a monitor in the Astros’ tunnel. A staff member then hit a trash can to tip off different pitches to batters from the dugout.
As is so often the case when stories of contrived corruption emerge, outrage quickly ensued. Former New York Yankee pitcher CC Sabathia said the Yankees were “cheated out of a title” (the Yankees lost to the Astros in the 2017 American League Championship Series, a series in which the Astros went 4–0 at home). Media personalities offered no shortage of contempt for the players and coaches involved in the scheme, with many suggesting that Houston’s championship is now “tainted.”
None of this strikes me as odd; the Houston Astros cheated. They should be punished (and they have been: the club has lost draft picks, and the two top officials have been suspended, and subsequently fired). There should be no room for cheating in baseball, or in any other sport.
. . . And that’s where, for me, the strangeness materializes. Because there is, in fact, plenty of room for cheating in baseball. It isn’t new; actually, many respected players, coaches, and contributors to the game take no issue with sign stealing. Some even call it a time-honored tradition. It’s well known — and expected — that players and coaches will try to steal their opponents’ signs. It’s why pitchers and catchers change their signals when a runner is on base: they expect the runner will attempt to decode a sequence and secretly relay that information to the batter.
We don’t call that particular type of cheating, well, “cheating.” We often refer to it as “gamesmanship.” And to be fair, Major League Baseball’s official rules do stop short of calling this type of manual, in-game sign stealing illegal.
But do you see how arbitrary our rules become once you permit certain degrees of dishonesty? And should the sophistication of the act really be our measuring stick? If the Astros had adopted the same system of trash-can-banging, only the signals were being relayed not from a camera, but from a runner on second base, does that make it less wrong? If they had been caught doctoring baseballs, or corking bats, is that a “less egregious” act of cheating? What if an Astros player had previously been a member of the opposing team — and brought with him intel on their signaling strategy? Is that wrong? At what point are these accepted, unofficial rules broken?
Further: what if the 2017 Houston Astros hadn’t won the World Series? Instead, what if they were one of the worst teams in baseball that season? Do you think the public outrage would have been as fervent?
To me, it seems that we grade the method and impact of the act before making a judgement on the act itself. The late Ty Cobb — a player enshrined in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame — once said that “if a player is smart enough to solve the opposing system of signals he [should be] given due credit.” Spy with your eyes? Good for you. Spy with a lens? That’s where we draw the line.
Back to Dan Ariely. In another study, he asked golfers about their propensity to take “mulligans” (to illegally re-take a shot because of a bad first attempt) while they’re on the course. He asked it in two different ways. First, he asked: “what is the likelihood of the average golfer taking a mulligan after a bad shot on the first hole?” Then, he asked: “what is the likelihood of the average golfer taking a mulligan after a bad shot on the ninth hole?”
Two scenarios that ultimately arrive at the same outcome. In both instances, the golfer receives an illegal “do-over” after a poor shot. The result on the scorecard would count the same. But on the first hole? Respondents predicted the average golfer would take a mulligan 40 percent of the time. You can almost imagine them rationalizing: well, it’s so early in the round that the golfer could scrap that shot and declare, “OK, now every shot counts!” But on the ninth hole? Respondents predicted a golfer would take the mulligan only 15 percent of the time. Apparently, “cheating” only counts as “cheating” later in the round.
The more we abide by these unofficial rules, the more we get caught up in assessing the method by which we cheat. When, instead, shouldn’t we all be focused on the underlying intent? Shouldn’t we be focused on what someone was trying to do, regardless of how they tried to do it?
