When titles are tarnished, but not taken
Pro sports league commissioners in the U.S. have been hesitant to punish cheaters severely
In years to come, this might be the week this age of sports came to be known as the “asterisk era.”
During a decade that brought eye-inthe-sky cameras, rogue chemists, executives with malleable morals and Sovietera spy craft, those two-fisted disrupters — science and technology — have given cheaters seemingly limitless tools to secure victory on playing fields as diverse as the Olympic Games, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and horse racing.
The Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scheme, laid bare in a sober yet searing report from the baseball commissioner Monday, is the latest embodiment of that old sports saw, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” The 2017 World Series champions mixed high-tech with the low-fi — using a television monitor near the dugout to watch the opposing catcher give his pitching signs, then having teammates bang a trash can to let the batter know what was coming.
For supporters of clean sports, this looked like just one more powerful weapon that athletes, teams and organizations used to win games and skirt the fair-play police, one more instance of the truth about a champion spilling out too late.
In 2014, the Russian Olympic Committee augmented its medal haul by having doping experts collaborate with the country’s intelligence services to switch out urine samples through a hole in the testing laboratory’s wall. On their way to six Super Bowl championships, the New England Patriots have been found guilty of using clandestine video surveillance and of somehow ending up with deflated footballs that allowed their quarterback to get a better grip in foul weather. A horse that staged a historic run to the Triple Crown was found to have chemicals associated with performance-enhancing drugs in his system.
Regulators of Olympic sports acknowledge that they are mostly outgunned on the science and technology fronts. Instead, they rely on law enforcement sources, whistleblowers and moral outrage, all of which are often in short supply.
“It doesn’t take a philosopher to know that if you cheat to win, you’re not really a winner,” said Travis Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, who is perhaps best known for bringing Lance Armstrong’s extensive doping operation to light.
Really?
Tygart and international Olympic officials have taken back gold medals and handed out lifetime bans for cheating. Yet Tygart knows there are athletes who keep trying to become faster and stronger through performance-enhancing drugs. The usual rationalizations: Everyone else is doing it, and winning is worth the risk.
Vacating titles and ending careers are powerful deterrents, but in U.S. professional sports leagues, commissioners have been resistant to mete out such punishments.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred handed down year-long suspensions for Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow. Both were subsequently fired by the team’s owner, Jim Crane. Boston Red Sox owners John Henry and Tom Werner also parted ways with their manager, Alex Cora, who was a bench coach with Houston during its sign-stealing operation and was identified as a major part of the scheme.
In addition, MLB stripped the Astros of their first- and second-round draft picks for the next two years and fined the team $5 million. The Red Sox, who remain under investigation for similar violations, may soon be penalized, too.
On Thursday, Carlos Beltran, the lone Astros player named in the report, parted ways with the New York Mets, who had hired him in November to manage the team.
“I couldn’t let myself be a distraction for the team,” Beltran said in a statement.
Still, Houston retains its title as the 2017 World Series champion. Presumably, Boston will retain its ’18 title. Would stripping those titles make a difference?
“If the goal was to uphold the honesty and sanctity of the game for a broader community, the ultimate penalty is to vacate the wins and the titles,” said Ann Skeet, a sports and leadership ethicist for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Santa Clara in California. “But there are some built-in conflicts. The commissioner works for the owners. They share revenue. Their fortunes are tied together.”
It’s true that lines between right and wrong have become blurry. Stealing signs in baseball is as old as the game, though using electronics (or stationing a scout with binoculars and signalling equipment in the centre-field stands) is illegal.
NFL teams study endless hours of video of opponents, but filming opposing coaches is a no-no. Performance-enhancing drugs are illegal, unless officials grant an exemption for a drug that, say, treats asthma.
But the rules are there, and F. Clark Power worries that by flouting them, more is being lost than a sense of fair play. Power is the founder of the Play Like a Champion program, which promotes character education through sports and focuses on proper coaching instruction in youth sports, especially for at-risk children.
“We need to understand, if we are going to endorse cheating as a means to an end, the children are watching,” he said.
“So it becomes a question of, how do you want to raise your kids? We can’t get much lower as a culture if cheating is no longer a moral issue but a form of coping. We need to change the conversation.”