DO CHEATERS PROSPER? LET US EXPLORE DEEPER, THANKS TO THE HOUSTON ASTERISKS.
The Astros only brought us further into the Asterisks Era of sporting accomplishments. Now we’re left to wonder whether winning at all costs is just a reflection of American society.
The idea has been passed down through the generations as the paragon of truth, justice, and the American way: Cheaters never prosper.
Give it your best, play by the rules, and you’ll be a winner in the end — no matter what the scoreboard says.
Boy, were we suckers. Cheaters prosper, all right. They win. They get paid. They’re celebrated as heroes. And even when they get caught, it’s difficult to say with a straight face that they really ever get punished.
Sure, they feign embarrassment. They issue non-apology apologies, saying mistakes were made and lessons were learned. But we’re really great guys, scout’s honor. Now, can we all just move on?
Which brings us to the latest chapter of Liars, Cheaters, and Thieves Club featuring the Houston Astros. As of this writing and for the foreseeable future, they remain the 2017 World Series champions despite an elaborate ruse to steal signs of opposing
pitchers through the use of real-time, high-definition cameras in the outfield and (unbelievably) trash cans.
The exposure of the brazen scheme led to the firing of Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Lunhow in January. The fallout spread when plot masterminds Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora lost their managerial jobs with the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox, respectively. And the scandal barrelled into spring training like a 25-car pileup without losing momentum as Opening Day approached.
Harsh words and threats of bean-ball retaliation were being slung between opposing superstars. The whistleblower — A’s pitcher Mike Fiers — was being called a snitch by former star David Ortiz and issued death threats by others.
Much like the vitriol we see in our national politics and so much else that floods our social media feeds these days, it has gotten ugly.
“We all know what is unfair,” Kevin Costner said. “What happened there is fundamentally unfair. The World Series became unfair, and no one knows what to think about it.”
Yes, that Kevin Costner. Before the Oscar winner brought the poetry of baseball to life with films that made us laugh (“Bull Durham) and cry (“Field of Dreams”), Costner was a darn good ballplayer. The man who played the philosophizing minor league catcher Crash Davis was talented enough to try out for the powerhouse Cal State Fullerton baseball team in the 1970s.
Today, he’s a fan who felt a sting of betrayal with the revelations that the Astros’ World Series victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers was not achieved fairly.
“There are rules in place for stealing signs,” Costner said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. “Clever people watch, and they look. That’s how you get to the big leagues. You try to see what other people don’t see. But when you take it to where it went in the most important seven games of the season, the game got destroyed. It destroyed the integrity of that World Series that some argue could have gone the other way.”
Costner represents the mainstream opinion no matter how much Astros fans defend their team. The line of opponents outspoken in their disgust forms behind such stars as the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger, the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Angels’ Mike Trout. The scandal has left Little Leagues from coast to coast wrestling with whether to ban the Astros as a team choice.
But the scandal has reverberated well beyond the national pastime as part of a broader conversation about character, ethics, and whether cheating at games reflects who we have become as a people. Does American Exceptionalism really mean anything goes now?
Perhaps most galling is how precious little guilt, shame or remorse has been shown by those involved.
“My read on the reaction to the Astros is that the general public is very disappointed and feels the title should have been vacated,” said Ann Skeet, senior director, Leadership Ethics, at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “That certainly was my take as well. People believe this went too far as an orchestrated, intentional act that many team members, if not the entire team, participated in it.”
Skeet said that over the last few decades, the idea of “winning at all costs” has become the overriding theme in sports, business, and even politics.
“Now the question is being asked: Do the means justify the
ends?” Skeet said. “Many are coming to the conclusion that they don’t, and we’ve gotten out of kilter in what we will accept in bad or corrupt behavior. There’s a reckoning, and maybe a chance of the pendulum swinging back the other way.”
One can hope. Or, maybe this is the new normal.
Future historians will be kept busy trying to contextualize the early decades of the 21st century. They’ll have a lot to unpack. (See: Enron; The Big Shorting of the Great Recession; Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos; college admissions fixing; Trump, Donald J.)
The lack of morality and accountability throughout sports also has been one of the hallmarks of this age. The pervasiveness of evading the rules on the fields of play should be an apt metaphor for everything else happening in our time. It’s a feature, not a bug, of modern society.
“The games provide a symbolic way of expressing something much bigger than getting a ball to the right place,” said Robert J. Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of popular culture. “Sports tells a story of the overarching change we’re seeing in our society.”
There’s nothing new about breaking the rules, of course. Sports history books have reserved a thick chapter for skullduggery and devious behavior. Although the scheme wasn’t confirmed for five decades, Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning “Shot Heard ’Round the World” homer for the 1951 New York Giants likely benefited from a long-running, sign-stealing plot involving a telescope behind center field.
Sure, over the years, baseball dealt with spitballs and corked bats, pine tar and emery boards. But that all seems so quaint now. Today’s athletes have entered an arena where the line of what is considered acceptable in gaining an edge has been obliterated.
Or perhaps it’s just more tolerated in the aftermath of Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds and the New England Patriots’ Deflategate scam. Everybody does it. So, we just shrug our collective shoulders.
“Frankly, nothing can shock people anymore,” Thompson said.
With each new scandal, Thompson thinks about the more innocent times of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox players who threw World Series games in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate. It led to the apocryphal story of the boy telling Shoeless Joe Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
“That’s the cliche for the shock and disappointment we all feel that people and teams we respected could have done such a thing,” Thompson said. “But we are so beyond that now, and many people no longer care about cheating because we’re all so cynical today.”
Reality TV, he added, is both a reflection and a contributor to this desensitized view of cheating.
“When ‘Survivor’ was changing the landscape of American television, lying was instrumental,” Thompson said. “Richard Hatch, the first huge star, was filled with complicity. It’s why if you talk to a lot of people under the age of 40 now, they’re more likely to say, ‘Cheaters usually win.’ It’s very Machiavellian about who can cheat more effectively.”
One other telling point that Thompson makes: Which shows have been most talked-about in recent years? Series that featured scoundrels, such as “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire” and “The Sopranos.” We love glorifying those who don’t play by the rules in our greatest storytelling.
“Most of the great television of this era is about liars, cheaters, and bad guys,” Thompson said. “In ‘Mad Men,’ Don Draper was even lying about his very name.”
Well, we can report, the names on the ballplayers’ uniforms are legit. But we’re still not sure if Astros star Jose Altuve wore a buzzer beneath his jersey to tip him off to incoming pitches.
All of this strikes close to home with parents, who can find them
selves struggling to explain to their children the concept of right and wrong — and how it often doesn’t seem to apply to their heroes. Costner is no different. His three youngest children, Cayden, 12, Hayes, 10, and Grace, 9, all play in youth sports.
“I wouldn’t want my kid to play in a game if they knew what was coming,” he said. “That’s the beauty of sports. The moment between the pitcher and the batter, when each one is trying to outguess the other, that’s called drama. The minute the pitcher lets the ball go and the batter swings, it’s going to move into something else, and that’s called the action. And we destroy the drama when someone knows what is coming.
“It’s nice to play for something when it counts,” Costner said. “It’s more important to play when it is fair.”
But passive observers — you know, fans — have become deeply jaded about recent results. The New York Times recently asked if the Astros’ scandal is the moment when sport becomes known as the “asterisk era.” It’s a good question.
Just watch. At this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, athletes will perform amazing feats and take our breath away. But in similar record-breaking fashion, doubts quickly will follow them across the finish line because after Ben Johnson and Marion Jones, after the East Germans, and now the Russians, people don’t know what is real and what is chemically enhanced.
Meanwhile, back in baseball, we still don’t know the whole story. The only reason we know any of this is because one man, the life-threatened Fiers, had the integrity to say “this was wrong.” He exposed the scheme in a November interview with The Athletic.
Every time the Astros players, owner Jim Crane and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred open their mouths, they seemingly make the situation worse. (Skeet, the Santa Clara ethicist, sees stark parallels between Crane’s abdication of leadership and the recent troubles at companies like Wells Fargo and Boeing.)
Everyone, it seems, is more interested in rationalizations than accepting responsibility. And hey, aren’t the Astros victims here, too, because of the humiliation they’re facing?
It will be fascinating to watch how the team reacts to the commotion this season. Will the Astros fold under the pressure of continual scrutiny, the vicious booing of fans on the road, and a potential retaliatory diet of 90-mph-plus brushback heaters? Or, will they fully embrace their role as villains and masters of the dark arts who march, Darth Vader-like, over the competition?
Costner, 65, who tries to attend the College Baseball World Series whenever Fullerton advances that far, is careful not to pile onto the Astros. After all, he knows what it’s like to live in the spotlight. He also empathizes with players who were reluctant to stand up in the face of the “clubhouse code.”
“I’m not looking for anyone to be persecuted more than they already have been,” he said. “I’m sure that players on the team wish it didn’t happen. But you’re talking about almost a profile-in-courage moment to say this is unfair, and I don’t want to play this game at this level with this much at stake with that advantage.”
Then he added:
“We’ve seen it time and time again in our lives. We know who got it right and who got it wrong. But that doesn’t define you for the rest of your life.”
Or, perhaps it will. Just not in the way the Astros expect. Maybe this is a kind of tipping point where people start demanding more accountability — and not only for baseball. The moment when citizens begin to say: This isn’t the way we should act.
Yes, another sports scandal probably could be on the horizon. But the simple fact that the anger is still white-hot brings out the natural optimist in Skeet. Maybe the Astros players escaped punishment from Major League Baseball. But she notes how the court of public opinion has ruled against them.
People do care, passionately, about playing the right way.
“Or we wouldn’t still be talking about the Astros,” she said. “People aren’t being quiet. My hope is that it suggests opinion is shifting and people are trying to find a new moral path that’s more comfortable than what they’re seeing right now.
“It isn’t over.”
Yogi Berra couldn’t have said it better.