Fair play is important on a playing field or in a court of law
Although baseball’s opening day remains weeks away, spring training games began this weekend. For cabin fever sufferers, even games that don’t really count provide a welcome foretaste of release from winter captivity. Everyone who had to settle for “Wait ‘til next year!” back in October now gets a look at the promising rookies, newly signed free agents, and returning veterans who this year will take us to glory, or more likely, to the heartbreak of “almost.”
This spring’s baseball rites will feature additional drama. How will opposing teams and fans treat the Houston Astros, baseball’s official outlaw franchise and disgraced villains, when they come to town? How will the Astros behave toward former teammates who blew the whistle on cheating the Astros organization perpetrated for at least two seasons, one of which concluded with a World Series title? In this age of social media and 24-7 news cycles, apologies, denials, demands for tougher punishment, and many other opinions have swirled about for months. Now balls, bats, and spikes will start flying along with the words. Will we see attempts at retribution? What will the new vigilance against copycat schemes look like now that a trusty, old sporting code has been violated?
More than almost anything, human beings value justice and fair play, and few things demonstrate this more consistently than the way we behave when playing or watching a game. Every college basketball game has three official referees charged with guaranteeing fair play by agreed-upon rules. As we all know, however, every warm body in the stands also serves as a self-appointed game official. We fans don’t have whistles, but we exercise our right to yell, scream, boo, and revile the officials who fail to see what we witness. I wonder sometimes if a crucial, untold detail in the Bible is an extra step Abel took in the lane one night on his way to making a layup, and for whatever reason, God didn’t call it. Cain burned for a while, then finally said to his brother, “How about we go play a game out in the field — just us, no refs or umpires?” The rest of course, is history. Our history, the endless cycle of thirsting for justice and what’s fair, getting it however we can, too often through vengeance.
So far, the Astros’ cheating hasn’t gotten anyone killed, but people did get hurt. Financial rewards may have been mis-directed. Careers got damaged. Family members of players on all sides will likely endure things we will never hear about. The most pervasive harm, however, may be the lingering sense that our worst suspicions are true, and that the justice and genuine fairness we all crave cannot happen even in venues and life arenas where we claim to practice them, teach them, and hold them sacred.
This last kind of harm occurs on a more dangerous scale when we witness the cavalier dismissal and undoing of good-faith efforts our rightly appointed investigators, prosecutors, and judges, both civilian and military, perform for us. Instead of draining the proverbial swamp of fraudulent, self-serving government employees, or freeing from prison those whose cases we have indeed bungled, our president, who claims to know justice better than anyone, has released another dozen of his well-connected friends caught one way or another with their fingers in the till. These “white collar” criminals have hurt people and ruined lives, even if not with guns or bombs. Making a joke of the justice system by presuming to transcend it hurts everyone and leaves us in a less safe, chaos-driven world whose only rule is Follow the Money.