This is good parable about how corruption becomes systemic. When integrity, and acting in good faith, becomes a weakness, it forces everyone to cheat or get cut. And on a larger scale, it gives integrity a bad name, a foolish position adopted only by suckers and losers who aren't willing to do whatever it takes to win. And so we descend even further into the cynical, amoral corner of the Nash equilibrium which is objectively worse for everyone.
The league should give a mild suspension to everyone doing this now, with harsher suspensions in the future, and the introduction of consistent, rigorous testing. They need to make it easy to do the right thing.
(Interestingly, a similar problem exists in the ping pong world. Players apply grippy, volatile chemicals to their paddles to increase grip on the ball. It got so bad that tournaments started doing gas analysis and sequestering paddles until match start to curb the practice. Imagine if the MLB did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTCbpWmPzTY&t=0s)
I like your framing, because this dynamic occurs in so many places. Pretty much everyone was doping in cycling during the Lance Armstrong era - if you weren't, it's highly unlikely you would have been remotely competitive. Similarly, there were tons of mortgage brokers in the mid 00s who could see that everything would end badly - but if you were an exec at a mortgage company and weren't willing to give a loan to anyone who could fog a mirror, you'd greatly underperform your competition in the short term, and you'd be canned long before the end game became apparent.
Euro 2020 football competition in progress, brings two more examples.
Commentators talking about how beautiful and artful some players abilities to consistently foul their opponents just enough to stop play, but without getting a yellow card. Players who cynically dive, roll around on the floor acting at every opportunity, or honestly try to claim a corner / throw in should be theirs even when they’re clearly the last to make contact with the ball before it goes out of play.
I only vaguely remember a time when calling it “the beautiful game” didn’t seem ironic.
The need to win at any cost has become paramount and pervasive.
I was quite surprised too, yesterday how the commentators appeared to be condoning the fouls. Although the Croatian side fouled more so... (also, is it just me or do national teams foul more then domestic clubs?)
Back in that era I worked for a Wells Fargo joint venture doing credit investigations. Our clients were LOs, and my job was to research negative items on credit reports. If I could get the creditor to say one of a set of things, it would allow me to strip the item from the report and then resubmit it to the big 3 for rescoring. Basically I turned loan refusals into acceptances.
It became clear to me quite quickly the business's QA process was designed for deniability, not to actually find fraud. The highest performing person in my unit never made a single phone call all day. He'd claim he'd been at it so long he had contacts at all the creditors he could just fax. What he was really doing was simply fabricating his work.
The most pathetic thing about it is doing the job straight up was quite easy. I spent about 2 hours a day on work, and the rest doing whatever I wanted on the web. The negativity of all this actually inspired me to shift careers to coding, so I used my remaining time there to learn a ton, mostly reading CS papers.
I'd say the worst institutionalized nonsense I saw there was WF's "Alternative credit" reports.
Here the borrowers would supply 3 references of someone they'd paid installment payments over time. Typical examples were jewelry stores, small used car lots, etc. It was immediately clear to me most of these were straight up fabricated. I'd often call someone, they'd answer with an ordinary family name, then I'd follow the script and say who I was calling from, and they'd immediately switch modes and say "Oh yes, this is actually Shady Dave's Used Cars. $Borrower bought a car from me. They always paid as agreed" often without me having mentioned the borrower's name yet. In fact the wording was so consistent it was absolutely clear the LOs had told them exactly what to say. But under the rules I was supposed to follow, that counted.
At the time I knew it was fraud, but was somewhat ambivalent about it, as nearly all of these people were low income minorities or immigrants that face a great deal of discrimination in the loan application process. Once I was a bit older I understood better and regretted that ambivalence.
When the thunderclouds started to appear near 2008, I was not surprised in the slightest.
More recently when I read headlines about WF branch managers opening 2nd accounts in their customer's name without request nor consent, I was also totally unsurprised.
The corruption is deliberate and is instituted top down, just in a way that's more wink, nod, and shaping of processes to create obvious opportunities than overt. I'm most familiar with WF, but I'm confident this is the industry norm.
I think people generally underestimate the scale of institutionalized corruption, even in supposedly low corruption nations, of this form, and how much of a loss it is to the economy and the ordinary person.
I'm not going to pretend I'm smart enough to think up some technocratic solution.
> I'd often call someone, they'd answer with an ordinary family name, then I'd follow the script and say who I was calling from, and they'd immediately switch modes and say "Oh yes, this is actually Shady Dave's Used Cars. $Borrower bought a car from me. They always paid as agreed" often without me having mentioned the borrower's name yet. In fact the wording was so consistent it was absolutely clear the LOs had told them exactly what to say.
Sounds legit! lmao. For pete's sake, this could have been a story straight up from the Big Short.
Have you watched Too Big to Fail by HBO films? It has some great actors (Paul Giamatti fan club here!) and is really entertaining and well done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXQ5VfBTNpg
> If you were an exec at a mortgage company and weren't willing to give a loan to anyone who could fog a mirror, you'd greatly underperform your competition in the short term, and you'd be canned long before the end game became apparent.
I would have assumed that loan-officer regulation would have meant that wouldn't happen. How many LOs kept their accreditation after the crash?
With hundreds of thousands of loan officers throughout the country, you'd need substantially more people hunting down regulation violations than there were. Or are.
The home plate argument is so absorbing that after stealing third, Cobb can pretend to join the argument. They'd forgot to call time; he scored.
"El Mago" Javier Báez would be this season's equivalent, with a gift for getting his opponents to forget how to play the game. He recently turned an easy out at first into a pointless rundown, so his teammate could steal home:
My opinion is the balance of the evidence shows that Cobb played within the rules, but he certainly took advantage of his reputation of being dirty to make steals that other players might not have succeeded in.
Gaylord Perry (clearly not the most neutral party) claimed the something similar about his Vaseline ball; he said that he got a lot of psychological advantage by pretending to doctor the ball by overtly reaching for odd places before the delivery.
Perhaps I should revise my earlier comment to point out the long tradition of gamesmanship in baseball. If you get a (deserved or not) reputation for cheating, how legitimate is it to use that for gamesmanship? In baseball, doing so seems to be clearly part of the culture.
Javy is not the best player in baseball, but he is by far the greatest agent of chaos and the most fun to watch. He's been perfecting the head first swim slide, where he goes around the base leading with his left (inside) hand, then pulls it back and reaches across with his right while the defender swipes at an arm that's not there to try to tag him out.
That Baez play is genuinely why I love baseball, occasionally. That's just so good, his teammates are so happy, and the other team is immediately flustered (as indicated by the massive errors immediately after). That type of thing reminds you that it's just a game.
> Ty Cobb was famous for shady base running tactics, so this isn't new
I've never heard anything about Cobb being shady or breaking rules. He was known to be hyper-aggressive and have an angry, paranoid personality; he was always five steps ahead of the competition; but I never heard of him cheating.
> Gaylord Perry
There are many unwritten rules and exceptions. Perry wasn't 'cheating' like the steroid users. He toed the line of the unwritten exceptions that everyone, and every serious fan, knew.
> Cheating has a long history in baseball.
So does playing by the rules and enforcement of the rules. Arguably the beginning of modern baseball was when the owners hired a federal judge as Commissioner in ~1920 to clean up the game, and Landis promptly banned several star players. Pete Rose was banned for gambling.
The statement is meaningless: People have cheated in everything, and followed the rules in everything. People have committed crime everywhere, but that saying Palo Alto has a long history of murder isn't meaningful.
It’s seems straightforward to have random testing of the balls throughout a game. All the umpire needs to do is ask the catcher to hand it over. If they’re suspecting this is happening and they’re not doing it, it’s intentional.
Does the public find the defense heavy game more enjoyable? I’d imagine more hits and homers would liven things up.
The point remains the same. Ideally, you'd be contacting the ball much further up the bat. There still might be some transfer, but probably not a whole lot.
You could also collect every strikeout ball and put them in a bag marked by pitcher for analysis. After a few games, you could quite easily see which had uncharacteristically higher tar on them versus baseline. That is, if the MLB actually cared.
Pitchers are putting the substance on every ball. Nearly all strikeouts are caught directly by the catcher, and the 3rd strike is the hardest to get, so it would be a very good sample indeed.
Nearly every ball touched by a bat is tossed out of the game--foul balls, balls in the dirt, balls that get tossed back by the pitcher. Games typically use between 84 and 120 balls. It would be trivial to detect if the ump did a check on every ball in play or after random outs. It's not like the umps can't see the same action the batter sees.
To play devils advocate, the batter also wants to know the pitcher has control of the ball. It has always been an unspoken rule that pitchers did this in colder weather, because the ball is harder to grip in cold weather. A batter would prefer to know the pitcher won’t unintentionally hit them with a 96 mph fastball.
I will completely agree this has gone too far. There are a lot of unspoken rules in baseball which to me is a feature not a bug. This has gone too far, but there are more layers than just “this is against the rules”
All the drama about striving to be better, and fairplay and cheating, is all just to entertain.
So this scandal is about as important to real world morals as the disappointing last seasons of Game of Thrones.
Scandals and drama, up to a point, increase engagement. (But that has to be managed carefully.)
Btw, I'm not saying that anyone in the industry has to consciously think like that. It's just what the competition with other forms of entertainment rewards.
The Cheetah doesn't have to understand how it runs fast, it just has to run fast. The entrepreneur doesn't necessarily have to understand the customer, we just need enough people trying so that some of them deliver what people are willing to pay for---even if those trying have the wrong idea about what they are doing works.
Betraying the trust of others in any context is wrong, and has moral implications beyond the immediate harm to the counter-party.
Your GoT example is nonsensical: it ignores the difference between fictional immorality and real-world immorality. Your assertion that this article is mere spectacle is baseless. It seems to me that you give no weight at all to betrayal, and I believe that has real implications for those considering taking you on as a counter-party in any context. Heck, I'd probably avoid playing board games with someone who espoused these kinds of views; apart from cheaters being less fun to play with, I find the "If you get away with it, it's fine" attitude to trigger a strong feeling of disgust, akin to the stench of fresh shit.
But why in this case it’s worse? Just allow sticky stuff to be used, compensate with ball design. Everyone will use it, no need to test and worry, no cheating scandals.
Reminds me of current insane F1 regulations while there exists simple way to solve most problems widely used in other series: rules that specify size of air inlets, which naturally limits power of the engine.
Yes. This is also why pricing in externalities is so important in capitalist economies: otherwise honest players in the market can't compete and only the worst companies survive.
The league should give a mild suspension to everyone doing this now, with harsher suspensions in the future, and the introduction of consistent, rigorous testing. They need to make it easy to do the right thing.
(Interestingly, a similar problem exists in the ping pong world. Players apply grippy, volatile chemicals to their paddles to increase grip on the ball. It got so bad that tournaments started doing gas analysis and sequestering paddles until match start to curb the practice. Imagine if the MLB did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTCbpWmPzTY&t=0s)