5 ms·

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

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTCbpWmPzTY&t=0s)

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
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.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > 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?
  - TheRealPomax 5y ago
    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.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    My experience is that right now, most loan officers can scarcely fog a mirror.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  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.
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  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.
  - sealjam 5y ago
    Are you in the UK? I too noticed how much emphasis there's been in the commentary in this tournament on players being "cute" with tactical fouls.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    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?)
koolba 5y ago
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.
- plank_time 5y ago
  They are using the same chemicals that batters use so it might be impossible to detect
  - drdavid 5y ago
    The sticky stuff on the bat shouldn't cover more than 16" from the handle. It may be 14", but I'm pretty sure it's 16". So, while some could get on the ball, it's not very likely and it'd not be in very high quantity. Wait, no... I decided to check before hitting the button and I'm too lazy to edit the above. I misremembered. It's 18". (Section 3.02) https://content.mlb.com/documents/2/2/4/305750224/2019_Official_Baseball_Rules_FINAL_.pdf https://content.mlb.com/documents/2/2/4/305750224/2019_Offic... (That's actually 2019, but I doubt it has changed. The rule has been there forever.) 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.
    - ghayes 5y ago
      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.
      - dreamcompiler 5y ago
        Assuming strikeouts with no fouls. Which is probably true much of the time with these unhittable pitches.
dgfitz 5y ago
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”
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Article already covers this, including the normal use of rosin. This is not that.
eru 5y ago
Eh, sports is an entertainment industry. 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.
- javajosh 5y ago
  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.
  - eru 5y ago
    I mention GoT not because characters in GoT did immoral things, that's indeed fictional. I mention GoT, because the quality of entertainment dropped. I guess I should have taken eg the Simpsons as a example. (Their quality dropped a lot after the first few seasons.)
- acomjean 5y ago
  Except it’s different in that you can gamble on it.
aidenn0 5y ago
Cheating has a long history in baseball. There was a point where a large fraction of players were on amphetamine. Gaylord Perry semi-openly used Vaseline on the ball, to the point where he offered to do a commercial for Vaseline. He's now in the Hall of Fame. McGwire missed the HoF by a mile due to the steroids scandal, but Bonds is likely to miss it by a slim margin. Ty Cobb was famous for shady base running tactics, so this isn't new
- Syzygies 5y ago
  I couldn't find "shady" but this one is funny: https://www.vintagedetroit.com/blog/2013/08/03/ty-cobbs-most-daring-baserunning-maneuver-defeated-the-yankees/ https://www.vintagedetroit.com/blog/2013/08/03/ty-cobbs-most... 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: https://youtu.be/-bVUWNj5XrU https://youtu.be/-bVUWNj5XrU
  - Loughla 5y ago
    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.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-24-1909-an-honest-slide-by-ty-cobb-or-malicious-intent/ https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-24-1909-an-honest-sli... 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.
vl 5y ago
> which is objectively worse for everyone 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.
nicoburns 5y ago
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.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

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.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> 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?
- TheRealPomax 5y ago
  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.
- thrower123 5y ago
  My experience is that right now, most loan officers can scarcely fog a mirror.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
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.
oarsinsync 5y ago
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.
- sealjam 5y ago
  Are you in the UK? I too noticed how much emphasis there's been in the commentary in this tournament on players being "cute" with tactical fouls.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  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?)

koolba 5y ago

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.

plank_time 5y ago
They are using the same chemicals that batters use so it might be impossible to detect
- drdavid 5y ago
  The sticky stuff on the bat shouldn't cover more than 16" from the handle. It may be 14", but I'm pretty sure it's 16". So, while some could get on the ball, it's not very likely and it'd not be in very high quantity. Wait, no... I decided to check before hitting the button and I'm too lazy to edit the above. I misremembered. It's 18". (Section 3.02) https://content.mlb.com/documents/2/2/4/305750224/2019_Official_Baseball_Rules_FINAL_.pdf https://content.mlb.com/documents/2/2/4/305750224/2019_Offic... (That's actually 2019, but I doubt it has changed. The rule has been there forever.) 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.
  - ghayes 5y ago
    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.
    - dreamcompiler 5y ago
      Assuming strikeouts with no fouls. Which is probably true much of the time with these unhittable pitches.

dgfitz 5y ago

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”

BoorishBears 5y ago
Article already covers this, including the normal use of rosin. This is not that.

eru 5y ago

Eh, sports is an entertainment industry. 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.

javajosh 5y ago
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.
- eru 5y ago
  I mention GoT not because characters in GoT did immoral things, that's indeed fictional. I mention GoT, because the quality of entertainment dropped. I guess I should have taken eg the Simpsons as a example. (Their quality dropped a lot after the first few seasons.)
acomjean 5y ago
Except it’s different in that you can gamble on it.

aidenn0 5y ago

Cheating has a long history in baseball. There was a point where a large fraction of players were on amphetamine. Gaylord Perry semi-openly used Vaseline on the ball, to the point where he offered to do a commercial for Vaseline. He's now in the Hall of Fame. McGwire missed the HoF by a mile due to the steroids scandal, but Bonds is likely to miss it by a slim margin. Ty Cobb was famous for shady base running tactics, so this isn't new

Syzygies 5y ago
I couldn't find "shady" but this one is funny: https://www.vintagedetroit.com/blog/2013/08/03/ty-cobbs-most-daring-baserunning-maneuver-defeated-the-yankees/ https://www.vintagedetroit.com/blog/2013/08/03/ty-cobbs-most... 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: https://youtu.be/-bVUWNj5XrU https://youtu.be/-bVUWNj5XrU
- Loughla 5y ago
  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.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-24-1909-an-honest-slide-by-ty-cobb-or-malicious-intent/ https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-24-1909-an-honest-sli... 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.

vl 5y ago

> which is objectively worse for everyone 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.

nicoburns 5y ago

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.