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Fools, Fixed Games and the Future of Our Nation

7/12/2014

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PictureReggie Jackson fools the umpires into thinking he unintentionally interfered with a play in the 1978 World Series.
Years ago, I played Little League baseball.  Those were good times.  I was a pretty good player and I played on some winning teams.  I learned about teamwork and sportsmanship.

I also learned a little about the dark side of some people.  Not the players.  They were kids like me, getting exposure to the kind of competition we would be accustomed to years later.

It was the parents, and specifically, some of the coaches.  I will never forget what happened one season.

In Little League we had split seasons.  There were two halves.  Teams competed to win at least one of the half seasons to assure a spot in the championship. If a team won both halves, there was no championship – that team was declared the winner.

My team lost the first half narrowly to our rivals.  In the second half, we were poised to win and face our rivals in the championship.

Then something happened.

Our rivals were set to play a game against another team.  My brother, who was on my team, and I went to see the game.  We hoped our rivals would beat the other team, which was challenging us for the second half.

We saw our rivals take the field.  Some guy who had never pitched the entire season took the mound.  He threw pitches in the dirt to a catcher who had barely gotten the equipment on!  We tried to find our rivals’ best player, who had clobbered several home runs that season.  He was not on the field: he was on the bench.

The other team came to bat.  The first hitter grounded a ball toward the second baseman, who started to step toward it.  Then he stopped and watched the ball roll by.  The next batter popped the ball into the outfield.  Two outfielders looked at each other and laughed as the ball dropped.

The game went on like this.  My brother and I watched for a while, stunned that no one was stopping it.  We went home and told my dad, who called the league commissioner’s office and relayed our account.  The commissioner said he would get back to him.  He never did.

Who would throw a Little League game?

People who put their self-interest before respect for the rules.

As I grew older, I realized this tactic was quite common.  Friends shoplifted.  Classmates cheated on tests. Co-workers embezzled money.

And this was small fish, compared to the prizes at stake in our society.

Those who deceive and flaunt rules will always have the advantage.  With no concern for ethics, they can achieve their goals using every option available.

So why do we, who are aware of these deceptions, bother to bring them to the attention of others?

Because life is a lot like baseball.

We may hit the ball or we may strike out.

But we won't let someone make a fool of us.
SEND THIS TO SOMEONE FRUSTRATED WITH OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM!

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You Could Tell the Teams without a Scorecard

4/10/2014

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Picture
Baseball in the 1970s Comes to Life in Dean T. Hartwell's new e-book! - Press the picture to read it for free!
“A Fair Fight”

When I played Little League baseball, they always made us say a pledge.  “I will play fair and strive to win, but win or lose I will always do my best.”

The pledge didn’t mean a whole lot. 
Until I understood what it meant.

My team, the Giants, were playing well one season. We beat the Cardinals, our biggest rivals, in a game and we clinched a spot in the playoffs.  Or so we thought.

The league rules said everyone got to play. In each six inning game, each player had to play at least three  innings.  One of the scorekeepers noticed that one of our players had only played two innings.

“Rules, shmools. We beat them fair and square,” I told my parents.  They thought otherwise and pointed out that if our player HAD played three innings, the outcome might have been different.

I thought about this game when I sat down and watched a playoff game some time later.  The New York Yankees played the fifth and final game of the 1977 ALCS at Kansas City.  The Yankees and the home team Royals had gained respect for one another and were beginning what would be a bitter and lasting rivalry on the field.  They would eventually face each other in the playoffs four times in five years!

In the bottom of the first inning, Royal superstar George Brett drove a Ron Guidry pitch over the head of center fielder Mickey Rivers.  Brett rounded second and slid hard into third base with a triple.

As Brett got up, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles kicked Brett in the jaw!  Brett responded with a punch to Nettles’ head.  The Yankee players on the field and in the dugout near third base got to the fray before Brett’s teammates and some of them tackled Brett to the ground.

The Royal fans must have had a collective heart attack: if their best player were to be injured, the team would hardly stand a chance to win the game and go to the World Series.

Then, completely unnoticed by even the Yankee announcers, one of the Yankees, catcher Thurman Munson, lay down on top of Brett against the other Yankees!  Brett would later say that Munson told him something at the bottom of the pile, “No one’s going to take any cheap shots.”

From Munson’s point of view, it just didn’t look like a fair fight.  He obviously wanted to win the game but he wouldn’t allow his teammates to achieve victory in an unethical way. Now I could finally see the point my parents were telling me about playing fair in Little League.


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We Are Them

5/8/2013

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There is only us

We all live in society

Some of us have lots of power and wealth

Most of us do not

Those with power and wealth want to keep it and get more

Power and wealth is attractive and who among us turns it down?

Few of us would

Few of us pass up opportunities to make more money or to gain more power

Are we that much different from those in power?

We are as quick to judge as we are to dismiss the powerful

We have seen the disguise of the powerful

The lies, the fall guys, the alibis

Who among us does not cover up things we do?

The powerful simply have more to cover

There is little power when truths are inconveniently revealed

So some of us have power

And some of us want to change those in power

But we do not know the powerful

We barely know ourselves

So nothing changes
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Would You Follow an Illegal Order?

4/6/2013

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Would you follow an illegal order?

Experiments, such as the Milgram Experiment, have concluded that people will break their own moral code if conditioned under certain circumstances.  In that experiment, the person running it would tell the subject to ask questions of another person.  Upon receiving incorrect answers from the other person, the subject would be told to order shocks to be given to them.

Unbeknownst to the subject, the other person was an actor secretly helping those who ran the experiment.  Separated by a wall from the subject, the actor pretended to feel serious pain from the shocks.  Overwhelmingly, the subjects, at some point told that they would not be held responsible for the harm, would continue to administer the shocks.

In a municipality recently, the head of Code Enforcement made a remark we have probably all heard frequently.  When asked why he did not charge a city official with permit violations, he said he was “just following orders” from supervisors who urged him not to pursue the matter.

Before we make any moral judgments of those discussed here who went along with actions they knew or should have known were wrong, we could start by asking ourselves:

What would we do?

Few people are comfortable with the idea of standing alone in advocating a point of view.

Few people are willing to risk repercussion from authority.

Few people have the ability to see themselves as part of the orders they carry out, especially when given the choice to displace the blame on the ones who gave the orders.

The morality of an order depends upon the followers’ willingness to equate their responsibility to that of those who give them.


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