Deception in Sports

Abstract

Herein I address and extend the sparse literature on deception in sports, specifically, Kathleen Pearson’s Deception, Sportsmanship, and Ethics and Mark J. Hamilton’s There’s No Lying in Baseball (Wink, Wink). On a Kantian foundation, I argue that attempts to deceive officials, such as framing pitches in baseball, are morally unacceptable because they necessarily regard others (e.g., the umpire) as incompetent and as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. More dramatically I argue, contrary to Pearson and Hamilton, that some forms of competitor-to-competitor deception (which Pearson labels ‘strategic deception’) are similarly unacceptable. Specifically, I offer a ‘principle of caustic deceit’ according to which any strategic deception that divorces a game from its constitutive skills is morally untoward and ought to be met with negative social pressure at least, and/or legislated out of existence. The problem with these forms of strategic deception is that they treat one’s opponents, again in the Kantian sense, as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends.

Keywords:

• deception
• lying
• baseball
• officiating
• ethics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am happy to thank J.S. Russell and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as my former colleagues at the Ohio High School Athletic Association, Brian Day and Paul Seiter; two excellent baseball aficionados who enthusiastically debated my thesis and thereby refined this paper.

Notes

1. As Editor, J.S. Russell has asked why motive has not figured more prominently in my Kantian approach. The answer, which is salient at this point, is that I wish to avoid the very difficult assessment of the concept. Russell takes the same position in his ‘The Concept of a Call in Baseball’, saying, ‘admittedly, the intent to deceive…will often be difficult to assess’ (1997, 31). What is the catcher’s motive in pulling/framing pitches? I cannot say with certainty; though I have a pretty good idea that it is to manipulate the umpire. If I am vulnerable for making this assumption, so be it. I happen to think that it is a safe one and to the extent that I am right my argument is all the more forceful. An ill motive, in the Kantian sense, makes the pull/frame more morally bitter.

2. Hamilton references Ethan Allen’s Major League Baseball: Techniques and Tactics (1938), which details the intricacies of both framing/pulling pitches (136).

3. Please understand that I am not suggesting that officials are infallible, quite the opposite. I am merely saying that it is not in the jurisdiction of a given game’s players to evaluate, assess, or influence the work of the officials.

4. Umpires already make this kind of assessment when they make discretionary decisions regarding whether or not a fielder has caught a ball that he or she then subsequently drops while transitioning the ball from glove-hand to throwing-hand, which happens often in double-play scenarios, especially, or in any case where a fielder must quickly catch and throw the ball, generally.

5. In speaking of ‘harm to the game’ I wish to avoid the meta-physical problem of how an inanimate social construct (e.g., a game) can be made worse-off. That is, I am not implying that baseball (for example) has self-interest. Rather, I mean something much more like what Simon (2010) or Robert Butcher and Angela Schneider (1998) have in mind in their discussions of broad internalism; that is, what best serves the institution of the game. William J. Morgan’s (2007) application of Harry Frankfort’s work might help here as well; because games are institutions that so many of us care so deeply about it may very well be the community members, not the inanimate construct of the game, that are worse-off when the game is ill-served.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S.P. Morris

S.P. Morris, Miami University, Kinesiology and Health, 106 Phillips Hall, Oxford, Ohio 45056 USA.