Ethics 101

If you're like most baseball fans I know, Gaylord Perry's presence in the Hall of Fame doesn't bother you, but Barry Bonds' induction would send you into fits of apoplexy. You laugh at Graig Nettles' Superball incident, but will hold Sammy Sosa's cork against him for the rest of your life. You have no problem with the home team's grounds crew keeping the grass long when a small ball team comes to town, but you'd demand a Congressional investigation if you learned that they moved the fences back in the dark of night before a homestand against a bunch of sluggers.

Sure, you may try to construct some black-and-white reasons for your inconsistency on these points, but ultimately it comes down to your gut, your emotions, and your biases. I'm the same way. Ethics is a hard enough business on its own, so it's totally understandable if the passion and nostalgia of baseball serves to flummox our moral compasses even more than they're usually flummoxed.

Thank goodness, then, that someone is around to study this stuff academically. That someone is Professor Willy Stern, who taught a course in Baseball Ethics this past semester at Carleton College. The coolest thing about it? Lectures weren't the centerpiece. Instead, everyone in the class got to play ethics police:

During the intensive course, students were given, by way of assigned readings, a list of 133 specific ethical incidents throughout baseball's history. Over the six-week course, students were required to rank these incidents from least ethically acceptable to most ethically acceptable. Quick example: Which was worse-the murder of minor-league ump Samuel White in 1899 by a player who didn't like one of the ump's calls and smashed the poor man over the head with his bat, or the decision to exclude African-Americans from organized baseball for decades?

The best part is that, thanks to The Hardball Times, you get to play too.