Baseball is For Cheaters: A Guide for the Perplexed

How Can An Ethicist Cheer for the Astros?

Welcome to the best time of the year: playoff baseball season. Time to warm up your Christmas forgiveness a little early.

How An Ethicist Came to Love World Series Cheaters

Sometime around 2014, as my family and I were preparing to leave Texas for Florida, I realized that, after living in Texas for nearly a decade and a half, I had zero Texas baseball allegiances. Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, I was in a bit of a black hole for natural allegiances: for a time, I followed the San Francisco Giants (because the minor league team was a farm team for them for years), and I married a woman from Michigan, meaning that I adopted a love for the Tigers that they have not warranted since their high point in the first decade of the 2000s.

One of my longtime roommates had been an Astros fan for decades, and it was pitiful: every year, in fantasy baseball, he would draft only Astros, and predictibly, finish last in our league. The Rangers, who went to the World Series twice while I lived in Texas the first time, had a better run of things, but I could never bring myself to cheer for them. For starters, their stadium, while a classic open air stadium, was murderous in the summer: you would come back with a sunburn or get carted out with heat stroke, guaranteed. But the most powerful objection was their management was the worst. Year after year, their owners would chase the most mediocre, overpaid pitching. I couldn’t throw myself in behind such unwarranted mediocrity.

The Astros, however, in 2014, were terrible. They had a great farm system, with some amazing talent on the way, but in 2013, had finished last in the division, losing twice as many games as they won. Who doesn’t love that kind of losing?

In 2014, their farm system began to pay off, as young new talent joined some existing solid players, and within five years, they were the team to beat. It was a fun time to be on the bandwagon.

And then, 2017 happened. The Astros made the World Series, won the World Series, and soon, word got out that cheating had happened. Through using a complicated series of cameras, relay systems, and a trash can, the team communicated with batters to tell them what pitch was coming, giving their batters an edge on the competition. In the aftermath, in 2020, the General Manager and manager were fired, several top draft picks were forfeited, and several others players were traded off. It’s a matter of debate which players were in on it, and who knew what when, but in effect the punishment handed down—particularly the draft picks—meant that they would feel this punishment for years to come.

The Long Legacy of Cheating: Baseball’s Sub-Pasttime

Since then, nearly the entire organization is different: there’s hardly any players who are on the team who were there in 2017, and yet, the stigma remains. You hear it in the catcalls by the Phillies, the Astros’ opponents in their second World Series win in 2022. The Astros’ prime crime here was not just stealing their opponents signals, which allowed them to know what pitches were coming: it was their use of the technology to do it. Stealing signals is a time-honored tradition in baseball: if you pay attention to the signals coming from coaches to players, you can figure out the patterns. There’s nothing wrong with puzzling it out.

But using a camera to see the pitchers’ hand positioning, and to see the catchers’ call: that’s straight out. Now, to be sure, knowing what pitch is coming won’t make you hit it: you don’t know where or how fast the pitch is coming, and hitting a major league fastball at 100 MPH—EVEN IF YOU KNOW IT’S COMING—is no joke. But what’s surprising to me is how we have collectively memory-holed how common these kinds of events are:

Between 2007-2010, the Phillies were credibly accused of the same behavior. Fun fact: the Phillies used mechanical means to steal signs back in 1897—with hidden wires and relay systems and everything! The Rangers? They were named in an expose in 2017 which demonstrated that it wasn’t just the Astros using this tech, not to mention their open-secret use of ball doctoring. And let’s not forget the steroid era: the use of steroids—both from those who were the big offenders (including Rangers star Rafael Palmeiro, and maybe Ivan Rodriguez), and those we’ll never know—altered all team fortunes irrevocably. There’s no unwinding the damage.

How We Go On: The Mysteries of Forgiveness

The point here is not to say that everyone cheats, but that, somehow, fans find a way to forgive their own teams, but to remember the sins of their opponents forever.¹ There will not be a day when I go to an Astros game and someone doesn’t bring up 2017, any more than one can over a century later say “Chicago White Sox” and someone doesn’t bring up the 1919 World Series.²

The tribal dynamics of guilt and forgiveness are familiar ones, playing out in trivial ways like baseball, and endlessly cyclical ways in families and nations: we forgive more readily our team. But this gets complicated: like nations, the current grievances in baseball aren’t because of the present, but past actors conjured up today.

Case in point: when I watch the Astros now, it’s an entirely different team.³ And yet I’m with them. My allegiance to them changes with the trades and with the management shifts, and I feel sorrow when good players leave, and happy to see Justin Verlander back in orange again. But I don’t cheer for players so much as I cheer for a team. And yet: the team I cheer for now is entirely different. The uniforms, the players, the names: all has changed. The institution itself remains the continuity, long after the faces have all been swapped out.

And so, here’s my thesis:

It’s institutions that we don’t forgive, because institutions—unlike particular people—are characterized by continuity. They are bearers of histories which are complicated, and which they would like to disavow, long after the bad actors are gone. Their guilt or innocence carries with them, to the end of the age, and there’s no getting away from it. Individuals we forgive, but institutions get to bear the shame forever.

So, what do you do?

A good version of this is good old fashioned forgiveness: coming to terms with the sins of the ones you love, and going forward in a process of repentance, of changing out the rot until there’s wholeness again. But the bad version of this a pernicious kind of dualism: the characterizing of one’s own team as pure and all other teams as bearing endless sins is not just tribalism: it’s the search for purity and the belief that institutional purity is possible. Theologians know this by the name “Manicheeanism”, the belief that separating oneself from all things impure is a possibility for creatures in this world. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about endlessly cycling through churches or belief systems in search of one that doesn’t have histories of abuse: the search for purity is in vain, and to assume that you’ll find a part of the world untouched by sin is delusional.

This is why baseball is the best: it teaches you forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a virtue that you have to cultivate as a baseball fan, not only because your team will always disappoint you on the field, but they’ll break faith with you in the pursuit to win. The point here is not to quit watching sports, but to ask the ones you love to repent, and to be better, even if that means bearing penalties that shape the thing you love for decades to come. And so, as the Astros go back to Arlington, two games down in their attempt for the chance to go back to the World Series, I will continue to cheer, because God loves a repentant cheater.

And so should you.

1. How a Phillies fan can look themselves in the mirror is beyond me, but it seems pretty evident that an Astros team with almost no continuity from 2017 is pretty clean.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal

3. Minus their stalwart second baseman Jose Altuve. His role in the cheating scandal of 2017 is up for debate. Same story with Alex Bregman at 3rd. See the last link for their apologies: the whole phenomenon of apologies in public is a whole other story, tied up in lawyering, legal constraints, and public relations. I think it’s impossible to know what their remorse looks like on the surface because any public statement is so tightly calibrated to both acknowledge wrongdoing and limit liability.