It’s Never Too Early To Get The Sticky Stuff Out Of Our Lives

When I was an associate editor at Sports Illustrated, I was part of the team that covered the steroid scandal that was ruining Major League Baseball as a generation of batters who, only a few years earlier, had normally athletic bodies transformed themselves into hulks and began annihilating the home run record books. They weren’t just hitting more homers, they were belting them into different zip codes. That there was a problem in baseball was not up for debate, for all we had to do was witness the remarkable speed with which players acquired their bulging, Popeye-like forearms. I felt it was important to shine light, because I loved the game and still do. But it was painful.

A couple years ago, I sighed when cheating in baseball took a high-tech turn as the Houston Astros and other teams were discovered to have been stealing the catcher’s signs and using them to tip off batters. “Stealing signs” had been going on for years, with some teams going so far as to dress their players up like fans to sit in the stands and radio pitch calls into the dugout where they would be relayed to the batter. The Astros replaced these human spies with electronic spying for faster and more efficient cheating.

The Astros’ competition raised a great hue and cry against this practice, especially the New York Yankees who played them during the 2019 playoffs. Just as it is hard to overstate the outrage the Yankees expressed at their opponent’s bald face tactics, it is equally ironic that the Yankees now find themselves front and center of baseball’s latest cheating scandal: foreign substances. For those who don’t share my love of the game, foreign substances include something called Spider Tack, super glues and a host of secret concoctions cooked up in secret team labs and used by pitchers to improve their grip, improving their ability to put spin on the ball. The practice of doctoring the ball—in front of the whole world, no less—has tilted the balance of power in favor of pitchers over batters to such a degree that a formerly mediocre pitcher such as the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole has rubbed, dabbed and gooped himself into a practically unhittable, strike-throwing machine.

As with steroids, the problem with foreign substance is not “controversial” but proven. “I don’t know quite how to answer that,” was Cole’s reply when he was asked if he uses a sticky paste called Spider Tack. Of course he uses, and not only him. Just check out YouTube footage of all the pitchers who’ve been busted for cheating.

Major League Baseball has reacted to the problem by drafting new rules that introduce stronger measures for enforcing the league’s decades long (and wholly unsuccessful) ban on foreign substance. The new rules require major league umpires to conduct random checks and punish offenders swiftly and regularly.

I hope it works because demographics already work against baseball’s slow, pastoral pace. Boring, low-scoring games of strikeouts are the last thing the game needs.

Nobody’s saying we should all be liable for self-regulating our every foot fault, line call, hand ball, double dribble or illegal block in the heat of competition. That’s what umpires and referees are for. All of us have cheated this way before and hopefully didn’t bellyache too loudly when we were called out for it. But these foibles didn’t define us as people or competitors.

Nor do the disgraced figures of sport alone—one thinks of Lance Armstrong, Tonya Harding and Marion Jones—cause the most damage. Systemic cheating is the main culprit because it’s like a virus which, if not confronted aggressively early on, spreads through the population until it constitutes the new normal. And speaking of viruses, during the COVID-19 pandemic the U.S. experienced a pandemic of a different sort as remote learning opened up new avenues for cheating on exams and a record number of college students were discovered taking advantage of these avenues.

So, we’ve got a cheating problem on our hands, and that’s a problem. Cheating might produce winners but it doesn’t produce excellence. Are you excellent when you win doctors’ endorsements for your drug after paying them off? Are you really demonstrating financial excellence when you shield your corporation’s money in offshore havens and avoid your share of tax burden? The challenge we each face in our work is not to take the easy way out and cheat because we think everyone else is doing it too.

Competition is good when it produces greatness, not winners at any cost.