Gambling and Cheating

So what’s worse for the game? Is it gambling like Pete Rose did a few years ago, or is it cheating? I guess when it comes to cheating it depends on your definition of what cheating is. Is it trying to find an unfair advantage or is it finding the loop holes before they close up? I think it also depends on the degree of cheating. I know cheating is cheating, no matter what you do, but isn’t there some difference between putting a little too much pine tar on the handle of your bat, and shooting some chemicals in your butt in a bathroom stall while someone stands guard? I think that there is a huge difference. Didn’t they used to say if you weren’t cheating, then you weren’t trying? Doesn’t cheating happen in every other sport ever played? NASCAR teams get fined all the time for cheating, and sometimes it’s not even cheating because there’s not even a rule against it. You don’t know your cheating sometimes unless the officials tell you what you’re doing is wrong. At some point in hockey history, it was cheating for the goalie to leave his feet in order to stop a puck. Eventually so many people were doing it, they had to change the rules just so that the officials didn’t have to keep stopping the game to call penalties. These things and others like rubbing a little Vaseline on a baseball or sandpaper hidden in your ball cap are minor offences compared to the drug problems of today. They don’t even seem to be in the same league to me.

On the other hand, gambling is just as wrong now as it was in 1918. Most people can’t see the harm in a little gambling on a baseball game. Well, if you have nothing to do with the game except for being a fan, there is nothing wrong. But if you are a player or a manager or a member of an organization then it becomes a whole other story. If these people gamble, even if it’s on other teams, it slowly erodes the integrity of the game. The outcomes are now in question and when that happens, then the sport becomes nothing more than professional wrestling. Not that there’s anything wrong with professional wrestling, but I think anyone over the age of twelve knows that it’s not real. So why would people pay good money to see a contest of any sort that they weren’t sure was going to be decided on the field and the outcome wasn’t already decide? They wouldn’t, and neither would I. Then the records and stats of the past become irrelevant and meaningless because the stats of today are worthless. What’s the point of that? These players of the past weren’t perfect, I know that, but we have to be more careful to preserve a sport, a game that is more than a game. It is part of our national heritage. It’s what was always good about us, from the sports heroes’ volunteering to fight in WW II to the integration of the sport that came years before it was widely accepted throughout the country. It is about who we are and who we’ve been and how we got here. We can’t waste that.