Invisible Lines

(Here's another essay from my creative writing class.  The purpose of this assignment was to lead the reader to ponder a serious idea using an unconventional subject.  Drake actually gave me the initial idea.  Notice, we have 'foot notes' with this one.  Pretty cool, huh?)

 A few weeks ago Joel Peralta was ejected from a baseball game between the Nationals and the Rays after Davey Johnson, the Nationals' manager, asked the umpire to check Peralta's glove for ¹pine tar. The peculiarity is Peralta was on the Nationals' team last year presumably playing with a pine tarred glove. Joe Madden, the Ray's manager, called Johnson's alerting the umpire to the pine tar 'bush league', a dire insult in the baseball world.

Doctoring the ball is a time honored tradition in baseball, and a cat and mouse game between the pitcher, the umpire, and the opposing team. There's an unspoken admiration for the cheater's ingenuity. Pitcher Gaylord Perry was so notorious, Gene Mauch famously quipped, “He should be in the Hall of Fame with a tube of K-Y Jelly attached to his plaque.” Yet, in a 22 year baseball career, Perry was ejected from a game only one time for doctoring the ball. Joe Niekro's ²emery board fell out of his pocket when he was the National League's premier knuckleballer. Other pitchers have used heat balm, sand paper, vaseline, and of course, spit to affect the trajectory of the ball. Substances are concealed inside gloves, in pockets, at necklines of jerseys, on the lids of caps or coated on a pitcher's hand, yet, somehow Davey Johnson crossed some unseen line turning in the Nationals' former player.

Actively attempting to steal strategy is called 'part of the game' in baseball. To thwart lip readers, on field baseball conferences are now conducted behind fanned gloves. Players use every opportunity to steal the opposing team's pitching signals and batting signs. There are outs made each season when an duped player falls for the ³hidden ball trick or a decoy play.

There are slim penalties in baseball for on field trickery. A runner is granted a base if the umpire calls a balk. A runner can obscure a hit ball from a fielder, but if he touches the ball he's called out. There have been Academy Award performances pretending to catch a trapped ball, to be safe on base when actually out, or hit by the ball at the plate. No player ever turns to an umpire and says, “You got it wrong, I'm out”. There's no reward for honesty in baseball.

It's a matter of honor for a pitcher to hit a batter as retaliation if the batter shows up the pitcher⁴. The offended pitcher might then hit the next batter, or wait for the offender to reappear at the plate. Once a pitcher hits a player, then it's equally a matter of honor for the opposing pitcher to deliberately hit the star player of the other team. In certain circumstances, baseball managers actually pick the opposing player he wants hit. Usually, only after retaliations from both sides does the umpire warn the teams. The warning is the umpire's judgment rather than a rule. Unlike what happened to the New Orleans Saints, there's no journalistic expose' decrying the tactic of targeting players. There's only a blink of the eye or a slip of the finger difference between hitting a player in the shoulder blade and beaning⁵ him.

Baseball, America's pastime, reinforces the cherished belief it's only cheating if you get caught. Students caught finagling are not repentant. According to the Huff News, “Cheating seems to be a continual scourge of the SAT.” Plagiarism is on the rise on the college campus according to 89% of the college presidents surveyed on the subject by Time Magazine in 2011. Fiddling your tax form is OK, as long as the IRS doesn't know. Running red lights, or speeding is expedient when no one is watching. Fudging, finagling, turning a blind eye, those invisible moral lines are so very hard to see; just ask Davey Johnson.

1  Pine tar in a pitcher's glove is used to 'doctor' the ball which will affect the spin and dip of the ball as it's thrown to the batter.

2  Niekro used the emery board to scuff the ball between pitches. A scuffed knuckleball is totally unpredictable and very hard to hit even though it's not thrown very hard.

3  A fielder only 'pretends' to throw the ball back to the pitcher, and when the runner steps off the base, the fielder produces the hidden ball and tags him out.

4  An example of showing up the pitcher would be the hitter taunting the pitcher as he rounds the bases after hitting a homerun.

5  To 'bean' a player means the pitcher deliberately throws the ball at the batter's head. Beaned players have lost their careers because they never recovered from being hit in the head.