Of Baseball, Winning, and Moral Rot

I’m not a baseball fan, but like many Americans, by tradition I consider baseball our national pastime. So news that the Houston Astros likely cheated during their seven-game victory over the L.A. Dodgers in the 2017 World Series by illegally videotaping pitch signals, then communicating the decoded signals to their batters through the indecorous banging of trashcans within earshot of home plate, disheartened me profoundly. While our country has endured many sports scandals, corruption at the headiest level of the game most closely tied to our national identity uniquely symbolizes the moral rot now plaguing the United States.

 

Many of us have attended more youth sports games than we care to recall. Have you ever told your child, "It’s not how you play the game but whether you win or lose," or, "Trying your hardest isn’t good enough," or, "Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing"? Of course not. We tell our children what moral probity demands, civil society necessitates, and humane people actually believe: that effort ultimately matters more than outcome and our social contract requires us to play by the rules, even if it means that we might lose. Intuitively, we understand that human beings will fail more often than they’ll succeed, and the best way to prepare our children for the difficult journey of life is to teach them to derive joy and pride from effort itself, and from the gift of dignity that effort yields. Equally, we know that if cheating were to become pervasive in our society, let alone condoned, people would stop trusting one other, making teamwork and mutual problem solving impossible. Yet, what were the Houston Astros celebrating that first November evening of 2017 if not winning in, of, and for itself? For the labor and sacrifice that alone should have fueled their triumph instead was neatly bypassed, or at least seriously diluted, by their cheating. At the season culmination of the sport most widely viewed as embodying the American spirit, the Astros’ triumphant shouts of joy and sweaty dogpile in the red clay dirt of Dodgers Stadium represented the elevation of winning above all other virtues, which were left to kneel at the goddess Nike’s altar. Sadly, the Astros’ warped values reflect a dangerous trend in our country.

 

Human beings are wired to strive and compete. It’s what builds skyscrapers and grows food for billions. It’s also what can, at times, make doing the right thing really hard. We just want to win so badly. So, humans battle their conflicting impulses to be good on the one hand, and to do whatever it takes to win on the other, often pushing the edge of right to its legal limit. The cultural trope of the snake oil salesman nods to this seedier side of humanity, as does our embrace of dubious fictional characters like the cheeky, charismatic grifters played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in their antic buddy films. But movies are not life, and our country has reached a tipping point. Something has gone seriously awry when “winning” justifies the shredding of civility and sacrifice of personal honor. Since when did it become okay to stop fighting our demons? Since when does the top team in baseball, whose players serve as role models for millions of children, blithely cheat its way to a championship in the most hallowed and iconic athletic event our nation holds?

 

I came of age in the era of Ronald Reagan and the greed-is-good ethos of the late 1980s, which culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. America won the Cold War, and we grew high on our own success. Capitalism was a beast, as my son would say, and we rightfully took pride in it. But in the ensuing decades, we got cocky and lost our humility. We forgot about the hard work, endurance, self-regulation, and sacrifice that led to capitalism’s success. We became gluttonous, and “winning” justified our excess. We felt entitled to win, which led to taking shortcuts. We underregulated, ignored the growing chasm between rich and poor, and failed to notice as the rise of information technologies, industrial automation, and globalization eviscerated the livelihoods and cultural rhythms of whole swaths of our population. Winning became a drug, and we were addicts.

 

Our current president rose to power claiming that America doesn’t win anymore, but the truth is, America no longer wins in the right way because we emphasize short-term gain over lasting success. In our nano age of sound bites and news cycles, winning, like the American attention span, has become a short-term proposition, even as this short circuitry harms our society’s wellbeing. When people post only their most curated, glamorous images on social media, depicting untroubled, airbrushed lives, they may “win” the admiration and envy of friends, but they have lost sight of the more sustainable, long-term goal of building true human connection based on a mutual willingness to be vulnerable. When Mitch McConnell denies Merrick Garland an up-or-down senate vote using the specious, made-up excuse that the constitution’s rules don’t apply during an election year, he may have won a Supreme Court seat for his political party, but he lost the respect and trust of half the American people, and we’re suffering the ugly aftermath of his “winning” to this day as the ability of lawmakers to apply common sense and work together to overcome differences has become virtually extinct. When winning is defined by short-term gain because “winning” itself is the goal, isn’t our country catastrophically losing in the long run? The answer is yes, and we must stop the madness. We must ask ourselves: who do we want to be as a nation, and if not now, then when?