Top 10 approaching ethical crises in sports

Douglas Charles Managing Editor

by DMtShooter, Five Tool Tool.com

the+future+is+always+crowded Top 10 approaching ethical crises in sports10.Brain Roids. Popular among the frat set at leading universities, this concoction of pills has dubious value now, but will likely improve over time. Should we laud a quarterback with perfect knowledge of the playbook if it came out of a bottle? How about a pitcher who can remember every single at-bat with his opponent, or vice versa? And when a journalist can focus better, remember more details and need less rest to stay sharp, will they hold to the same morality that led them to chastise the physical steroid achievers of yesteryear?

9. Propaganda. If and when newspapers die — and the simple fact that you’re reading this blog, rather than buying your local newspaper, makes you an accessory to their death — the sports public is going to have three main sources for team news: the teams, the players via blogs, and the TV/Blogfrican watchers. Don’t expect any of them to give you the access and information that a good daily reporter would, but it’s not like the good old days had great sportswriters in every market anyway.

8. Cybernetics. Wheelchair users complete marathons faster than runners, and it’s not hard to imagine a technologically enhanced athlete using that advantage in the very near future to beat the 100% meatbags. Even more telling is when the refinement isn’t visible to the naked eye, and doesn’t set off the metal detector. For more on this, see the new “Transformers” movie, which I think is some kind of documentary.

7. Flight. The carbon impact of jet travel can ruin years of being eco-friendly, making the encouragement of routine air travel, especially the prolonged flights that are part and parcel of major league sports, something that’s going to eventually raise eyebrows.

When you add in the fact that ticket demand greatly outstrips availability in the big media markets (it costs much less for MLB+ Fan to fly and buy seats to the road games, not to mention the fact that the seats are actually available), you can see how there’s a multiplier effect at work here. One more reason to applaud the onset of high speed rail, people. (And not just because the writer has a long rail commute every day. Has nothing to do with my interest in that.)

6. Mutation. Does football feel like football when the offensive linemen is so large that their ability to pull on a sweep is mostly theoretical? Or pro basketball teams wind up becoming LeBron Clones, which means no player 6′-8″ need apply? Feel free to talk about the rise of huge middle infielders here, too.

When market efficiency is measured and implemented in a similar/uniform way, you get a sameness of play and player; outliers are dealt with, unless their very freakishness allows them to break the rules of the game by, say, selling more tickets and jerseys. There’s a reason why Allen Iverson’s jersey still sells so well, even at this point in his career, where his value to a team is mostly theoretical; people like to root for scrappers. And there’s also something lost when our athletes stop resembling, well, humanity.

5. Cloning. When Todd Marinovich was bred from the cradle to be a QB in the ’80s, if was fairly grotesque; luckily for us all, it was also ineffective. But now that the human DNA code is fully mapped and we have the potential for eventual FrankenFavres, will we be able to resist cranking out multiple versions of Quitter Boy to do the yard work, test automobile crash safety and clean septic systems with their bare turnover-prone hands? As the alarmist television talking heads say, only time will tell.

4. Statistics. This one has been growing for a long while now, but when compensation is so entirely tied to statistics, expecting players to do things like sacrificing or moving the runner with outs in baseball, playing hard-nosed ball denial defense in basketball, or just plain tackling in football, rather than gambling for picks and fumble strips… well, maybe the stats eventually get to the point where they really do reflect true value 100% of the time. But since we’ve never gotten completely there in baseball, and the other major sports are way too fluid for numbers to reflect worth… well, maybe not.

3. Class warfare. A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Clippers won the NBA lottery, dooming college basketball’s most visible and exciting star, Blake Griffin, to at least three years of utter professional irrelevance. This assumes, of course, that the Clipper Stink doesn’t just wound up turning Griffin’s knees into putty. And on some level, the waste of Griffin is arbitrary and pointless, part of a system designed to encourage parity in a league that succeeds, on some large level, by having the lowest amount of parity.

As economic turmoil and pressures increase, the temptation for the strong to stop giving it up for the weak will rise, because that’s just reality. So is the presence of Rich Road Fan taking over the park of the disadvantaged. Rooting for the home team, or the underdog, will eventually be a minority position, and if/when that happens, I have to think that our world will change, and not in a good way.

2. Surveillance. Ever wonder how many cameras are watching you on a daily basis? Don’t; it will probably put you off your food. You should especially not think about how easily your identity is being tracked with stuff like car transponders for toll booth collection, swipe cards for public transit, credit card usage, traffic cameras, UPC bar codes, GPS tracking of cell phones, keystroke monitoring by employers… yeesh. Being paranoid doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone out to get you, after all.

And in sports, this means that heckling, being drunk in public, or even improper observance of a flag/song (see how the Yankees enforce the proper reverence for “God Bless America” in their seventh inning timewaste) could generate heat for you. What a fun world we live in. And finally…

1. Home Field Non-Advantage. Premium pricing with non-cheering corporate swells, ejections for any unkind word, Road Fans following their laundry, attention deficit fans with cell phones, laptops and texting ability, new stadiums that never deliver the noise, fantasy sports causing a portion of the audience to hedge their bets, and the simple but potent disillusionment that is the modern athlete class from civilians… well, add it all up, and you get very few places in any sport that really seem to give their teams a true advantage anymore. (Not that you’ll probably notice, since teams will just follow the Colts’ example and just fake the crowd noise in the PA. But still.)

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