Why do human civilizations—and baseball leagues for that matter—make rules? The answer is that we’re terminally forgetful.
It’s one of the least of the Star Trek movies, but it contains one of the more profound lines regarding the human condition: in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Spock’s father, having learned that his son died in the last picture, visits Admiral Kirk to retrieve Spock’s memory; he assumes that Spock, knowing he was about to check out, would have taken the time to download it to his friend Kirk. It’s something that, conveniently, Vulcans can do. Informed that this did not and could not have happened, Spock’s father concedes, with great sadness, that, “Everything he was… everything he knew… is lost.”
Yep; that’s the way it works for us non-Vulcans. Master physicist or master bricklayer, the totality of our experience, our hard-won wisdom, does not survive us. That’s why humanity struggles to progress. That’s why we approach so many of the problems we encounter as if for the first time—all those who fought our fire du jour, or prevented it from occurring at all, now reside in urns and wooden boxes and aren’t replying to any text messages.
What we try to do to compensate for our ephemeral lives is make rules. Imagine a pond, one that freezes over in winter. There is a sign: NO SKATING. STAY OFF THE ICE. That sign has been there for your entire life. No one has ever fallen through the ice that you’re aware of, so as far as you know you and your co-residents are wasting a perfectly good pond because the Dead Hand of the Past is upon you. Sometimes those signs come with ordinance numbers written on them. You might even look up that ordinance and find out that the town council passed that law nearly a hundred years ago! Well, who cares what they thought? What the hell does that have to do with now?
The obvious answer, if you took the time to go further than the date of the ordinance, is that something hasn’t happened in living memory because it did happen then. “Jack Wilson, 7, fell through thin ice while skating with playmates and drowned…” Young Jack wasn’t the first to lose his life skating at Gotoyour Reward Lake, and enough was enough! And so they put up a sign, and as a result no one has drowned for 95 years, long enough for everyone who knew why it had been put there has passed—of natural causes, not drowning. The sign has been so successful that no one ever drowns here, so we can take it down and go skating… right? Right? Is there a name for this sort of logical fallacy?
- This place is dangerous, so we warned people away.
- People heard our warning, so no one has gotten hurt for years.
- Therefore, this place is no longer dangerous.
If we had the ability to convey Spock’s knowledge forward, some sort of eternal Grandpa Memory, we would know not to reason this way. We would realize that ye olde towne council had given us a gift by attempting to childproof that lake. Books would seem capable of doing the work of Grandpa Memory, but they require the labor of reading them. Those covers are heavy and tiring to lift; with apologies to Sir Joshua Reynolds, there is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of reading. There is also the problem of comprehension, as neatly summed up by one of our great American presidents Warren Gamaliel Harding, as he tried to puzzle out a matter of policy: “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it.”
Baseball suffers from the same lack of Spockian Grandpa Memory as the rest of humanity. The very first World Series, in 1903, brought the very first attempt to fix a World Series, though for 21 years no one except American League president Ban Johnson and Cy Young’s personal catcher, Lou Criger knew it. In 1924, while desperately trying to hold onto his position, Johnson—to no obvious end except that he wanted to embarrass John McGraw—revealed that in 1903, on the eve of the World Series between the Boston Americans (read: Red Sox) and the Pittsburgh Pirates, gamblers had tried to bribe Young by offering Criger, his personal catcher, a bribe of $12,000. Young, Boston’s ace, was all over that World Series, pitching in four games, starting three, and winning two. Any “gambler” (if you think about it, game-fixing is the opposite of gambling) who wanted to steal the Series would need Young, Criger or both. “The prince of catchers” refused the bribe and reported the attempt to Young and (depending on your source) to Johnson.
Johnson kept the news to himself, probably so as not to cast doubt on the integrity of his own team and the then-nascent World Series idea as a whole. Yet, because he did not erect a sign, the public did not realize that the ice was thin, and there was still room for Arnold Rothstein et al to enact their great swindle 16 years later—and possibly in all the years between, not that we’ll ever know who they got to and who they didn’t. It was only after pushy writers like Hugh Fullerton insisted on reporting out the 1919 story that baseball put up a sign. No one erected one in the Pacific Coast League, though, so they had to go through the same thin-ice ritual a few years later. Pete Rose never saw the sign, so Bart Giamatti pointed out it was still there. And then there was Tucupita Marcano, who sprinted past the sign and dove into the water. Neither Rose nor Marcano impugn the idea of signs. Rather, they impugn the idea of small signs. The signs should be very large with a flashing LED display, with motion sensors that cause it to light up whenever anyone gets within 100 feet of it.
Criger had a long, slow end to his career and thereafter his life due to his lungs being slowly devoured by the tuberculosis bacillus; he also lost one of his legs. Johnson, supposedly in gratitude for his actions in reporting the attempted fix, made him one of the few ballplayers of his time (1896-1910, 1912) to receive a pension. It didn’t do anyone other than Criger any good.
We don’t just have signs as the result of game-fixing. Every single rule in baseball evolved from real-world experience. Some of them required the Princes of the Game to overcome their inherent indolence. When Buster Posey got hurt defending the plate in 2011, the idea that the contact plays in this non-contact sport could be hazardous to player health was not novel. When Chase Utley obliterated Ruben Tejada in 2015 it also wasn’t news. Somehow, though, at that moment there was the will to do something about it, and the signs went up.
Someday those signs will yellow, then rust, and those same Princes will wonder aloud whether this languishing sport might attract a more youthful audience by appealing to its desire to see more violence. Probably no one will be alive to remind them of why the signs went up in the first place, or perhaps a few will be, but no one will care to hear them.
Thank you for reading
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