In Baseball, Cheating is the Problem, not Blowing the Whistle

Even in Baseball, which after all is just entertainment, a whistleblower can be subject to being attacked, merely for stepping up to the plate.

Jessica Mendoza an ESPN baseball analyst and a pretty good one if you ever listen to her on a game, sided with secrecy regarding the sign stealing scandal infecting baseball.

Well it is sad, I’m a Boston Red Sox fan and we are living through a personal state of disgust right now, knowing our team’s latest World Series win off an historic season is tainted by the strong possibility of sign stealing.  Manager Alex Cora is gone and the Yankees are going to be tough to beat this year as usual.

Bad as having the happy memory of winning a series tainted, it is the wrongdoers that deserve our anger not those who try to clean the sport up.  How much money do these guys make to play ball? How much does it cost a fan to go to a game?

If you pay to see a game and your team got cheated out of a playoff birth this way, according to Mendoza you have no right to know that it happened or expect that the sport will do anything to clean itself up.

Yes, it’s only baseball, but she’s making an argument for a code of silence among those on the side of making the money off the public and saying we never should know about it.

What is truly sad is that as an employee of a media company, Ms. Mendoza should be instinctively on the side of our right to know what is really going on in the sport than in protecting the individual reputations of cheaters. This type of mentality is a pervasive problem in sports, and it has led to all kinds of cheating, some worse than others.

However, telling us the truth is not something that should be considered the problem. Baseball’s attempts to clean up scandals usually fall far short of justice. This time real people are losing real jobs which is never a happy thing, but you can’t blame the one who said wait this is wrong for the fact that a lot of people who knew better acted worse.