Ethical Ranks

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Rank Baseball's Ethical Scenarios

Want to play the "Baseball Ethics" game? Two randomly selected actual ethical incidents from baseball's storied history are listed below. Please tell us which one you consider to be "worse." In other words, select the one you think is less ethical than the other. This exercise originally ran in August, 2008. After 35,000 votes, we compiled the results in this article.

This material was developed for an American Studies course at Carleton College. You can read about it in this article. The entire bibliography of sources is on this page.

Here are your first two choices. Select the less ethical one and you'll be given the opportunity to make even more choices. Thanks for helping.

1. Stuffing

Some batters go up to the plate looking to get hit by a pitch. Take the time in 1908 when Hall of Fame catcher Roger Bresnahan waddled up to bat with what appeared to be stuffing under his uniform. Bresnahan then stood right over the plate, at the very front of the batter's box. Umpire Hank O'Day quickly ordered the bloated batsman back to the bench and instructed Bresnahan to rid himself of the extra padding before he returned to finish his at-bat. Even in today's game, batters openly wear thick pads on their arms and elbows, a legal act. See any Barry Bonds at-bat late in his career for details. Some baseball observers believe such body armor ought be banned. (Murphy, p. 82)

2. Head hunting

As long as pitchers and hitters have tried to establish who's in control, pitchers have thrown up and in, to back batters off the plate. Sometimes they throw at their heads. Perhaps the best known of the head hunters was Sal Maglie. He was simply called "The Barber" because, according to the legend, he could shave a man with his high-and-tight heater. After Maglie retired, he had this to say in a 1959 feature article in Cavalier:

Why didn't I throw at, say, batters' chests, instead of their heads? I threw at the head because I knew that a batter could see a pitch up around his face better than he could see a pitch to any other spot. It's no trick to hit a batter in the ribs. Any pitcher with decent control can do it. It's a bigger target than the head and, besides, it's a lot tougher for a batter to move his head than his body. So I aimed at the head. The pitch served my purpose.

Hundreds of other pitchers have used a similar tactic--throwing at batters' heads--over the years because it served their purpose. (Scheinin, pp. 288-289)