[N]o player who throws a ballgame, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ballgame are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball again.
- Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis Commissioner of Baseball August 3, 1921
The 1919 Chicago White Sox were one of the best professional baseball teams that ever took the field. As everyone with even a peripheral awareness of sports history knows, the Sox lost the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, in eight games,* on purpose. Famously, eight members of that Chicago club — including perhaps the greatest hitter of the so-called “deadball” era, Shoeless Joe Jackson — were banished from the game forever by the newly-appointed first Commissioner of Baseball, federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The affair came to be known as the Black Sox Scandal.
[* — The World Series was expanded to best-of-nine after World War I and was played that way in 1919, 1920, and 1921, reverting to best-of-seven in 1922.]
The story of the 1919 White Sox and the scandal that unfolded during and after that fateful best-of-nine World Series is a fascinating one in itself; I don’t want to get too deeply into it or I’ll never get to my point. The hiring of Judge Landis as baseball’s first Commissioner with full autonomy to “clean up the game,” and the banning of all eight players, including one who didn’t take any gamblers’ money and hit .324 in the Series without an error, and a benchwarmer who had one hit in just two at-bats, sent a message that still reverberates throughout the world of major North American professional sports: Losing on purpose is a no-no.
The Black Sox Scandal focused both public and internal attention on the influence of gamblers and racketeers on the sport; Landis and the owners wanted to protect players from that kind of influence, and restore public confidence that the games were being played, and would be played, fairly; that if their favorite team won, or lost, it will have done so fair-and-square. And while it’s true that the sports world has been vigilant about keeping gamblers and gangsters out ever since (see: Rose, Peter E.), if you read Landis’s statement carefully he doesn’t get to gambling or undue influence until the third subject clause. The first two subjects are players who lose on purpose; anyone who “throws a ballgame” or “promises to throw a ballgame” is risking a lifetime ban, no matter why he does it.
Again: losing on purpose is a no-no. Maybe even the biggest no-no in all of sports. It is simply not done.
Which brings us, of course, to The F***ing Jets.
The history of New York City’s/North Jersey’s junior pro football franchise in the decades since Joe Namath left the Orange Bowl field wagging his right index finger in the air 52 years ago next month, is another rabbit hole that I could easily chase myself down, so again, let me get to the point. Long-suffering fans of this accursed, woebegone franchise have been churlish all week about the team’s having had the audacity to actually win a game last Sunday in Los Angeles, defeating the Rams 23-20 to improve to 1-13 on the season with two games to play. Jets fans were hoping they would go 0-16 — which only two other teams have ever done — in order to secure the first pick in the 2021 Draft, so they can then select Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence who is supposed to be a can’t-miss, once-in-a-generation, franchise-altering talent. The win may end up costing the Jets that pick.
It’s not uncommon for fans of lousy teams, particularly NFL teams,* to hope, think, or believe that their team will “tank” in order to get a higher draft pick, or perhaps the first pick, next year, especially if there’s a particular college prospect coming up that the fans want the team to draft and believe will solve all of its on-field problems. Sports fans love this idea. But the reality is, it doesn’t happen; at least, it’s never been shown to have happened, documented, or admitted-to. Professional athletes play to win; that’s a given. Losing on purpose is not only distasteful, and against every principle of sportsmanship and competition, it’s bad for business. As the Black Sox Scandal and its aftermath revealed, the business of sports depends on the public perception of games being played fairly, on the level, without undue influence or ulterior motives; i.e., of everyone playing to win.
[* — The NBA guards against “tanking” by having a draft lottery, meaning the worst team is not guaranteed the top pick. In baseball, it’s exceedingly rare for even the top draft picks to play in the Major Leagues immediately; hockey players also tend to spend time in the minors before being elevated to the NHL.]
But there’s an ugly strain emerging among Jets fans these days, and I had a very distressing conversation with a friend on Facebook the other day that, for once, was not about politics. My friend and I are both Jets fans, and are both disappointed that the Jets could end up being the first 1-15 team ever to not get the #1 draft pick;* they’re currently tied with the Jacksonville Jaguars at 1-13 and Jacksonville has clinched the “weaker” strength of schedule, so if they both finish 1-15 the Jags will pick first — i.e., they, not the Jets, will get Trevor Lawrence. But my friend is not just disappointed; he’s mad at the Jets for winning which, in his view, was “DUMB! DUMB! DUMB!”
[* — There have never been two 1-15 teams in the same season. Ten (10) teams have finished 1-15, including the 1996 Jets. Only two teams have ever finished 0-16; in those seasons, the next-worst teams were 2-14, and 3-13.]
I explained to him that pro athletes don’t lose on purpose, and can’t reasonably be expected to do so (or called “DUMB!” for not doing so). To which his response was, in essence, that Jets owner Christopher Johnson should have stepped in and manipulated the roster so as to keep any player who could possibly help the team win from playing (and that not doing so was, also, “DUMB!”). I reminded my friend that the movie “Major League” was fiction. He asked why Johnson couldn’t do that, to which I responded inter alia that he’d probably get severely sanctioned by the league if he did; that it could violate the NFL Bylaws, or the Collective Bargaining Agreement with the Players’ Association; that the Commissioner and the other owners wouldn’t tolerate it, and that it could result in the Jets having to forfeit the pick. It’s been a while since I took Sports Law in law school, but I do remember some of it and there are a great many things about the business that my friend, who looks at this solely as a fan, wasn’t taking into account.
What followed was not all that different from a lot of the political discussions I’ve had in which my counterpart relies mainly on wishful thinking and false equivalence, and the only evidence offered to support any factual assertion is “Oh, come on, you know...”
I mentioned the Black Sox Scandal and asked if he could name another team that had lost games on purpose, for any reason, in the 100 years since; he said he was sure there was one but couldn’t think of one, let alone one that had lost games on purpose in order to draft a particular player the next year. He insisted that resting players with injuries, or resting them for the playoffs (as, e.g., the Indianapolis Colts did against the Jets in 2009), is no different from holding one’s better players out of a game so that the team will lose and thereby get the top draft pick.
I kept coming back to the same point: Losing on purpose to get a higher draft pick is a form of cheating; resting players with injuries, for the playoffs, or to give the rookies some playing time when the team has nothing to play for, is not. The best he could do was insist, again without any evidence or specifics, that (a.) it could be done, viz., that an owner could manipulate the roster in order to lose on purpose without making it look like they were losing on purpose; (b.) that “Oh, come on, you know” it’s been done before (or that “everyone” does it); and (c.) that Christopher Johnson was “DUMB!” for not doing it.
Obviously, what my friend was doing was something political partisans do all the time: reverse-engineering a feeling, viz., frustration and disappointment over “losing” Lawrence (which they haven’t yet; the Jaguars could still win one or both of their remaining games), into the idea that something should have, and could have, been done, and/or must be done going forward, to avoid that undesired result. That someone “let it” happen, and should be blamed and castigated for “letting it” happen.
I understand the frustration, disappointment and anger among Jets fans (because, you know, I am one) at not getting the number-one draft pick despite this team being as bad — seriously, incredibly, unwatchably bad — as any team anyone has ever seen, when a prospect like Lawrence is projected to be there for the taking. Only the Jets could be this bad in a season and have another team win the prize for being just ever-so-slightly, marginally worse. But why can’t someone reconcile that feeling with the knowledge and understanding that it’s just not reasonable or realistic to expect a pro team to lose on purpose, let alone insist or demand that they do so, or that the owner take steps to ensure that they do so?
There’s something about insisting that a pro sports team can, should, and must lose a game (or games) on purpose — and is “DUMB!” if it doesn’t — that troubles me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Is there anything more to it than just abject, puerile selfishness, an inability to deal with not getting what one wants and lashing out at others for ruining everything? Is it that wishful thinking and false equivalence are so much easier and more emotionally satisfying than researching the history and fully understanding the ramifications? Or is it that unreasonable and unrealistic expectations like this creep into other areas of life besides sports fandom where the stakes are much, much higher?
In any event, Just End The Season.