A few days before every college basketball season started our coach would bring the new game balls to practice to scuff them up and for us to get used to playing with them. Being brand new they were slippery and with no accumulated floor dust or sweat were much lighter than our practice balls. That made the balls bounce higher and quicker off the floor and harder off the rim, taking the favorable roll on shots we were used to with it.
The problem was they’d been inflated right out of the box by a student worker in the equipment room who wouldn’t know the feel or bounce of a properly inflated ball if it hit them in the head. So I took it upon myself to take them to the equipment room after practice to deflate and reinflate them until the bounce was just right by trial and error. And while I was doing that, it never occurred to me it might be violating some obscure rule for how many pounds they needed to be inflated to.
I bring this up because in an environment where the word “cheater” is used so easily and imprecisely today I probably would have been branded as one, even though all I was doing was just trying to get the new balls to bounce right. When Deflate-gate hit and Tom Brady was branded a cheater I always thought he did something similar to what I did. Which is to say, after getting stuck with over-inflated rock-hard football balls in one game he likely told the equipment guys either directly or by implication to make sure they were “grippable” going forward without having a clue there was a rule for how inflated they had to be. I believe that because I’ve been playing, coaching or covering sports since I was 6 and have never known even one player who gave it any thought beyond “this is too hard or not inflated enough.” Plus, I was a quarterback back in the day, so I know there was nothing worse than playing with rock-hard footballs. But my little thing was not subject to fan jealousy or the media chance to pay back Bill Belichick’s churlishness with them, and so taking a little air out of a ball was blown completely out of proportion.
Beyond the role of public perception, my problem with the word “cheater” being thrown around so loosely is it’s done without any distinction between what’s on the low end of the scale and real cheating. The latter is what the Astros did by using technology and an organized plan to circumvent the rules on the way to winning the 2017 World Series. In saner times, the low end of the scale was called looking for an edge, like DBs clutching and grabbing receivers in football or flopping in basketball to sell a call. Those sports have penalties to address those issues. In baseball it’s the guy on second base seeing the catcher signs and then relaying them to the hitter. To those who know what’s what, it’s an art and no big deal.
There are a million stories of real cheating, quasi-cheating or what people see erroneously as cheating and isn’t. Like Belichick using a funky formation to confuse the Ravens defense in the 2014 playoffs that made it hard to tell who the eligible receivers were. Even though it was a legal, clever ploy, the “it was cheating” folks didn’t like that it worked. Paranoia has fueled some of it too, like George Allen being convinced (without evidence) the Cowboys had scouts in a hotel overlooking the Redskins practice field in the 1970s to steal his game plan. Still others are real, like Adolph Rupp having an assistant coach pose as a janitor to spy on Michigan the day before a big game at Kentucky. Though from the way ex-Michigan coach Johnny Orr chuckled as he told it in an ESPN SportsCentury episode, he didn’t think it mattered much. Today the woke folk would want to give Adolph the chair.
Then there’s the public perception, like Gaylord Perry being celebrated as he cruised into the Hall of Fame even though he was a notorious spit baller. How come he’s in and the steroid guys are pariahs? How about the 1951 NY Giants? They’re remembered fondly, even though they basically did what Houston did by sticking a guy in the scoreboard with binoculars to read the catcher’s signs and relay them via a buzzer in the dugout as they erased Brooklyn’s 14-game lead in the last six weeks of that legendary season.
The Patriots’ rise and Coach B’s secretive ways played a role in this gaining momentum, which thanks to spy-gate it’s earned. Ditto for Barry Bonds’steroid-aided run at the beloved Hank Aaron’s home run record. But it really picked up steam with what the Astros did as attitudes in went nuts. Which is just in time for baseball’s newest scandal: using tacking substance to give the ball better spin rates (whatever that means) to make it tougher on hitters. To their credit baseball is getting out in front of it with new guidelines and penalties about to be announced. Coincidentally, since news of a crackdown was coming 10 days ago, the surprisingly good till then Red Sox pitching has been abysmal, culminating in Sunday’s 18-4 loss to Toronto. Hmmmmm. A story for another day.
What’s particularly irritating is this nonsense clouds what is cheating and what’s not. Applying a substance to the ball is wrong. But I’ve heard wokes actually say bench jockeys figuring out signs from a third base coach and relaying them to the team is cheating. It’s not and it’s been a valuable skill and honored part of baseball for 100 years. Not the crime on humanity these historically clueless drones are trying to make it.
As for me, I’m safe from them, as the statute of limitations on my inflation act has long since expired.
