Ethics And Fantasy
While gathering opinions on Twitter about Alex Rodriguez, I ran into an interesting issue – ethical reasons to not roster a player. In the past, it has never really occurred to me to not roster or cut a player based on his off-the-field actions. Certainly, I will adjust my valuations. We’ve seen divorce eat into player contributions, and ill-timed comments can lead to a change in role or a trade. But not until the Adrian Peterson fiasco has it ever occurred to me to boycott a player for ethical reasons. Perhaps I’m behind the curve, but I want to explore the topic in more detail.
The argument for boycotting has two tiers. First, fantasy owners root for their players – it’s inevitable. If a player is reviled for personal reasons, then it makes sense to leave him off your roster. That way you’re free to root against him to your heart’s content. The second reason is perhaps a little more meaningful – money. I’m not entirely sure of the tie between fantasy sports and individual player compensation, but I’m sure some kind of link exists. If a player is boycotted even by fantasy owners, then it may affect how advertisers view the player. To be clear, I’m not saying advertisers take their cues from fantasy owners, but there might be a ripple effect.
In baseball, despite the aftershocks of the steroid era still being felt, we haven’t had too many reasons to avoid a player. Yes, PED’s are the big one, as the return of A-Rod demonstrates. Personally, I have trouble faulting a player for bending or breaking the rules in an effort to improve. My position on cheating to win has always been “if you get caught, serve the time.” My opinions of Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, or Nelson Cruz as people were not affected by their role in biogenesis.
A few other potential use cases for the ethics card come to mind. Miguel Cabrera has multiple DUI’s – a seemingly inexcusable incident for a excessively rich player. If anyone can afford a full time chauffeur to drive him home from a bar, it’s Cabrera. Still, while a DUI is a poor decision that could have terrible consequences, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s an awful human being. Maybe Cabrera is a hot head who doesn’t care about the consequences of driving drunk, or maybe he’s somebody who had a few too many combined with a lapse of judgment. I don’t think my fantasy preferences need reflect my displeasure with drunk drivers.
Other recent cases offer slightly better fodder. Yunel Escobar’s homophobic slurs are exactly the sort of vitriol that perhaps should affect ownership. Unfortunately for us, Escobar is seldom used in traditional fantasy leagues. He fits better in deep roster scenarios as a back up. His fantasy use case is so limited that we can’t hope to apply ethics. Escobar is usually the very last guy an owner will turn to when they need regular shortstop starts.
With a similar issue, John Rocker probably offered a good example back in his New York hating heyday. Rocker may hold the record among MLB’ers for most people offended with a single comment. We liked the quirky reliever when he was just a guy who sprinted from the bullpen to the mound. Once his godawful personality came to the surface, we had enough. There’s a lesson for players here, it can be best to let your quirks cover your personality.
Had I been in a position to care, I probably could have observed some fantasy league resistance to rostering Rocker. His Wikipedia page blames the incident for a downturn in his career, citing “intense taunting” by rival fans. However, I wonder if we’re finding correlation without causation. In any event, Rocker faded from the league within three seasons and an inning of those comments.
The last example is another former pitcher, Brett Myers. The Philadelphia righty struck his wife while leaving a Boston bar. He was a former boxer, so you would think he’d be more careful with deploying his fists. This particular story contained enough did he/didn’t he supposition, contradictory statements, and other such confusion that it didn’t draw the attention of the Ray Rice incident.
For Myers, the mistake became a punch line but not a rallying cry against him. I wonder if the same would have happened with Rice had the elevator footage never became public. In any case, I’m not sure if the fantasy community was ready to react to Myers’ assault back in 2006. He was a mediocre starter that season, but everybody rostered him in 2007 when he turned into a near-elite reliever. Maybe things would be different if it had happened today.
My question to the audience is this: would you ever cut a player based solely on off-the-field actions? Imagine if Peterson were still playing, would you use him? Where is your personal line in the sand?
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I think it’s a huge stretch to say that a player would be impacted meaningfully by fantasy baseball players refusing to roster him. In any case, boycotting players is just giving your rivals an advantage. Finally, I don’t have a problem with rooting for whoever’s on my team, so I don’t really think there is much of a case to boycott players. If you think people are too evil to roster, that’s up to you, but it doesn’t bother me at all.
Yes, everyone boycott Miguel Cabrera next season…
*evil laugh*
I think there are always players, before the draft, that I x off my list just because I dont like them, for multiple reasons. However, as the draft progresses, sometimes you have to take them, as they are also off other peoples lists. Fantasy is kinda like mlb and real life in that way, ethics can be bent if you think they will help you win……
I would think it needs to be a league wide decision. I’ve heard many football leagues have eliminated Rice and AP from the player pool. If you want to take a stand that’s the best way to do it. Otherwise someone will take the chance of fostering a guy when the cost is zero. Someone who says “I’m not drafting that guy no way,” could change his mind when the question is, “Should I drop useless player X for a free chance at first round performance from a jerk?”
Too tempting. League wide ethics or expect no ethics at all.
I 100% agree that if the Ray Rice’s footage was never released,it would not have been a huge deal. Out of sight, out of mind. Heck, the Ravens fans were cheering Rice.
When I play fantasy sports, I worry about what is best for my fantasy team. Where do you draw the line?
Do I roster Michael Vick since he paid for his crime and acted sorry?
Do I not roster Joe Flacco because he did not condemn Rice?
It’s just a game, compiling numbers. I am a Giants fan and I still draft Dodgers players, even though I hate rooting for them. It’s not that big of a stretch to use ethically compromised players if they can put up the numbers I need.
MLB doesn’t make any money off us directly when we play fantasy baseball, so even if we decide en masse to boycott a certain player, no one will care. Attending games, or buying merchandise is different, and if a player or team’s actions bother you, then you do have an ethical dilemma as a fan, but that dilemma doesn’t extend into the world of fantasy.
1. I don’t agree that there’s a link to how many people a guy gets rostered on and advertising dollars. The elite players are the elite players and the just above replacement players are who they are. Plus there’s a lot of guys that may have more flash or value in real life than in fantasy, so we don’t roster them but that doesn’t seem to hurt their marketability. There’s another disconnect between fantasy and the player getting paid. So while I might boycott buying something from a person or company, attending certain games, etc, I don’t have any problem rostering Himmler and Ted Bundy if they can put up stats for my fake teams.
2. I think it’s a bit odd that multiple DUI’s are discussed in the light of ‘he might still be a good person’, but how a guy disciplined his children tosses him into monster category. I’m not saying DUI = you are the devil, and I’m not saying I don’t think AP crossed the line. However I do think AP was disciplining his kid as he got disciplined and wasn’t some psychopath preying on children and intending to harm them. It’s been interesting to see AP get tossed into the monster category while others get a pass for their mistakes or ignorance.
I guess as a society we still consider whipping a 4 year old with something called a “switch” to be “disciplining” a child. I thought we had moved past that, but to each their own.
I think the larger issue is educating about the topic. Unfortunately, going after a high profile target like AP is probably the best way to teach people not to hit their children. If you did a nationwide poll, I think you would find a lot of people who believe switchings are a valid and effective form of discipline.
re: #2, it’s certainly an interesting phenomenon. It doesn’t seem like either event is “evil,” but they are sub optimal for society as a whole. We’re pretty sure corporal punishment to children is entirely negative. The “turned out fine” argument is a complete misnomer. We know driving drunk is bad news. Perhaps the two should be treated similarly.
In many ways, AP and Cabrera are public sacrifices. Both driving drunk and switchings are somewhat culturally embedded* and it takes a lot effort to enact change. A high profile witch hunt or two can do a lot of good, even though it’s terrible for the target.
*to be very clear, I’m not just referring to black or latino culture. I mean American culture as a whole*
Rather than using a “switch” I prefer to beat my children with a Louisville Slugger. It is a cultural issue for my ethnic group, and it is simply a way for me to teach them discipline. How dare anybody criticize me for my expression of my cultural heritage with regard to raising my children.
I know you’re just being snarky, but let’s not make this a race or ethnicity thing. Those too are misnomers. Social and economic class are better indicators if we really want to stereotype. Probably best to leave that to other corners of the internet.
I am not a cut-throat fantasy player, and I prefer to field a roster of (as far as I know) clean-cut players while excluding any players with significant problems. Even if it costs me. I just don’t want to root for players like Brett Myers, Ben Roethlisberger, Michael Vick, Adrian Peterson, Alex Rodriguez, Nelson Cruz, Melky Cabrera and many others to succeed.
I managed to win my OttoNeu (FG points) league this year without any known HGH users or players with known sordid pasts. I know I am starting from a disadvantage b/c of the reduced pool of talent available to me. But I get to feel better about it.
Touchy-feely nonsense, yes. But it works for me.
I agree with you in that rostering these players is a personal decision. Fantasy is for fun and you have to do what makes you happy.
Myers became a “punch” line? Really? Couldn’t have chosen a better word there?
I was a Brett Myers owner in 2006 and actually did drop him after he punched his wife in the face that year out of disgust for the guy. I live in Philadelphia and am not the biggest Phillies fan to begin with, but felt like my dropping him in fantasy was a small yet laughably meaningless victory for human deceny. I wouldn’t ever drop a player for drugs/steroids/cheating, but for some reason violence against women makes me feel differently.
As noted, the fact that Myers wasn’t very effective that year made the decision to drop him easy to make. Apart from my feeling about the incident itself, I also considered the fact that if Myers was such a fool to be drunk in public in Boston and punch his wife in the face, that likely that his pitching approach going forward would likely also falter, both from his general idiocy and from backlash (public and at home).
Wait, so a pro-athlete and former boxer hits his wife and it’s a mistake? Try a felony. The only possible excuse for such a thing would be if she was an MMA superstar and attacked him first, meaning that he was truly acting in self defense.
In the future lets not sugar coat abuse or treat it like it was some sort of innocent mix-up. We don’t need any more apologists for this kind of scum.
I only have so many synonyms to use. I referred to it as an assault later. I don’t really see any sugar coating.
The fact is that a trained fighter hitting some one who can’t ever hope to effectively defend themselves is never a mistake. ‘Incident’ would be a much better word, and wouldn’t have been over the top to use it four times instead of three. A quick use of Thesaurus.com also gave me ‘event’ and ‘episode’, you could also have used ‘offense’ which would have given you a plethora of other words much more appropriate given the situation (another option!) you were describing. A mistake implies that it was an accident and implies some level of innocence as a mitigating factor. Look at some of the synonyms for mistake, ‘blooper’, ‘blunder’, ‘flub’, ‘gaffe’, ‘boo-boo’, and ‘faux pas’. Now tell me that the use of ‘mistake’ here doesn’t imply that this wasn’t a serious offense, and to combine it with your poorly chosen pun only makes it seem even lighter.
You’re a professional writer, you don’t get to use the excuse of “I couldn’t come up with anything better”.
Not sure how this works around the country but a friend of mine was an amateur MMA fighter done in Florida. His hands were registered as a lethal weapon so if he ever hit someone outside of a sponsored fight or outside self-defense, he would have committed a felony.
Ok fine. I don’t see cause to require this level of precision in an article about fantasy ethics, but I’ll agree I could have used a more aggressive word.
“Ok fine. I don’t see cause to require this level of precision in an article about fantasy ethics, but I’ll agree I could have used a more aggressive word.”
BIG mistake, pal! I am so not drafting Brad Johnson in any of my fanatasy leagues for the next 2-3 years. /angry face
I boycotted Wil Cordero in the late ’90s after he was accused of assaulting his wife while on the Red Sox.
Ryan Braun fell in my league’s draft and I nabbed him with the 3rd pick. Didn’t plan on drafting him, but saw the value at that spot in the draft and took it. I have no love for Braun but I rostered him all year. It’s a game.
Same here. It was probably due to people thinking all of his stats were due to steroids, but still.
It seems that there a lot of people out there that think steroids and lying about it is equivalent physically assaulting a person who cannot possibly defend themselves adequately. Hell, people still love Todd Helton and says things like, “he did things the right way,” even though he has a DUI. Normal people would realize that a DUI can kill people while lying about steroid use cannot.
Luckily, I haven’t had any players whose behavior would prompt me to consider cutting them, but it has made a difference as a secondary factor when looking at the waiver wire. For example, I’ve passed on Moustakas a couple of times as a cheap injury replacement, in part because he and Hosmer were such d-bags to Eno. Of course, the fact that he absolutely sucks at getting “barrels on balls” was the main factor.
I don’t draft Phillies. Never. Ever.
I may have some young, cost-controlled talent in my fantasy league to trade to you.
I was planning to pick up Alfredo Simón this past season, but after reading about him decided I didn’t want a player like him on my fantasy team. The whole fun of being in a fantasy league is rooting for your players to do well, and he just wasn’t someone I wanted to root for.
I wouldn’t have wanted John Rocker either, albeit for his personality rather than any criminal behavior, and I wouldn’t want Jonathan Schoop either, for his hockey-style defense at second base.
Well I’m not entirely convinced free will exists, so the point could be moot. The resulting “ethical” is probably just a result of genetics, environmental factors, and the laws of the universe. Did A-Rod choose to cheat? Or is he a victim of fate? Because the universe came into existent 13.7 billion years ago, it set of an unchangeable series of a events that made Miguel Cabrera get a DUI and win the Triple Crown
It seems to me that the kind of punishment described here is about more than just saying someone is blameworthy for the event and, thus, deserves punishment; it is also about preventing the event from happening in the future because people will want to avoid those negative effects that they see. So even if we throw blameworthiness out the window and the morality that comes from that, we still have prevention.
You are clearly missing the entire point. My point was that things are either going to happen or they are not. We probably have no choice in the matter. We can’t prevent things for happening. The universe is essentially playing itself out like a movie. It is never possible for us to do anything different from what we actually do In each case, the circumstances that exist before we act determine our actions and make them inevitable
It is probably the most meta-discussion in all of philosophy. We will always APPEAR to have free-will or a choice because we can’t predict the future, but that doesn’t mean the future isn’t a certainty.
In a money league, I completely look the other way. I take him, no questions asked. If I get him in a later round, so much the better. In a fun league, I take the guy but feel the slightest bit guilty, until he helps my team. If he doesn’t, I get on my moral high horse and feel justified in dumping him. Makes me feel better, so what the heck.
Brad and I had this discussion back and forth on twitter, with is a terrible place to convey reasons for not rostering a player. I never rostered ARod after he left Seattle, because I was working for the Seattle Mariners at the time, and guy was a complete asshole.
The PEDs, the blatant lying, everything that has happened in New York is secondary to the fact I disliked him as a person.
I also owned Rocker as a closer and traded him for pennies on the dollar and if Josh Lueke had made it to the majors and developed into Clayton Kershaw, I still couldn’t have stomached rostering him.
Maybe I just don’t want to win enough, but I’ve won my fair share of championships and have never gone a year without placing top three in a league. If that’s the cost of peace of mind, I’m willing to let someone else be the Yankees.
Cabrera has one DUI, not multiple
No mention of Jurassic Carl?
I would draft Hitler if he could hit 40 homers. Or Pol Pot if he produced a 1.15 WHIP with 230 K’s. I don’t apologize for this…I am in it to win. Period.
In general, I will continue to roster players with issues: Sometimes it irks me, but my fantasy team is extremely unlikely to change anything if I boycott them (Adrian Peterson is so big that he’ll either still get the deals with the public relations risks or he won’t get them regardless of what I do), plus the fact that fantasy baseball/football is somewhere I primarily go to relax. I actually kept AP on my team for a week or two after it all came out, in case it’d look like he came back later, even though I felt he and Ray Rice’s actions were awful.
However, I will say that I would never fault someone for not rostering them for the ethic reasons, and I would be fine in a league that banned those players due to that reason. It is just that where they are legal, I want to get the most advantage I can. I will certainly say things like domestic abuse and DUIs, to me, are things I care much more about ethically than things like steroids for drafting a player: Even though I wouldn’t let either deter me, unless I felt either would affect their performance, if I was in a league looking to ban stuff I would go after abuse, DUIs (especially those that end in tragedy, like Donte Stallworth’s, as I feel that the punishment is far too light IRL on those) and more before I cared about steroids.
I also think it is an important issue to bring up. I hope that, if nothing else, people gain more awareness of these issues as a result of these horrible tragedies and try to do their best to prevent them in the future.
The thing is that the game is FANTASY baseball. All that matters for the game are the stats or points you accrue. If defense doesn’t count in your league, do you care if he is a fencepost? Are any rationale Red Sox fans not taking Ellsbury if he falls dramatically in the draft?
You have to leave the moral aspect out of the fantasy game, just as you have to turn off your personal fan biases. Boo the crap out of these guys at games or boycott entirely, but stats are just stats.
One point that I haven’t seen made in this discussion is that, if Player A is on your fantasy team and gets in trouble for something terrible (like assaulting somebody), does it lead the fantasy owner to hope that he escapes punishment? I mean, if the player is doing so well he is hard to replace, do you hope that real-life justice is postponed until it is more convenient for your fantasy league performance?
(Let the victims wait, I NEED that scumbag for a couple months?)