Another example of how the acceptance of cheating is seeping into American culture is being played out in the Major League All-Star Game voting. The American League squad supposedly elected by “fans,” will be announced tomorrow, and what the results will show is…

…that Major League Baseball, like the federal Office of Personnel Management, depended on technology with out comprehending technology, displaying unethical incompetence and harming those who had no choice but to trust it,

…that technologically adept computer dorks decided to rig the vote, harming the game, the sport, and deserving players, and

…that Major League Baseball is pretending there is no problem to minimize PR damage, its proven disastrous approach in other cheating scandals, such as the steroid infestation of the ’90s.

The ineptitude of the sport here is beyond belief, especially since this has happened before. When baseball originally allowed fans to vote for its All-Star teams, it didn’t take long for one enterprising fan base to engage in organized ballot stuffing. Thus when the 1957 team was announced, seven Cincinnati Reds players were in the starting line-up, with only St. Louis Cardinal first baseman Stan Musial breaking the Red color-line.   An investigation showed that over half of the ballots cast came from Cincinnati because the Cincinnati Enquirer had printed up pre-marked ballots and distributed them with the Sunday edition of the newspaper. Using his powers to do whatever he felt was necessary to protect the intregrity of the sport, Commissioner Ford Frick named Willie Mays and Hank Aaron  to substitute for two of the lesser Reds electees, and the incident resulted in fans being stripped of their voting privileges for the next eleven years. Managers, players, and coaches picked the entire team until 1970, when the vote again returned to the fans.

2015 became the first year the voting has been held without paper ballots, entirely online. Every fan, identified by e-mail, was limited to 35 votes. Did Major League Baseball think to put any safeguards in place to keep its system of tallying votes from being hacked? Nah! After all, who would try to fix the voting for an All-Star Game? Oh…right. That. Did anyone consider that some jerks with computer skills would generate skads of dummy e-mail addresses to let them vote thousands of times? Heck no. Whoever heard of computer nerds doing anything unethical?

Thus the sport was shocked when the initial voting tallies showed eight of nine Kansas City Royal players leading in their positions for the 2015 All-Star Game, the one non-Royal being Angels star Mike Trout, generally accepted as the best player in the game and the reigning American League Most Valuable Player. MLB has voided 65 million votes determined to be part of the Kansas City virtual ballot-stuffing scheme, but there is little doubt that the AL line-up is still going to be substantially determined by the cheats, not the votes of the fans who hewed to the voting rules and their spirit. Five Royals are now leading in the vote, and the team that will be announced tomorrow will probably include Omar Infante, the K.C. second baseman who is neither a household name or especially good. In fact, he is having a terrible season, but unless new Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred pulls a Frick, he will start ahead of Houston’s Jose Altuve, who won the batting championship last season.

The fraud is not inconsequential. The undeserving Kansas City players will necessarily push more deserving players off the squad. Many of those players have bonus provisions in their contracts for being named to the All-Star team, so they will not receive money that they would have earned without the Kansas City cheating. The team itself will be weakened, reducing the quality of the game as well as its interest to  non-Kansas City fans. The sour taste of a rigged line-up largely composed of non-stars from one city may hurt ratings, which in turn will lower the game’s profitability for Fox, which broadcasts it, and sponsors. Moreover, the outcome of the All-Star Game matters: it determines the home field advantage in the World Series. This means, ironically, that the scheme may eventually hurt the Kansas City Royals, who are again legitimate competitors to go to the World Series.

As for Infante and the other fraudulent All-Stars, the scam means receiving hefty bonuses that are undeserved. Infante’s contract will award him an additional $500,000 over time as a direct result of the ballot stuffing.

Like a lot of sports ethics controversies, this one exposes the depressing state of ethics ignorance among sports fans and the even more depressing ethics void in the sports media. The general reaction to this episode by baseball writers is amusement. Yes, wide-scale cheating is funny to them. This reaction is based on their contempt for MLB (“Ha-ha! These idiots couldn’t see this coming!” Rationalization # 36, Victim Blindness), fans (“They always vote for the wrong players anyway!” #2. The “They’re Just as Bad” Excuse, or “They had it coming” ) and the All-Star Game itself. I suppose it is too much to expect journalists to realize that any form of accepted cheating helps make all cheating more acceptable. (That thinking is the fault of #8. The Trivial Trap  or “No harm no foul!”)

For their part, fans, especially Kansas City fans, are chewing through rationalization on the Ethics Alarms list as if they were Cracker Jacks, among them:

#1. The Golden Rationalization, or “Everybody does it”: “Hey, all the cities vote for their own players, we just did it better!”

#3. Consequentialism, or  “It Worked Out for the Best”: “The Royal are the World Champs and have the best record in the league! It will still be a great All-Star team!

#4. Marion Barry’s Misdirection, or “If it isn’t illegal, it’s ethical, ” and #5. The Compliance Dodge: “The rules don’t say anything about how many e-mail addresses you use!”

#7. The “Tit for Tat” Excuse, 11. (a) “I deserve this!” or “Just this once!”  and 21. Ethics Accounting (“I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”) The argument here is that deserving Kansas City players were snubbed by voters in past years, so electing undeserving Royals in 2015 makes up for the deserving Kansas City stars of the past who never made it to the game. I’ve seen this one more than once, in print.

#15. The Futility Illusion:  “If I don’t do it, somebody else will”  “If we didn’t rig the votes, some other team’s fans would have done it, so it might as well be us.”

#22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things.” “Lighten up! It’s not like this is a Presidential election or anything!”

A discussion of the fiasco on MLB radio yesterday caused my head to explode inside the car—what a mess—when the hosts of the show “Power Alley” pooh-poohed the idea that Infante, the proud possessor of a .234 batting average and a .555 OPS, making him one of the worst hitters in the world, should politely decline a starting All-Star berth in favor of someone who actually deserves it. “It would be an insult to the fans!” quoth Ethics Moron A, whose name I have erased forever from my brain. No, you dolt, it would be a demonstration of respect for fans, a demonstration of fairness to fellow players, and a rejection of the handful of cheats who rigged the vote. “Why? This isn’t his fault!” sayeth Ethics Moron B, apparently unaware that those of us who can fix an ethics injustice should.

Ethics Quiz: Is knowingly accepting the benefits from someone cheating on your behalf and harming third parties by doing so more admirable than doing the cheating yourself?

Surprise, A and B! The answer is no, even when the benefits include a half-million dollars in bonus money. Not surprisingly, Infante agrees with them, telling Yahoo! Sports,

“I have to be happy. The fans vote for me. I’m happy about that. I can’t control that. I’m happy because if I’m there, the opportunity to go to the All-Star Game is great.”

Unethical, greedy and stupid with a .234 average is no way to go through life, son.

The Commissioner should void the results and have an independent panel decide which Royals players deserve to be on the squad. None should start as a waring to future conspiratorial fan bases, and the system should be reformed to one fan, one vote, with heavily weighted votes going to coaches and managers. (A and B didn’t like that reform, because, and I am not joking, “the vote totals would be as impressive.” You know, like those impressive vote totals under Stalin when you either voted for him or disappeared.

Cheating matters. There is no such thing as trivial cheating. Baseball has an obligation to fix this, and not next season, but immediately.

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Sources: USA Today, Kings of Kaufman, ESPN, Sporting News