In which Derek Jeter should wipe that self-satisfied grin off his face

Baseball is built on rules. Unlike football, soccer, basketball, or hockey, baseball is not a game of possession. It is a game of elaborate conventions designed to ensure that both team have equal opportunity — both defenses must record 27 outs. Both offenses must field the same number of players. And so on.

But it’s also a game full of cheaters, men who would try to steal an out away from the opposing team by faking being hit by a pitch – it’s the exact opposite of “giving outs away.”

This tendency has a long history within the game, as Bill James reminds us in a fabulous article in Slate.

The central theme of Babe Ruth’s life, which is the fulcrum of virtually every anecdote and every event of his career, is that Babe Ruth firmly believed that the rules did not apply to Babe Ruth.

So he cheated. He used a corked bat. He also innovated, and because he believed the rules didn’t apply to him, he shook off convention and swung for the fences, forsaking the line drive.

But it’s another Yankee’s brush with the cheat that is grabbing the attention of Bruce Weber and The New York Times. Weber, no doubt tired of covering the cheating / steroid scandals of Yankees Andy Pettite, Roger Clemens, Jason Giambi and Alex Rodriguez, wants to make the case that Derek Jeter pretending to have been hit by a pitch during a game is not the same as CHEATING. And he ought to know, right?

Yikes! First of all, can we please just call a halt to the professional-sport-as-a-metaphor-for-life thing? Morality is complicated and context-based, isn’t it?

Weber wants us to agree that cheating is a harsh accusation for a type of situational taking-advantage. And in the case of the infield fly rule, he’s right. There are situations when it applies, and situations where it doesn’t. And, of course, it is all up to the umpire to make that call.

Except that’s not what Weber thinks an umpire does.

Indeed, I’d argue that a prime function of officials is to relieve players of the burden of honor. After all, on a bang-bang play at first base, when the runner is called safe but knows in his heart he was out, he does not feel compelled to correct the umpire’s misimpression.

But in life there are no referees, no first base umpires.

That doesn’t matter in Weber’s construction.

I would describe the dividing line this way: If a player’s ruse is spontaneous, if it occurs in response to the action on the field, then it’s legit.

But Jeter still lied, and that lie produced a decided advantage. He didn’t feel the ball drill into any of the twenty small bones on the top of his wrist, nor did the pitch flatten a curled knuckle, pinching it against a bat.

Yet the problem isn’t even that cheating exists in baseball (cough, Kenny Rogers pine-tar-hand, cough) it’s that the accusations are leveled on a sliding scale. Derek Jeter can’t be a cheater, because he was just acting in the moment. But Mark McGwire can, because he planned his ‘roiding.

The problem is that we’re lying about the fact that there is lying, and it undermines the fundamentally unique premise of baseball: equality.

Jeter’s fake-out wasn’t just good television. It wasn’t just something every player should try once or twice. It slanted the field for the Yankees, giving them an extra base-runner when they could have easily ended up notching an out.

Baseball doesn’t have a game clock. Baseball doesn’t have the built-in possession war. Baseball has 27 outs, for each side, and stealing one is stealing one, Derek Jeter or not.