NON-FICTION

Pt. 1: Spare Me the Small Change

It was a diamond-shaped Cinderella story. On November 1, 2017, the Houston Astros, for the first time in its 45 year history, slipped into World Series rings. The team had batted and battled toughly through a rough year. They took game 7, finally, 5-1. The Astros danced and hugged on the Boston field. Shortstop Carlos Correa ran to his girlfriend and asked that she be his wife. 

Baseball fans know fully where this tale goes. It turns out, Cinderella had used a spot of grease.

An MLB investigation confirmed that the Astros had been cheating for some time via a camera and a garbage can.

1.

At a distance, baseball seems like a slow game. People stand a lot. Once in a while they walk. It looks like they are hanging around, waiting for the real game to start. 

Up close, the game hums like a soft symphony. Players plan, strategize and plot. The on-field team is tasked with securing three strikes for three batters. This can’t rely only on advanced planning. They improvise. And they need to communicate, quietly, distantly, the secret of their next move. 

Pitcher and catcher share a crucial message stream. Moves are spoken by visual codes. A batter stands at the plate. The catcher at his back signals the pitcher: throw a curve ball, throw a cutter. The hitter sees none of this. If he knew what the catcher was signalling, it would change the game. Balls fly at an average speed of 90 MPH (144 KMH). The ball moves from pitcher to plate in 4/10 of a second. The batter, in this split second, judges speed, curve and elevation and takes a swing. If he judges wrong, he can’t compensate in time. He makes a decision as to what kind of pitch is coming before the ball has left the pitcher’s hand. A good guess could mean a home run. A bad guess almost always means a strike. The hitter unlocks possibilities if he knows in advance what to expect.

But the batter has a way to find out what catcher and pitcher are planning: stealing signs.

Sign stealing is what, in World War 2, was called code cracking. A team manages to tell their hitter what pitch is coming.  Baseball has two forms of sign stealing: legal and banned. If you are at the plate, it is legal for your teammate on first to signal to you whatever the catcher is telling the pitcher. It is against the rules when you get the info from a source outside the game- say, because you are hearing secret messages.

MLB members whispered of Astro rumours for years. Were they cheating? We finally got an answer last November. Former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers was the first to confess that, yes, they were. The Astros had a camera trained on home plate, sending an illicit feed to a teammate’s tv . The teammate would bang out signals, drumming baseball Morse onto a trash can, broadcasting to the batter the pitch to come. This constructed clairvoyance gave them the World Series. 

The Astros Club was punished for the cheat. The team was fined $5 million and lost their first and second round draft pick. The manager was fired. And they paid, arguably, the deeper cost in reputation and respect. The fans lost their proudest moment. The League lost credibility. 

Cash and intangible suffering weren’t enough for everyone. People were angry. Fans wanted the complicit players suspended rather than the immunity that they were granted. Tweet after tweet demanded the Astros to be stripped of the World Series title. Fellow players raged. Dodgers closer Kenley Jensen called this “the weakest punishment in sports history.” Atlanta outfielder Nick Markakis told the Guardian, “Every single guy over there needs a beating.” 

Non-sports people often don’t get these intense reactions. The World Series was three years ago. It’s just a game. The Astros club suffered even if individual team members did not. Why do some people want more?

Why indeed? Baseball fans will give you many answers. But there is an important answer no fan will give. It is outside the purview of sports. It is far from intuitive. 

It has to do with water shortages. 

2.

The June issue of the stutter-worthy Journal of Personality and Social Psychology gives us some clues to understanding this. Social psychologists Yu Ding and Krishna Savani had a question- not about sports but about punishment. What, they asked, makes people want harsher penalties for crime?

They created some clever ways of finding answers. They gathered a couple hundred people into an online study. They showed these people graphs of averaged annual temperature fluctuations in the U.S. over thirty years. They then asked everyone to imagine a scenario: You live on an island. This island gets all of its water from rain. You are in year two of a drought and the government imposes water restrictions. You see your neighbour violating these restrictions by washing their car and sprinkling their lawn. Now answer: How likely are you to report the neighbour? How severe should the punishment be?  How bad is the crime?

Like any good study, there was a twist. The participants were randomly deposited into one of two groups. Remember that, before getting the above scenario, people in the study looked at a graph of three decades of U.S. temperatures- one averaged temperature per year. Each group got a different graph. One group saw smaller changes in temperatures year to year. The other saw the changes as large. That’s it. The groups differed only by the size of temperature variations on a chart.

And this was enough to affect how badly people hated their imaginary, water-liberal neighbours. People who looked at the chart with bigger weather changes were more likely to report their neighbour, rated their crime as worse and wanted their neighbour punished in more severe ways.

The question is: why? It is easy to see why any particular person would be upset by the waste of water. We need each other to survive a drought. One person making bad choices hurts us all.

But that doesn’t explain the difference in the two groups. The drought was the same in both groups. The size and quality  of the problem was the same. But people who saw larger differences viewed the crime as worse. It’s like thinking today is colder because you just learned about the ice age. Yet, that is just what those graphs did- they changed perception. What spell did that chart cast to make people want to see their neighbours suffer more?

The authors had a hypothesis. 

It is hard to judge the personalities of people who write research papers. They are names on a page, their individuality lost to the opaque clouds of academic speak and stats. But my imagination has a default SIMS setting that dresses social scientists up like Sherlock Holmes. They are always searching out clues to help them crack interpersonal enigmas. Detectives Yu and Savani may have solved the case of the disgruntled neighbour. 

They were studying the impact of variability - how much do fluctuations affect our feelings about wrongdoers, and what do we do with those feelings? When we see a graph that shows one year is really hot and the next is really cold, we think forward: what will happen next? Maybe it will be bad. Maybe next year it will be worse. In other words, we feel vulnerable.

And if things could get worse, we need to act now to protect what we have. In this context, we judge more harshly the transgression next door. You are Nero, washing your car while Rome burns. But if weather patterns are consistent, we’d be more confident that next year will probably be fine. This is just a minor blip in an otherwise predictable pattern of rain-to-sun ratios. It’s all chill, man.

3.

How does this explain why some people want to punch cheating baseball players in the head?

Yu and Savani say that variability makes us feel vulnerable. Can this be true of sports?

I will tell you a secret about me. I don’t actually watch sports. The reason is not hatred. Sports are too captivating. When a hockey game is put in front of me, I go into an anxious trance. It’s harrowing. The emotional process of investing in a team, in cheering through the highs, groaning through the falls- it exhausts me. It is a two hour panic attack. My breath shortens; my pulse grows quick. There is pleasure when my team does well, but there is a lot more pain. And tiny changes impact the game in major ways- a swapped goalie, a penalty, an unrested player. I can’t control any of it. In other words, the variability makes me feel vulnerable.

This variability plays into not just individual games but to entire seasons. There are thirty teams in the MLB. Each of these teams comes with tens of  thousands of fans, all of whom are hoping that this is the year where they win the Series. And a different team wins every year. In fact, a baseball team has not won two World Series in a row in almost twenty years. That is a lot of variation. 

Imagine, instead, the league limited to two teams. You have the West Coast Chanters and the East Coast Hipsters. In this league, the World Series is won, always, by the Chanters or the Hipsters. This is called low variability. This changes our fears. Sure, we may have lost this year, but our chances are fifty/fifty for next year. How would this affect our views on stealing signs? If we accept the implications of this study, the answer is, “a lot.”

4.

In March, a couple in Kelowna, BC, was filmed in a grocery store. It was the early days of Covid dread. We had not yet caught on to the fact that this wasn’t the end of all things. This couple panic-loaded two carts with all of the store’s remaining meat. The video, and the subsequent rage, went pandemic. People around the world found shelves cleared of chicken and toilet paper because a tiny section of society went shopping with a list reading, “Buy it all!” We were already mad. The video gave us a focal point for our anger. Some of us quietly moaned. Some shamed them online. Some threatened death. We poured our mounting frustration onto these two until they reached a desperate hand above the surface of our fury with a $1000 cheque for the food bank. 

These reactions, good or ill, illustrate the point. We were scared. We felt vulnerable. 

Vulnerability is an important word as it comes up in Yu’s and Savani’s study many times. Extreme change makes us feel like society is at risk, that something bad is on its way. 

This meat hoarding couple weren’t convicted in the Court of Twitter because they were selfish. They were judged for when they were being selfish. They looked, in that moment, like a crack in the crumbling dam of our social landscape. It wasn’t a crime, but it felt wrong. We made an example of them in the hopes of saving the rest of us.

5.

Back to baseball. There is a concept within social psychology called Just Desserts theory: that people are deterred from crime if the punishment is appropriately severe. Fans see baseball as vulnerable, though that word is never used. They addressed this sense of vulnerability through calls to punish more. Penalty is the vaccine that keeps cheating from spreading. So the argument goes.

The variability/vulnerability theory follows a clear logic: bigger fluctuations lead to a realization that there are more possible outcomes. More possible outcomes means more possible bad outcomes. The more possible bad outcomes, the more vulnerable we feel. And the more vulnerable we feel, the more we seek stability in the form of strict punishment. We believe that if we have punished people enough, others will be deterred from copying the wrongdoers. Punish baseball players for cheating and, hopefully, less people will cheat. 

This section covered only the first aspect of Yu’s and Savani’s elaborate lab study of crime and punishment. It turns out that neighbourly reactions to washing cars in a drought and fans reactions to cheating are not just affected by weather and game complexity. As part 2 of this story will explore, they can be affected Covid, riots and a roll of dice. It will also answer a question you have probably never asked: why do changes in weather lead more people to want the death sentence?