* Remember Barry Bonds?

I’m including this one because the contributor of this essay is a published author (even if his main subject isn’t baseball). The subject of ethics has always intrigued me, so here’s one from John Marshall on “The baseball ethicist: Why nobody signed Barry Bonds.” Marshall is a professional ethicist, writer, lawyer and lifetime baseball enthusiast. He is the president of ProEthics, a national ethics training firm, and the writer of the Ethics Scoreboard.

Back in the 1980s there was a whole to-do over free agents who went unsigned or were signed for relatively low salaries. “Collusion” was the watchword of the day, as owners were eventually found guilty of deliberately keeping salaries low. Sorry, but in this troubled economy, that seems like a responsible thing. But I digress…

… the usually reasonable John Brattain condemning major league general managers for not signing Bonds, because, you see, he might have made a difference, even gotten the Mets, or the Jays, or some other also-ran, into the postseason. But just as, in Sir Thomas More’s words, “it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world,” signing Bonds in order to make the playoffs would have been a dubious and foolish deal for any team, even if one buys the questionable assumption that he would have played well enough to hold up his end of it.

So we know when Marshall stands on the subject. But how long does the outrage last? Look at Roger Clemens. Heard much about him lately (outside the bit about the hospital changing the name of the Roger Clemens Institute for Sports Medicine to the Memorial Hermann Sports Medicine Institute)? The public, it would seem, has a short attention span. Outrage as long as the name is kept in the news, soon forgotten by most when the media moves on to a new hot topic.

Later on, Marshall notes the troubles faced by the NFL:

Can anyone imagine a pro football team hesitating for one second from drafting a promising prospect because of something like [stealing sports equipment]? There simply are no equivalents of Pacman Jones in baseball. Players who have serious criminal charges, who are accused of rape and spousal abuse, drunk driving and drug arrests just fade out of the game. Football and basketball want to sell merchandise to kids. Baseball wants to be an example for kids (and sell merchandise).

(I’m picking and choosing here, so you should really read his whole essay.)

Cognitive dissonance and the process whereby it changes attitudes explains much of advertising, political affiliations, biases, and most important, how powerful, popular leaders, celebrities and institutions can influence (or pervert) public culture for good or ill. A team signing Barry Bonds would set off a massive cognitive dissonance chain reaction. The team, which has the strongest positive value for most of its fans, would confer some of that positivity onto Bonds, who has seen his own values plummet below zero by the cognitive dissonance produced by his association with cheating (a strong negative), drugs (another negative), and law-breaking (also negative).

When Bonds rises on the scale, so do drugs and cheating: fans of the team signing him will become more likely to start mouthing the familiar, lame rationalizations Bonds defenders, sycophants and enablers have been using for years. (This was seen in the attitudes of Giant fans, who continued to support Bonds while the rest of baseball fans were substantially critical.)

Meanwhile, the team would fall on the scale, pulled down by Bonds’ negative value. Usually the weight of one player, no matter how negatively rated, couldn’t pull an entire team into negative territory with its fans, but this is not impossible, as I will personally attest: a lifetime, die-hard Boston Red Sox fan and a professional ethicist, I would not continue to follow or support the team if it embraced the warped ethics of Barry Bonds and the steroid apologists by signing him. I would, I am quite sure, actively dislike the team until a new regime took over, and it would probably never regain my previous level of loyalty or good will. Cognitive dissonance dictates that the team’s unavoidable decline on the value scale would also pull down others associated closely with it, such as its players, management, and major league baseball itself.

The team that hired Barry Bonds would be making a devastating statement of its own values and priorities, which would be this: “Cheating and using performance enhancing drugs is not as big a negative on our scale as winning is a positive. So if you help us win enough games, cheating is OK. In fact, it will be rewarded: observe how we hire Barry Bonds despite overwhelming evidence of steroid use and multiple federal indictments.” Hiring Barry Bonds would specifically contradict the Mitchell Report and what it stood for, which was essentially setting the cognitive dissonance value for using performance-enhancing drugs as prohibitively negative.

On the whole, I agree with Marshall. I just disagree with some of his premises. Not to generalize, but not every owner is the most upstanding citizen. Sports is a business and they want to put their product in the best light for maximum consumption. I’m believe if someone would have signed Bonds in a heartbeat if he could get at least 50-50 public opinion going for him.