DRAWING THE LINE

               In sports, what happens on the field stays on the field. Usually.

               A couple of times when it didn’t have punctuated the news of late. One involved Myles Garrett, a Cleveland Browns defensive end who, in a tussle at the end of a game with the Pittsburgh Steelers, yanked off the helmet of Steelers’ quarterback Mason Rudolph and whacked Ruddolph over the head with it.  The other involved allegations that the Houston Astros, baseball’s 2017 world champs and 2019 runnersup, engaged in a three-season campaign of electronic sign stealing.

               Garrett’s misdeed, a crime of the flesh, occurred in full view of the 67,000 or so spectators at the football game in Cleveland plus the millions of folks at home watching on TV, for whom it was replayed many times. There was no doubt what happened, so the National Football League quickly stepped in and whacked the player with an “indefinite” suspension that will include the Browns’ six remaining  regularly scheduled games this season plus whatever playoffs they might quality for, and, maybe, some games next season as well.

 The Astros’ business is more complicated and no doubt will require prolonged investigation by Major League Baseball. That’s the way it can be with white-collar (white jersey?) crimes, where lawyers often succeed in painting offenses in shades of gray that defy easy adjudication. They earn big money for doing that.

 But back up a second and take another look at the supposedly open-and-shut Garrett matter. If the young man had been caught doing what he did on the street he’d now be in jail or out on bond, faced with a criminal assault charge. We’ve become so accustomed to our sports organizations being laws unto themselves that we take for granted their power to make rules that, in their own spheres, replace the force of law. That power is grounded in the fact that sports participation is consensual and people choose to compete with the knowledge that they take out-of-the-ordinary risks. In practice that covers just about everything that happens on a football field.

 That line, however, blurs when the mayhem goes beyond what is usually defined as egregious; in those cases the criminal authorities can intervene. That’s what has happened at least three times in the National Hockey League, all involving incidents that took place in Canada.  In 1988, Dino Ciccarelli of the Minnesota North Stars was fined $1,000 and spent a day in jail after being convicted of assault for a slashing attack on Luke Richardson of the Toronto Maple Leafs.  In 2000 Marty McSorley of the Boston Bruins got 18 months’ probation for similarly bashing Donald Brashear of the Vancouver Canucks and in 2004 Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche got a year’s probation and 80 hours of community service for a from-behind attack on the Canucks’ Todd Bertuzzi that left Bertuzzi with three broken vertebrae and ended his career.  That last attack also resulted in a sizable civil judgement in Bertuzzi’s favor.

If he were so inclined the Steeler’s Rudolph might have marched over the nearest police station and accused Garrett of assault. He didn’t, and it probably never occurred to him to so. He didn’t appear to be hurt too badly and, no doubt, subscribes to the boys-will-be-boys ethos that pervades the game. It is on such a permissive basis that our sports proceed at all levels, for better or worse.

The business about baseball sign stealing is interesting because the act involved is as much a part of the game as pine tar. Stealing signs go back as far as, well, signs, and everyone does it. The rub is supposed to come when a team employs mechanical or electronic devices in its pursuit, but even then the offense usually isn’t reported publicly. In a recent piece on the subject Paul Sullivan, the estimable baseball writer for the Chicago Tribune, called it a “club-on-club” crime that, when suspicions arise, is dealt with through informal channels,  in a sort of “hey, we’re on  to you, so quit it” mode. That’s because no team’s hands are clean.

Sign stealing’s part in baseball is best exemplified by the roll it played in one of the game’s biggest moments, Bobby Thomson’s 1951 “shot heard round the world” home run that decided the National League pennant playoff between his New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. According to accounts pieced together some 60 years later by my old newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, Giants coach Herman Franks picked off the Dodgers’ sign with a telescope in center field and relayed it to the Giants’ dugout through a buzzer system, and from thence it went to Thomson.  Thomson went to his grave insisting he wasn’t clued in, but some teammates’ later accounts contradicted that.

Sneaky as it was, though, that sort of thing wasn’t against baseball’s rules until 1961, and then only when technology is involved. This being the 21^st century the Astros case probably involves some of that but, amusingly, some old-fashioned means also might have been employed. One story had it that after picking off a catcher’s signals with a video camera and flashing it to the dugout, the team passed it along to its hitters by banging on a trash can.

If found guilty by the commissioner’s office the Astros probably will suffer the usual sports penalties— fines, loss of draft choices and the like. It’s none of the courts’ business, and rightly so. In a society that values property, though, the world of fun and games ends and the real world begins when actual stuff is involved. In 2016 Christopher Correa, the St. Louis Cardinals’ scouting director, was found to have looted the Astros’ computer system for such things as the team’s draft evaluations. Instead of a wrist slap and whispered “attaboy” he was sentenced to spend 46 months in a Federal prison.