Dom Perignon

At first glance it seems innocent enough. One millionaire ballplayer sends another four bottles of champagne as a tongue-in-cheek thank-you note for sweeping his division rival on the final weekend of the season. Unfortunately, the gesture is outlawed by baseball’s rules, and Torii Hunter may be in some hot water with the league.

MLB’s Rule 21, quoted by The Cheaters Guide to Baseball blog:

(b) Gift for defeating competing club. Any player or person connected with a Club who shall offer or give any gift or reward to a player or person connected with another Club for services rendered or supposed to be or to have been rendered in defeating or attempting to defeat a competing Club, and any player or person connected with a Club who shall solicit or accept from a player connected with another Club any gift or reward for any services rendered, or supposed to have been rendered, or who, having been offered any such gift or reward, shall fail to inform his League President or the Commissioner or the President of the Minor League Association, as the case may be, immediately of such offer, and of all facts and circumstances connected therewith, shall be declared ineligible for not less than three years.

A three year suspension may seem excessive, particularly in light of today’s 50-game suspensions for a first positive PED test, but baseball history has been exceedingly clear on this point: gambling, or the appearance of gambling, does not belong in baseball.

At the beginning of the 20th century, gambling was as big a part of baseball as the pitcher or the base. Scandals seemed to occur on a yearly basis, and baseball was becoming an environment where the fans questioned the legitimacy of every player and every game (sound familiar?).

One of the common practices of the time was incentive payments, a practice where a player or team would “reward” a non-contending team for winning games against another contending team. On the scale of gambling-related sins, this certainly seems benign, but it was the appearance of impropriety that Judge Landis wanted to remove after the scandal of 1919. It wasn’t hard to imagine that these mostly-cash payments for winning could eventually turn into payments for throwing a game; thus came Rule 21.

Today’s baseball environment is decidedly different than it was when Judge Landis set out to clean up the game some 80 years ago. There is no longer a need for ballplayers to “supplement” their salary; one of the biggest reasons that baseball and gambling originally went hand-in-hand. Four bottles of Dom is probably about the same to Hunter and Sweeney as a couple of mini candy bars might be to you and me, so the significance of the payment in this case is almost laughable.

Still, it is hard for me to believe that people who have been around the game so long could be so clueless as to the rules, particularly involving what was, until recently, baseball’s number one sin. Christensen adds:

But Ryan also hinted at the reason MLB won’t let it pass with a simple slap on the wrist. The rule is designed to avoid any tampering between teams — gifts from a team to a pending free agent, for example — and MLB remains highly sensitive to anything that could even be remotely viewed as a form of gambling.

I don’t want to speculate as to what MLB’s response will be, nor am I advocating for a three year suspension (a punishment that would certainly not fit the “crime” in this instance). It will be interesting to see what happens in the upcoming weeks, however. The last several years in baseball has been a frenzy of panic in response to the limited evidence that baseball had been taken over by ‘roided up home run machines; now a near 80-year old scandal that was a true threat to the integrity of the game rears its head again, and I don’t think that it should simply be laughed off or swept under the rug.