Who's the cheater?

Margaret, or Peg, a new voice here, writes to ask the intriguing question (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase): 

"Why is, say, gambling on ballgames worse than stealing signs?  Isn't cheating cheating?  Shouldn't it all be punished equally?"

First, Peg, I would like to say thanks for joining our merry band of lonely, bitter, drunken men.  (The upside is, you could do even worse, such as maybe a heavily armed incel militia.)

My response would be this:  gambling is the red line, the third rail, the inviolable sanctum sanctorum because it leaves in question whether people are trying.  

Players get caught "cheating" all the time. 

They smear stuff on the baseball, they smear stuff on their bats, they run out of the baselines, they steal signs the old-fashioned way (squinting from second base), they let the infield turf grow long or they cut it short, they ingest dangerous substances that make their heads grow and their testicles shrink, and they grab onto opponents belts when they're turning third or hide extra baseballs in the outfield grass. 

Well, all right:  those last two not so much since the original Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s.

But you get my point.  Everybody's always looking for an edge and if they go overboard they get punished for it, as they should.  

But gambling is something else.  Gambling rips away the essential pretense that keeps the game going.  

Much as we groan and moan about ballplayers, they go to incredible lengths to win, even now that they're all rich.  They crash into walls (and into each other), tear up their knees making sliding catches, risk taking 100-mph fastballs to the head.

Once that stops—once we don't know if anybody out there really is doing their best to win—then it's what Jerry Seinfeld called it:  just rooting for the laundry.

Or even less!  What reason is there at all to watch the games, if the players can purposely lose and don't get punished?

This is why major-league baseball hired an egotistical nut job like Kenesaw Mountain Landis and even handed over power to him, in order to quash the gambling pandemic that was threatening to wipe out the game at the start of the 1920s.

And that is why it meant so much when the glorious Babe ascended to New York City, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Or something like that.  

But it's true:  the ascent of the New York Yankees is intimately connected to stomping out gambling by ballplayers.  

The Babe was what we want all ballplayers to be:  a wonderful, overgrown manchild, who in his sweet naivete made himself a fortune entertaining us.  

Pete Rose can go suck an egg.