[Alberta's Child]

In some sports, cheating was actually built into the fabric of the sport's culture. Look at NASCAR, for example. Stock car racing was built on a culture of tax-evading moonshiners, for heaven's sake! Junior Johnson, who was probably the greatest NASCAR driver of all time, actually did a stint in Federal prison for his family's moonshining operation. And when he was a driver and (later) a team owner, he was pretty unapologetic about bending/breaking the rules just to get an edge.

Baseball has a lot of similarities, at least when it comes to things other than performance-enhancing drugs. There was something charming in a nostalgic kind of way about pitchers who would throw spitballs or doctor the baseball (spitballs used to be legal way back in the early decades of the 20th century). And there were always suspicions about how a grounds crew might put softer sand in the base paths if the home team was facing an opponent with fast runners in the lineup.

Perhaps the best case of bending the rules with the ballfield is "Ashburn's Ridge." Richie Ashburn played on the Phillies back in the 1950s. He was a fast runner and a good bunter, and the story was that the grounds crew at the old Connie Mack Stadium put a very slight hump in the ground up the third base line. This would help keep a slow-rolling bunt up the line from rolling foul. Gotta love it. LOL.

[Resolute Conservative]

Once when our highly rated HS football team went to play an opponent we arrived to field that was almost under water. We were lightning fast compared to them so they watered their field for 3 days before we arrived (it hadn’t rained in weeks).

We thought it was funny but it worked, they held the score down to 35-6. The year before it was 55-0 on our home field.