On the first, 1–1 count, it hangs smoothly: everything rises. With one game left in the playoffs, Aaron Judge, one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, made his 62nd home run of the season, pitching in the seventh. in history. The umpire’s total was an American League record, we kept hearing, because the men who left him all played for National League teams, it doesn’t matter that interleague play made up the difference. Nobody cares about American League records. They are concerned with the assumption that the Judge grew his good body by eating food, not drugs, unlike a few men who took him. We are resurrected because we believe that he plays by the rules.
Is there another one? The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the online platform chess.com found more than 100 cases in which the 19-year-old grandmaster Hans Niemann may have “received illegal assistance” by switching screens and searching for fake intelligence – a brain on steroids. Think of it as cheating on a take-home exam. (Reports of academic fraud increased during the pandemic.) Niemann admits he did it twice, at ages 12 and 16, but denies allegations he found a way to cheat last month at a tournament in St. Louis. he defeated the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, in front of the video cameras. “I had the impression that he wasn’t nervous or really focused,” Carlsen said afterwards, explaining his refusal to play Niemann again. On the Internet, speculation abounded as to where Niemann might have hidden a device that could vibrate in Morse code, giving hints from a colleague. His shoes? His rectum? Niemann volunteered to play in a suit.
Vibration theory has affected professional poker as well. The case in point is the $269,000 won recently by Robbie Jade Lew, who had some bad cards. Did he know that his opponent, Garrett Adelstein, also had bupkes? That’s what Adelstein seemed to suspect. He met with him—and, amazingly, Lew returned his money, thus prompting Zapruder—a film screening process online. (Later he said he regretted doing so.) His stool, others noticed, seemed to tremble here and there, as if it had been broken. “I was shaking my feet,” he told the podcast “PokerNews,” blaming ADHD. and a hangover. What about the red stone on his finger that disappeared after his hands fell a little under the table? “I was twisting my ring, like I always do.” Is that where the phone-shaped pants were? “I was wearing pants that were too tight and too small.” Versace leggings. “I wish we could just take our clothes off,” he added, sounding like an aloof chess rogue.
The dishonesty or dishonesty is reminiscent of the former President who insists that all elections are rigged unless the right person wins. Sports don’t build character, the saying goes. They open themselves. Are we all being paranoid? Unfortunately, the angling sport on Lake Erie that made world news the other day is no match for the sanguine. “We have weight in fish!” the Dickensian tournament director, Jason Fischer, announced, after catching an unusually fat walleye caught by the winning team, slicing open its belly, and removing the sinker, to cheers from the angry crowd. On the one hand, this was a low-tech con, along the lines of Deflategate, compared to sci-fi conspiracies in poker and chess. Many roads have opened up, showing not only other sinks but the waves of fish that used to be caught—ingenuity in its ignorance. On the other hand, those of us who followed the virus quickly learned that their would-be rivals, Chase Cominsky and Jacob Runyan, were enjoying a fishing dominance that, like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in the 90s, could not. t help attract doubters. (Sosa, for what it’s worth, never admitted to wrongdoing.) Lake Erie is big. How could the same lines keep getting big fish? It didn’t help that one of these men reportedly failed a polygraph at last year’s Fall Brawl. One’s faith in the settlement agreement was not improved by the knowledge that polygraphs were already well established for the angling district.
“Now you know why I hate fishing tournaments,” a trout angler e-mailed the other day, and confessed that he, too, had cheated in the only tournament he ever entered. “We filled our flies with the smell.” He continued, “We brought them to the river, and maybe we threw them a few times, they didn’t catch anything, and we went back to fishing straight away.” So I have to say, we tried cheating, but we gave up on it because it didn’t work. So our third finish was official! ” Much like Judge’s seventh inning. Or so we will hope, until it turns out that the Yankees were stealing signals and sending pulses to his belt. ♦
