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Framing Pitches in Baseball: Ethical or Not?

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Jack Bowen, a past Double-Goal Coach® award winner, is an author, water polo coach and philosophy teacher at Menlo School in California. To see him in action and to hear what his players say about him, see this video, made when he won the PCA Double-Goal Coach award.

At the 5th annual Institute of Sports Law and Ethics (ISLE) Symposium at Santa Clara University, Bowen discusses the ethics of framing pitches in baseball. In contrast to flopping in soccer, which Bowen believes is clearly unethical, framing pitches is not against the rules. Still Bowen arrives hesitantly at his conclusion because of what is given to one player and taken from another when a catcher frames a pitch. Watch and consider how you would teach a young baseball player about framing pitches.