Court Opinion

ID: 9492786
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:50:35.171443+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:29.730510
License: Public Domain

HAWKINS, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I am delighted to join Judge Whyte with respect to Sections I (Facts & Procedural Background) and II A. (Jurisdiction) of the opinion. I am equally pleased to concur with Judge Reinhardt in Section II B. (The Arbitration Award) of the opinion. I write separately only to emphasize why I think the arbitrator’s ruling is not entitled to the deference ordinarily accorded such decisions.
Imagine that Major League Baseball has decided to adopt a rule allowing video replay review of contested decisions and that we have been asked to review the home plate umpire’s decision to call a particular pitch a strike. In the process of doing so, we are told we must apply a rule of substantial deference to the call on the field, that our job is not to overrule close calls, but only those that are so clearly and plainly wrong they cannot be rationally explained.
*593In that context, which I would argue is not unlike the standard of review of arbitration awards, I would certainly not overrule the strike call of an umpire where the pitch was right down the middle of the plate. Nor would I even consider overruling a strike call where the pitch was on the edge, or even close to the plate. And even if the umpire adopted, during the course of a game, a definition of the strike zone that was inconsistent with my own understanding of what the rules of baseball define as a strike, as long as the umpire applied anything even remotely approaching a consistent application of that definition, I would defer to it.
But if the videotape replay showed the catcher diving outside the batter’s box to catch the pitch, I would overturn the umpire’s decision in a New York minute. I would do so because the call on the field bore no reasonable relation to reality and, more importantly, because the integrity of the game — here, of course, not a game at all — would suffer if I did anything else.
And that appears to be precisely what happened here. The arbitration below arose out of an earlier finding by another arbitration panel — which this very arbitrator chaired — that the owners had in fact engaged in collusion. This finding was reached after various owners, including Ballard Smith, then President of the San Diego Padres Baseball Club, testified under oath that no collusion of any kind had occurred. Of specific importance to this matter, Smith also testified that he had not made Steve Garvey a contract extension offer.
After considering this evidence, the earlier arbitration panel found that indeed there was collusion among the owners — a conclusion that simply could not have been arrived at without disbelieving the testimony of club owners, including Ballard Smith, to the contrary. This defined the “strike zone” for the resolution of claims like those of Steve Garvey. And, by any fair application of that definition, evidence that admitted the existence of collusion and owned up to prior attempts to mislead the truth-seeking process was in the strike zone and evidence that did the opposite was outside it.
This is the call that this arbitrator had to make. Having concluded that collusion had indeed occurred, a fund of some $280 million having been created to satisfy collusion claims, it was this arbitrator’s task to sort through claims by players and former players. Into that process returns Ballard Smith, now no longer affiliated with Major League Baseball or the San Diego Padres baseball club, who says, in effect, to the arbitrator: “You will undoubtedly recall my prior testimony, which you were obviously able to see through. I know this will come as no surprise to you when I now tell you that I lied. I lied about not having made Steve Garvey a contract extension offer, and I lied about the existence of collusion among the owners.”
The collusion “strike zone” having been decided as it had, we might expect a fair-minded decision maker to have done one of two things. One would have been to simply accept that Smith had lied when it was in his, his baseball club’s, and baseball team owners’ best interest to do so. Those lies having now been exposed, we might have expected such an arbitrator to applaud Smith for his forthright admission of prevarication, accept the truth of what he was now saying and proceed to determine the value of Steve Garvey’s claim. No reviewing panel of any kind, applying even the most rigorous standard of review, could have found fault with that approach.
The second thing the arbitrator might have done would have been to take a more cautious approach. Smith’s later statement, after all, was not under oath, and it is one thing to say “I lied” in a letter or an interview and quite another to serve up a prosecutable case of perjury by admitting under oath that prior testimony was a knowing, deliberate, and premeditated falsehood. Recognizing this, the arbitrator *594could have directed that Smith testify under oath concerning his more recent statements. And, if such a cautious arbitrator had done that, even though one might disagree with the end result — the “strike call” if you will — a reviewing authority would be required, I would think, to accept an arbitrator’s weighing of the two sworn statements.
Unfortunately, neither occurred here and no standard of review, no rule of deference is so slavish as to require us to accept the conclusion of an arbitrator who says, in effect, ‘You lied before when you said there was no collusion, and I refused to rely on those lies in finding that there was collusion; but now that you are telling me that you did lie, that there really was collusion, I refuse to believe you.” That is a pitch so far outside the strike zone that it is unworthy of deference, however defined.