By now, you’ve probably seen the umpiring butchery that Mike DiMuro foisted upon Cleveland, when he ruled that Dewayne Wise caught a foul ball while tumbling into the stands that the right fielder very clearly did not catch. (Watch it here.)

The real question, as it concerns the unwritten rules, is one of gamesmanship. Wise knew that he didn’t catch the ball, but was more than happy to accept the out. Did he act appropriately?

Of course he did. It’s the same reasoning used by outfielders who have trapped flyballs but act as if they caught them. (Wise was even more innocent than that—he didn’t act in any way like he made the catch.)

“Everybody thought it was pretty funny,” he told the Westchester Journal News. “They’re just laughing about it, the way I got up smiling. What was I supposed to do? I’m not going to laugh and show up the umpire right there.”

He was also not going to willingly give up one of the 27 outs necessary for his team to win the game.

“Baseball is a game where you try to get away with anything you can,” said Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg in the Saturday Evening Post. “You cut corners when you run the bases. If you trap a ball in the outfield, you swear you caught it. Everybody tries to cheat a little.”

“It’s not cheating,” said former outfielder and minor league manager Von Joshua, ” if the umpire lets you get away with it.”

Wise’s action is less like his teammate Derek Jeter acting like he was hit by a ball that struck his bat, and more like Greg Maddux, a master at throwing scuffed baseballs. Maddux didn’t scuff them himself, however—he held onto ones that had acquired abrasions through the course of regular use, taking what was legally given to him during the course of the game and using it to his fullest advantage.

Tough to fault anybody for that.