DIGITAL CHEATING IN BASEBALL IS OLDER THAN YOU THINK.
DIGITAL CHEATING IN BASEBALL IS OLDER THAN YOU THINK (AND EASY TO PROVE)
Everyone has already made all the j okes about the Boston Red Sox using Apple Watches to cheat in ballgames. “Somebody finally found a use for those things!” The marketing of the Apple Watch has been heavy on ultra- sporty imagery, but somehow the planet’s supreme marketers never thought to make a commercial with a rotund, liver- spotted old baseball coach getting the cyber-message “CUT FASTBALL” on his wrist and flashing a hand signal to Dustin Pedroia in the batter’s box. Opportunity missed.
When a crime story in the newspaper involves technology, we newspaper- makers have a terrible tendency to make the story all about the specific object or medium that was used in the crime. There has been a “Facebook killer” and a “Craigslist killer.” I don’t think there has been a “Twitter killer” yet, but wait a few months — one is sure to happen along. The scandal to which the Red Sox have now officially admitted seems certain to be called “Applegate” or something equally clever.
Yet the Apple Watch is truly incidental to the whole t hing. Applegate began when the New York Yankees noticed that Red Sox trainers were studying Apple Watches in the dugout at Sox home games and furiously signalling Sox batters. The Yankees’ GM sent an angry missive to the office of the commissioner, who reviewed footage of games in Fenway Park, confirmed the odd behaviour, and confronted the Sox front office. The team folded immediately and admitted that they had been unlawfully “stealing” catchers’ signals for weeks.
Stealing signals is legal in baseball, but normally only a friendly runner on second base will be in a position to see how many fingers the catcher puts down to ask for a particular pitch type. If a runner, a base coach, or anyone else can see the catcher’s finger signal, and decode it — catchers rarely do much if anything to encrypt their pitch calls — he can communicate that information to the batter however he likes. He can shout “SLIDER!” do an interpretive dance, whatever.
It is the use of electronic ( or optical) assistance — an instant link between some eye in the sky and the man at the plate — that is illegal. The Red Sox were caught having flunkies in their video room intercept catcher signals on camera and send the information to persons in the dugout. This violates a 2001 directive from Major League Baseball that reminds clubs that they are not supposed to use any electronics, even a cellphone, to “communicate to, or with, any on-field personnel” for sign-stealing purposes during a game.
But you don’t need an Apple Watch to do this kind of thing. If you want to just tell a batter what pitch is coming, two or maybe three bits of digital information will cover most pitchers’ repertoires. Baseball men have known this, and exploited it, for a long time.
In July of 1951, the New York Giants exiled a coach named Herman Franks to a box above centre field at the Polo Grounds — and gave him a telescope to take with him. Franks was also given a button that set off a buzzer in the Giants bullpen, and personnel there would pick up his Morse Code- like signals and relay them to batters during home games. The Giants, led by acknowledged super- scoundrel Leo Durocher, used this practice until the end of the season. It coincided with what is still the greatest, most famous regular- season pennant comeback in baseball history.
Rumours haunted t he “Giants win the pennant!” moment for a half- century, but it was only in 2001 that a historian named Joshua Prager assembled interviews and old- timer confessions into a complete, abundantly documented picture of the Giants’ cheating, complete with the exact game in which it began. The careful reader will have noticed that this 2001 date coincides with the timing of the Major League Baseball directive on electronic cheating mentioned earlier.
But the Giants certainly did not invent digital cheating. That honour may belong to the Philadelphia Phillies, who were — you could look it up, as they say! — caught with an electric buzzer under the third-base coach’s box late in the 1900 National League season. What is really new and remarkable about this sign- stealing controversy is that the Red Sox had, and attempted, no apparent defence of the club’s conduct.
Instead t hey are t aking the seasoned litigator’s “throw up a counterclaim” approach: Sox officials have supposedly accused the Yankees of using the cameras of the YES TV network, which the team co- owns with Fox, to steal signs at their own home games. If this is so, it should not take them any longer to prove it than it took the Yankees to prove their case. Baseball is played in the panopticon now: at every game there are dozens of cameras, pointing in every direction, taking video that is all stored indefinitely.
You can use this data, as the Red Sox did, to predict the next pitch with high accuracy. But it can also be used... to catch you using it.
I was explaining the Red Sox’s crime to a less baseball- conversant friend, and she asked, “Why don’t they just give the catcher and the pitcher a radio link, like coaches and QBs in football have, so they don’t have to use the dumb hand signals?” I did not have a good answer beyond, “Because that’s not how it’s done.” And that is, after all, Organized Baseball’s usual rejoinder to such naive suggestions.
But t hen I f ound out that Yankees manager Joe Girardi, a former catcher, has proposed exactly the same idea. As awkward as pitchers might find it to wear earpieces during a game, Girardi seems convinced that it is the only way to prevent an electronics arms race from impinging on the game.
It certainly seems like a natural method of preserving a little corridor of desirable secrecy inside the panopticon. But we all know what the real problem is. About a year after ballplayers start using headsets, the TV networks will start clamouring for the right to broadcast the chatter on them...