A scandal for a slow summer in sports
Everyone cheats, it’s just that the Red Sox foolishly got caught
Firstly, if you are going to call this a scandal and you feel compelled to name it, the scandal should be called iGate, because Spygate also happened in Boston, and this time they used an Apple Watch.
Had they used Google Glass, the scandal would have been more difficult to name, but at least the New York tabloids could have used more profane and interesting cover headlines. For the record, the Oxford English Dictionary recognized “Masshole” as an actual word in 2015.
Second, the Boston Red Sox got caught stealing signs from the New York Yankees, and this was all it took for this to become a Major Thing, since the NFL, the NHL and the NBA haven’t started up yet, and this slid in just under the wire.
The scam worked like this: The Red Sox video staff watched for signs and sent them to training staff who stood in the dugout and looked at their Apple watches, which was the first red flag. Hey, that’s odd. People don’t ever do that. They might as well have been juggling live badgers. The trainers would tell players, and then the players would signal players on second base, who would signal the batter. To their credit, that is some fast work. You would have trouble doing that with Google Glass, if only because you would be slowed down at least a little by the societal shame.
The Yankees have a reputation for extra level paranoia, dating back years — Yankees manager Joe Girardi was accusing the Blue Jays of using sign-stealing help outside the field back in 2011, before The Man In White thing, which was left rather soundly unproven. Wednesday, cnnse.com reported that the Yankees recently accused Red Sox pitcher Doug Fister of wearing a prohibited earpiece in the dugout, which turned out to be a mouthpiece. So close.
Oh, and the Red Sox also accused the Yankees using YES Network cameras to cheat. Ha ha, terrific.
At its heart, this is about two things. One, unless you are a diehard baseball fan, sports have been a bit boring and desperate this summer, and it doesn’t take much to get people talking. Yankees, Red Sox, Apple Watch, back page of New York tabloids, go. This was the summer of Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, a fight that was deemed compelling by some because Mayweather waited for a while before he was absolutely sure he could pummel the amateur Irishman, which
of course he could, without a single doubt. This was the summer of Michael Phelps not
racing a shark. He did not race a shark. He raced a shark hologram. Why not have him race a hologram of every creature in the ocean while you are at it?
Second — and this relates to Phelps racing a computer simulation — this is about how comfortable Major League Baseball is striding into the future. While commissioner Rob Manfred pointed out that stealing signs is not actually against the rules, using electronic equipment to do so is the one red line.
And they should be, if only because sometimes the old-fashioned way is best. The golden days of baseball cheating involved pine tar and Vaseline, emery boards and cork in the bats, spitballs, sunscreen, sandpaper and shaving cream. Baseball cheating used to have a grimy, real-world feel to it. It may have been cheating, but at least it was artisanal cheating. Old-school sign-stealing was similarly analog. You had to learn to work with your eyes, and your hands.
And nobody took it too seriously, really. When Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda was caught smearing pine tar all over his neck during a start against the Red Sox in 2014, he was mostly treated like a clumsy child. Red Sox manager John Farrell — who surely did not know anything about this scheme, since as we in Toronto know he is an honourable man, wink wink — said, “I fully respect on a cold night you’re trying to get a little bit of a grip, but when it’s that obvious, something has got to be said.” Red Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski actually gave Pineda advice.
“Put it on your hat, put it on your pants, put it on your belt, put it on your glove, whatever you’ve got to do,” said Pierzynski of Pineda. “But at some point, you just can’t do it that blatantly, and I think that’s what the biggest issue was. No one has an issue with him doing it. I think it’s more of the fact he just did it so blatantly.”
Baseball prefers its cheating to be quaint and old-fashioned, and in today’s technology-soaked world, where every smartphone is both an indispensable tool and a never-ending hellmouth to the world’s misery, this is probably a good idea. Baseball could stand to modernize things, like letting players flip bats without retribution and the Jackson Pollock strike zone theory of umpiring and whatnot, but some things, like stealing signs and going to the movies, should stay as quaint as they can for as long as they can.
Meanwhile, some will say the Red Sox are cheaters, but that’s not the point. They cheated, yes, but everybody cheats. The real shame, the lasting taint that they will carry through the years, is that they were incompetent enough, primitive enough, simple enough, to get caught.