Gamesmanship’s gains turn high-risk

There was a time when Red Sox Manager Alex Cora, under fire for allegedly stealing signs, would have been hailed as “an oldtime baseball guy,” a throwback to those grizzled skippers who understood the box score tells but part of the story.

A student of the game, Cora is said to have devised a way to essentially eavesdrop on opponents.

That ability to crack the code of communications between, say, a catcher and a pitcher, thus determining what the latter’s next offering might be, was once regarded as an art form in the Grand Old Game.

It was known as gamesmanship.

That simply meant gaining a competitive edge, and it had lots of applications.

Maybe it was a moistened ball, or a corked bat, or an almost imperceptible adjustment in the mowing of the grass, cognizant of how its height can affect the speed with which hardhit grounders zip across and through the playing area.

While one side sought to utilize its signs, the other side sought to surreptitiously purloin them. It was an ongoing battle of wits, like Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” saga.

And baseball certainly had no monopoly on it.

There have always been tales of how regulating an arena’s heat can determine how “fast” its ice might be, just as in basketball loose rims and tight nets were known to determine the effectiveness of a fast break.

And who among us didn’t delight in hearing the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers complain about having no hot water for their showers at the Boston Garden, to say nothing of hangup phone calls they mysteriously received in the middle of the night despite assurances their hotel numbers were closely guarded secrets.

Then there was the legend of the mythical dead spot on the parquet floor. It was said any opponent dribbling over it was likely to see the ball go astray, and even said that John Havlicek excelled at directing the man he was covering to that veritable Bermuda Triangle.

True? Who cares? What mattered was that opponents worried it might be true, which was the whole idea.

The more you know about sports, the more you understand there are games within the games.

Ever see a basketball player flop, or a hockey player pantomime a trip, or a football player wail over a flag that wasn’t thrown?

Ever see the hidden ball trick, which is entirely legal though clearly designed to make an opponent look like a dope?

Truth be told, there’s a bit of an actor in every athlete.

It’s called gamesmanship, and the only way to muff it is to get caught.