DID CRIME PAY?
It’s debatable that the Astros sign stealing actually helped them win
If the cheating allegations against the Houston Astros are proven true, they are inexcusable. While baseball has a long tradition of legal sign stealing — what should be called “sign decoding” — using cameras to spy on the other team to gain an extra edge damages the sport as a whole. But beyond calling into question all of Houston’s success over the past three years, it also raises a pragmatic issue: Is this spying worth the risk of getting caught?
Sure, knowing whether a fastball or off-speed pitch is heading your way sounds helpful. But there are reasons why it may not be as useful as it seems — and it’s possible that cheating, at least in the short term, may do more harm than good. What makes the Astros dangerous is that they may have found long term success by embedding stealing into the offense’s culture.
Hitters have refined and honed their approach at the plate for a lifetime, so suddenly having to listen for a whistling or banging from the dugout at the last minute can be a distraction, says ESPN analyst Doug Glanville. As a player, Glanville once told teammates he didn’t want runners on second to relay him decoded signs because his team’s system was too complicated and would throw him off.
Plus, if the player lays off the off speed pitches to wait for fastballs they may take a strike that puts the pitcher ahead or a fast pitch he could have crushed. When the fastball does come, the hitter may be too eager to capitalize, taking a huge swing or chasing a pitch in a bad location. And, Glanville adds, if the player gets the signal too late or is given wrong information even once, a deadly factor can begin to creep into the hitter’s approach: doubt.
Houston certainly did not seem to get an offensive boost from cheating in 2017.
In 2016, the Astros scored 17% more runs on the road, 390, compared to 334 at home. Their road slash line was better across the board: .255/.326./426 versus .238/ .311/.407. Overall, Minute Maid Field was 30th in runs scored in 2016, dead last in the league. You can see how a team with negotiable morals might turn to garbage cans for a remedy.
In 2017, after bringing in the centerfield fence by more than 20 feet and allegedly adding high-tech surveillance, Minute Maid was again 30th in total runs. The team produced 27 percent more runs on the road this time around: 501 to 395. Their slash lines were once again higher away from home, too: .284/.351/.483 versus .279/ .340/472.
That’s not to say that nothing changed at all. As Rob Arthur argued convincingly for Baseball Prospectus, the Astros did indeed see an uptick in overall production around the end of May, the point in the 2017 season the team is alleged to have begun stealing signs, going from very good to extremely good. Houston players swung and missed and chased pitches outside the strike zone far, far less then they had previously.
This is undeniable evidence that the Astros changed their approach at the plate after the alleged cheating began, but leaves some doubt about how much that change actually helped. At least at that point. The team blew the doors off at home in 2019, the other season for which the team is under investigation.
Bill James, perhaps the game’s foremost statistical analyst, cautions against reading too much into any of the statistics, saying 81 home games and 81 road games are too small a sample. “There is instability in both sides of the measurement,” James notes, adding that parks change each year beyond fence distances (and road parks change too) so all park factor statistics, especially for a single season come with a giant asterisk.
While these numbers do not definitively prove that cheating hurt the Astros, history adds further evidence — again, with James’ caveats — that baseball cheaters do not prosper.
The most infamous previous sign stealing brouhaha came with the (very) belated revelation that the New York
Giants were stealing signs during their celebrated pennant race against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. The Giants were down 13½ games on August 11th but finished 37-7 to tie the Dodgers; then won a best-of-three tiebreaker on a stunning ninthinning comeback that culminated with Bobby Thomson’s historic home run off Ralph Branca.
When word of the sign stealing (using a telescope and a buzzer) became public fifty years later, people speculated that the Giants would never have caught the Dodgers without cheating nor would they have won the playoff. However, according
to an article by Bryan Soderholm-DiFatte for the Society of Baseball Research, the Giants implemented their system on July 20th when they were just 7½ games back….and then their offense got worse.
Soderholm-DiFatte notes that New York had been averaging 5.5 runs per game at the Polo Grounds and 4.9 on the road. Afterward, they scored 4.7 runs at home. Starting August 11th when they began their hit streak, they scored just 4.6 at home, and 5 on the road. Six of the other seven National League teams had more innings at home scoring at least three runs after July 20th.
For every Eddie Stanky, whose home hitting stats jumped after July 20th, there was an Alvin Dark, who struggled at home while flourishing on the road. Whitey Lockman’s average jumped by nearly 50 points at home yet, according to author Josh Prager, who initially broke the sign stealing story, he was one of two players (with Monte Irvin) who refused the clandestine help, even if it was from a runner on second base legitimately deciphering signs.
Ultimately, the Giants won the pennant because their pitching improved dramatically. Yankee fans complaining about the 2017 ALCS would do well here to remember that they lost four games in Houston mostly because New York scored a total of three runs there.
In the tiebreaker playoff, people forget that Bobby Thomson, who never admitted to knowing what was coming, hit a home run off Ralph Branca in the Giants Game 1 victory… at Ebbets Field. Back home with their telescope at the Polo Grounds the Giants were shut out in Game 2 and held to just one run in Game 3 before that epic ninth inning.
Other stories have circulated about the 1959 Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians stealing signs. But despite Wrigley Field generally being considered a hitters’ park, the Cubs had nearly identical statistics at home and on the road that year (.249 team average and 336 runs scored at home, .250 and .337 away) … just as they had the previous year. The Indians fared better on the road both seasons but proportionally remained consistent.
But according to the reports, Houston seems to have stuck with the sign stealing for longer and possibly to have refined their system (using wires and earpieces), perhaps producing long-term benefits in 2019, when the team actually scored far more at home (489 runs) than on the road (431 runs), and had better slash lines: .284/ .362/.516 in their home uniforms com- pared to .265/.343/ .476 in their road grays. (The park was seventh in overall runs.)
Glanville says players may have adapted their approach at the plate to incorporate the sign stealing so it no longer felt like a distraction. “The players get used to it,” he says, cautioning that all of this is speculative since there’s no definitive proof as of yet about the team or about individual players. “The Astros may have created a regimen and trained within the system.”
He believes other clubs are stealing signs too but they may lack the organizational thoroughness and the talented players to produce the same results. The Astros, he says, have been leaders in treating the front office and the managers — and maybe now the players — as parts of a machinery that can be adjusted as a whole.
“They are incredible as an organization in working systematically on any topic, where they find a methodology and execute, ” Glanville says. But if they are using this to create a culture of cheating, he adds, then regardless of the results, “that threatens the integrity of the game.”