SPY ANXIETY
HOUSTON — Technology is to the major leagues today what performance-enhancing drugs were in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The rules surrounding usage are vague, the likelihood of getting caught low enough for bad behavior to continue, punishments are not clearly delineated and a lack of clarity exists about just how many are illegally participating and what the impact on results are.
MLB and the Players Association were slow to appreciate the gravity and damage that would result by ignoring and downplaying the PED scourge. The same mistakes should not be repeated here.
At minimum, the game’s pace and style have been altered for the worse. At maximum, we are getting cheating that is impacting results.
Sign stealing has always been part of the game and teams have always been suspicious. The stories, for example, of a guy sitting in the outfield seats with binoculars trained on the catcher’s fingers and keeping a hat on or off to signal a type pitch or location are well known. But what is going on now is cheating on, well, steroids. The speed, detail and precision offered by technology has led to greater possibilities, but also greater paranoia.
The game is relentlessly slowed by the need to flash multiple signs and change signs to deceive the tech spies. This has led to more pitcher step-offs of the mound, more hitters stepping out and just a more grinding pace. There have been far more cross-ups between pitchers and catchers leading to more wild pitches and passed balls because the multiple signs leave the battery members on different pages.
But the worst of this would be if hitters know what is coming based on electronic cheating, polluting the impact of talent. We want to believe sports is determined by individual and collective skill, will and smarts. We don’t want this to be Ebaseball in which the balance of the hitter-pitcher confrontation — as the biggest example — is swayed because an intricate relay system that begins with technology alerts the hitter what is coming.
The answer, I believe, is tied to going all in or all out on the elec- tronics. Personally, I would allow preparation however you would like, using any means. But once first pitch arrives, I would order all electronics of any kind off for both teams. That would mean no replay room and managers would have to decide what to challenge based on their own views and hunches.
In part we are in this dilemma because of replay rooms. The advent of challenging calls led to each team’s replay official getting access to every camera in every stadium and a treasure trove of angles and info of which clubs were not previously aware. One veteran executive told me he stopped scouting from behind home plate and would sit with his video replay chief because so much more information was available.
Of course, we probably are not going to get unplugged baseball. That genie will not be returned to the bottle. So the next answer — one Joe Girardi advocated strongly in his final seasons as Yankee man- ager — is to go like the NFL and outfit the players with earpieces so that overt signs no longer are necessary. MLB officials continue to say it is more complex than coach to quarterback and the technology is not yet available to outfit all who would need the earpiece.
And, of course, once the tech is available one part of the slippery slope of unintended consequences will lead at least to fears of that system being hacked. But stronger emphasis on solution and punishment is vital. The Commissioner’s Office is making up some ground, requiring last offseason that all teams detail what all of the cameras under their control are doing during games. There is an expectation Rob Manfred will create stronger edicts this offseason.
That is a must. Distraction from the postseason games has now occurred. Astros GM Jeff Luhnow conceded he has used counter-surveillance in each visiting park to play defense against opponents’ cheating. He made this public upon revelation that an Astros employee was filming near the dugouts of the Indians in the Division Series and the Red Sox in the ALCS.
Conversely, Houston has gained a Belichick-ian reputation for pushing the legality line.
“The best offense is a good defense,” a competing official said. “So I am suspicious of the defense story. Another competing executive said, “You know how we think of the A’s Bash Brothers as kind of a Ground Zero for a team succeeding because of steroids, I think there is at least concerns that the Astros are the Ground Zero for what can be done with tech.”
This is not ground MLB should want to be on.