Keeping the code: Redmond’s system minimizes the risk of giving up signs

As a major-league catcher and coach, Mike Redmond admits he has always been paranoid about the other team picking up traditional signs — arrays of touches to the nose, ear, chin and other parts of the face — coming from the dugout.

So when Redmond was hired by the Rockies as bench coach before the 2017 season, the former Marlins manager, who played 13 years, decided he needed to formally implement some sort of coding system.

“Nowadays, the other team getting one sign could cost you a game, and one game could cost you a season,” Redmond said. “That was something that was in the forefront of my mind — ease of use, quickness in relaying the signs from the dugout to the field and safety of communication.”

With that line of reasoning, Redmond worked with the Rockies’ analytics team to create the content for a wristband cheat sheet similar to the one seen on forearms of quarterbacks in football.

Those wristbands are worn by Colorado’s catchers, Chris Iannetta and Tony Wolters, and house a grid stuffed with random three-digit numbers that correspond with initialisms such as EAT, RPT and HSO.

“It’s pretty simple, really. (Redmond) gives us a number from the dugout, then we check the corresponding number on the sheet to control the basepaths,” Iannetta said. “And we have an infinite amount of sheets that we make, and then change out randomly.”

Hence, the Rockies feel like they’ve created a unique coding system — “to my knowledge, it hadn’t been done before” in the majors, Redmond said — although the concept has its roots at the college level.

“My vision for this has kind of evolved. It was an idea I’d originally gotten, because I’d seen guys have it at Gonzaga, because I live in Spokane,” Redmond said. “It’s a different system than what we have because college coaches, in large part, are using it to call pitches too, but it’s the same wristband concept.”

And perhaps the biggest impetus for the wristband’s implementation before last season was the fact that Redmond, in his debut spring training with the Rockies, was working with a couple of green catchers in Wolters and Tom Murphy (now in Triple-a Albuquerque), who had a combined 103 major-league starts behind the plate entering last season.

“Coming over here with two young catchers in Murphy and Wolters, I was thinking of something that would be easy — taking an aspect of the game of getting the signs from the bench totally out of their hands,” Redmond said. “That way, they could focus on game calling and the things they need to concentrate on out there.”

Wolters believes the system helped him expedite his skills on the defensive side of the ball, where this season he has drawn high praise from the pitching staff and manager Bud Black.

“I can just think about catching the ball — beating the ball to the spot, putting my body in a good position to where I’m ready to receive in a couple different areas,” Wolters said.

But now that news of the Rockies’ wristband is out, how long until it’s deciphered? With cameras omnipresent at every ballpark, and considering the persistent observant power of social media, is Colorado confident that its cryptograph can stand the tests of opposing surveillance?

“We have tons of variations of the cards, and we could use the same three-digit number more than once, but it’d mean a different thing each time,” said Redmond, smiling. “It’s virtually impossible to pick it up.”