New technology adds to baseball’s paranoia
By Noah Trister
It probably felt like a cutting-edge caper at the time: The New York Giants, using an elaborate spyglass-andbuzzer system, would have the opposing team’s signs relayed from their centerfield clubhouse at the Polo Grounds to the bullpen and then to the batter, passing along valuable information during the team’s pursuit of the 1951 pennant.
The question nowadays is whether there’s an app for that.
Stealing signs is as much a part of baseball tradition as stealing bases, but the technology available now could open a whole new frontier of competitive sleuthing. The latest flareup came when a man associated with the Houston Astros was pointing his cellphone into opposing dugouts during playoff games against Cleveland and Boston. The Astros said they were just trying to defend themselves against any suspicious activity from opponents.
There’s clearly plenty of paranoia to go around.
“The game is so ultracompetitive and there’s so small margins between really good teams and really good players and there’s a lot at stake,” Houston manager AJ Hinch said before losing to the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series. “So we do have to find a healthy place for everyone to be comfortable moving forward competitively because it’s a bigger topic than even one instance.”
The art of sign stealing ranges from the mundane — a baserunner trying to decode the catcher’s signals and let the batter know what’s coming — to more complex spying schemes. Even 19th century technology could apparently be useful.
In his 2007 book “The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball,” Derek Zumsteg mentions an 1898 incident in Philadelphia when a visiting player found a buried wire in the area around third base.
“The wire ran all the way to the home team’s clubhouse in the outfield,” Zumsteg wrote, “where a player would sit with binoculars and signal the pitch by setting the ground under the third base coach shaking, and the coach would in turn alert the batter.”
The 1951 Giants famously beat out the Dodgers for the National League pennant on Bobby Thomson’s playoff-winning homer . A half-century later, New York’s signstealing system was laid bare in a Wall Street Journal story that quoted members of that team. The bullpen would receive the signs from the clubhouse via a buzzer system. Catcher Sal Yvars said he relayed them to hitters.
Fast forward to the present era, and the possibilities for surreptitious surveillance seem endless.
“If they’re in the dugout, and they’re in there trying to steal our signs, I think that’s part of the game,” said Dave Dombrowski, president of baseball operations for the Red Sox. “If you’re doing electronic devices, that’s against the rules. We were penalized last year.”
The Red Sox were indeed fined last year for using an Apple Watch while trying to steal signs from the New York Yankees. Major League Baseball says before this postseason, teams contacted the commissioner’s office about sign stealing and “the inappropriate use of video equipment” — and it wasn’t just one team that was the target of those concerns.