USA TODAY International Edition
Anti- sign- stealing device ‘ sort of whispers’
WASHINGTON – For his entire baseball career, New York Mets catcher James McCann has dropped into his squat behind home plate and cycled through the incoming pitch’s sign sequence by pointing and flipping his right fingers between his legs.
That has been the universal way to communicate signs for more than a century in this game.
Now it’s being phased out – by a magic- influenced system that’s as easy as pressing a button.
MLB announced prior to 2022 opening day that PitchCom – a technology that allows the catcher to call a pitch without putting signs down – will be allowed for this season after being tested in the minor leagues last year.
Once McCann presses a button on a device he wears on his left wrist, the verbal commands are sent to miniature receivers equipped with an antenna and speaker that informs the pitcher and selected fielders of the call ( the catcher also has a listening device to make sure he pushed the correct button).
“I think the awkwardness is the hardest aspect,” McCann told USA TODAY Sports. “Once we used it a few times during spring, it was pretty simple.”
The receivers fit into the lining of ballplayers’ caps while they’re in the field.
“You don’t even notice it,” Mets reliever Adam Ottavino said before Thursday’s regular- season opener. “It just sort of whispers to you. It’s like, ‘ slider.’
“I like the fact that the guy can be calling the pitch well before the ( batter) is back in the box, get that out of the way. So that’s kind of nice. You don’t have to think about signs when there’s a guy on second.”
Ottavino said he used PitchCom three times during spring training. Having the capability to fall back on traditional sign dissemination is comforting, but the right- hander said he used it even without a runner on second base – a situation that can cause games to slow to a crawling pace because of teams’ paranoia that a runner can relay signs to the batter.
“At first I thought it was a little weird,” Ottavino told USA TODAY Sports. “But once I used it, I was like, ‘ Oh, this works pretty good.’
“And I think it’s a bonus that a couple fielders get the info.”
Five players, including the pitcher and catcher, can have earpieces in at any given time. The Mets initially allocated earpieces for the fielders up the middle – shortstop, second base, center field – Ottavino said.
How PitchCom came to be
ProMystic, a company that creates and designs similar technologies for performing magicians and mentalists, developed PitchCom. Company cofounder John Hankins said he was inspired by the fallout of the Houston Astros’ electronic sign- stealing scandal, which used an instantaneous video replay system to decode catchers’ finger signs in real time, to create a technology that protected the game’s integrity.
Hankins, an attorney in addition to his credentials as a technical engineer, filed the patent paperwork within a week of his idea in late 2019. He challenged Craig Filicetti, his fellow cofounder, to develop a prototype that they tested one month later in the early part of 2020.
“It worked beautifully,” Hankins told USA TODAY Sports by phone Thursday.
“We felt that in order for it to be adopted in baseball, it needed to be invisible – or as close to invisible as possible,” Filicetti said.
Filicetti added that the goal of communicating signs discreetly isn’t much different than a magician or mentalist conveying covert information. He also knew the prototype had do be more complex than a “Morse code buzzer.”
That’s how the earpiece- to- speech innovation took form – PitchCom is also available in Spanish, Korean and Japanese.
Collaborating with the MLB security team to cover all of its bases, ProMystic is “extremely confident” that PitchCom cannot be hacked. All communications are encrypted to prevent decoding, and the trillions of code combinations make it impossible to predict, Filicetti said.
In an effort to accommodate the many requests from college programs, youth travel teams and softball squads that have flowed into ProMystic recently, Filicetti said a low- cost version that could be widely distributed is being developed.
The COVID- 19 pandemic delayed ProMystic’s initial pitch to MLB brass, but two executives met with them in Hankins’ native San Diego during the 2020 postseason series there. They demoed the technology “and their eyes lit up,” Hankins said.
After those positive reviews, PitchCom was introduced in 2021 major league spring training and tried out more intensively during the Low- Class A West minor league season. Fifty to 60 pitchers used the technology, Hankins said.
But they found out that PitchCom was a full- go for 2022 along with everybody else this week.
A new workflow
Even baseball traditionalists who may balk at the introduction of technology into the game will appreciate that it speeds things up, Filicetti said.
Yankees ace Gerrit Cole told reporters Thursday that he was excited to use PitchCom and that the “immediate positives” regarding pace of play is “encouraging.”
“Of the top ( pitchers), it seems like most of them want to use it,” Hankins said. “It’s gratifying.”
The Mets will operate PitchCom use on a case- by- case basis, depending on pitcher comfort.
“We’ve been doing it since it’s Day 1, when it came out. We got some good information that’s where it was headed – not from the league office or anything. We just felt it would be smart to prepare for that,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said.
“Our guys, every day, have embraced it more and more. We’re not going to force it on anybody. We’ve had guys using it for quite a while and know how it works and know the things you can and can’t do.”
The primary limitation is that the verbal signs don’t dictate pitch location. Ottavino said one potential workaround is that the first “pitch” called will determine the location before the pitch type is crystallized, or vice versa.
“That’s definitely the hardest part,” McCann said. “Pressing those little buttons, you got to figure out a way to do location.”
Speaking to Miami Marlins catcher Jacob Stallings during spring training, McCann said the two discussed the confusion over which sign the pitcher may be shaking off – the pitch or the location. He noted it’s a lot quicker to change fingers than press a new button and have the pitcher and fielders hear it.
McCann said it’s a lot like NFL coaches feeding play calls into the helmet of a quarterback or linebacker. Baseball has a competition proximity issue that football doesn’t have to worry about, though.
“Their closest opponent is 10- 15 yards away. In baseball, the guy that cannot know what’s coming is a foot away from the catcher,” McCann said.
“It’s new. It’s not that it’s hard,” McCann added, “it’s just different.”