Sign-stealing goes high-tech
Sign-stealing accusations levied against the Astros by pitcher Mike Fiers reverberated throughout baseball this week, leading to an MLB investigation, a Twitter spat between Yu Darvish and Christian Yelich and who knows what else down the road.
This story, as they say in the business, has legs.
It has all the ingredients to make for interesting reading — cheating, lying, modern technology and high-paid athletes and executives looking for an edge over their opponents in a sport in which some rules are made to be broken.
The only disappointing part of Fiers’ expose in the Athletic is that it wasn’t released during the Astros-Nationals World Series, when Fox Sports analyst Alex Rodriguez, the former PED user, could have shared his opinion on the difference between cheating via sign-stealing and cheating via juicing.
Sign-stealing has been an accepted part of baseball forever, and some personnel, including former White Sox coach Joe Nossek, were renowned for their ability to break the opposing team’s codes.
But using a hidden center-field camera, which the 2017 Astros allegedly did, according to Fiers — who was on the team that season — is not only illegal but considered beyond the pale and could lead to a hefty penalty.
“It’s certainly not something to be swept under the rug,” Cubs President Theo Epstein said at the general managers meetings in Scottsdale, Ariz. “It needs to be fully investigated, bring light to it. I’m sure there will be appropriate action taken. … There are always a number of teams there are rumors about, or more than rumors.
“It’s just part of baseball. I’m sure some of them are based in fact and some in fiction. It’s just important that any time this stuff comes up, MLB has to investigate it and take it very seriously, and we understand that they are.”
Darvish became involved in the conversation tangentially when he discussed his World Series flop against the 2017 Astros in a YouTube video.
Though blaming himself instead of alleged sign-stealing, he also brought up an incident this year with the Cubs in which an opposing hitter was looking into leftcenter field during an at-bat, forcing Darvish to step off the mound. The Cubscentric website Bleacher Nation discovered a video of such a moment between Darvish and Yelich.
When Darvish responded by tweeting “I’m not sure what he’s trying to do,” Yelich shot back on his Twitter account: “Be better than this. Nobody needs help facing you.”
Former Sox pitcher and current Class-A Winston-Salem pitching coach Danny Farquhar also was quoted in the Athletic report describing an alleged sign-stealing incident during a Sox-Astros game in 2017, when a banging noise came from the Houston dugout to signal a changeup was coming.
A Twitter user who calls himself @Jomboy found the Sept. 21, 2017, game and tweeted a video that backs Farquhar’s accusation.
Neither Farquhar nor the Sox brass mentioned the alleged sign-stealing afterward to the media. In fact, most of the accusations of sign-stealing go under the radar and don’t come close to reaching the level of MLB scrutiny. A Cubs source said they believe a team was stealing signs off them in a postseason series, but they never went public with their belief.
Sometimes it’s not even the players who play detective.
In 2013, Bob Gehrke, a 76-year-old Wrigley Field security guard who died in 2015, was working in the tunnel outside the visitors clubhouse when he noticed a new cable wire stretching from the opposing team’s video room to the dugout, even going through the dugout urinal.
A lifelong Cubs fan, Gehrke watched the opposing team’s players come and go through the tunnel during a game and came to the belief they were stealing Cubs signs off the video monitors and somehow relaying them to someone near the dugout.
Gehrke told his superior about the wire, but his boss humored him and told him they’d handle things, reminding him not to discuss it with the media. Gehrke did, naturally, and I took a couple of photos of the wire in case anything came of his report. But the next day the wire was gone, and Gehrke said the opposing players gave him dirty looks every time they passed him in the tunnel. The Cubs never made a public accusation against the opposing team, which we are not naming because there was no proof or charges.
In September 2014, the Sox and Tigers engaged in a spat over an alleged signstealing incident at Comerica Park during Chris Sale’s final start of the season. Sox outfielder Avisail Garcia reportedly told Tigers designated hitter Victor Martinez the Sox believed the Tigers were stealing signs from someone in the outfield.
Sale plunked Martinez in the sixth inning with the Sox up 1-0. Tigers manager Brad Ausmus, apparently informed of Garcia’s conversation with Martinez, called Sale “weak” for hitting Martinez. Sox manager Robin Ventura responded by saying Sale “doesn’t do weak things” and alluded to the alleged spying by saying Ausmus “should probably worry about his own team and investigate a little more in his own team.”
Sale believed the Tigers were stealing signs because a player in the Sox dugout had been performing counter-espionage, spying with binoculars on the culprit in the bleachers. A few days later in Ventura’s office, Sale and Ventura engaged in a heated argument after Sale demanded Ventura call out the Tigers for the signstealing.
Instead, Ventura sent Sale home that day to cool off and declined to go into details about their argument when the Tribune reported it.
Reacting to the Athletic report on the Astros incident, Tigers GM Al Avila seemingly alluded to Sale’s accusation in an interview for a story in Friday’s USA Today.
“People have always been suspicious of different ways teams get signs,” Avila told USA Today’s Bob Nightengale. “I remember when Justin Verlander was pitching for us, he was always aware of things that might be going on. Chris Sale got upset thinking guys were getting signs from center field. This stuff has been going on forever.”
If the Sox had made a stink of Sale’s accusation in 2014, who knows what would’ve happened. Either way, they are now in the middle of the Astros sign-stealing because of Farquhar’s accusation two years after the fact.
“Look, most of this stuff, let’s call it clubon-club crime, so to speak, that usually gets handled pretty quietly between the two clubs and the league involved if need be,” Sox general manager Rick Hahn said at the GM meetings.
“Over the last couple years the league has been very diligent in sign-stealing, and any concerns that the White Sox or any other club has had over that period time have been heard.”
Now that sign-stealing has gone hightech, and Fiers, now with the Athletics, outed his former team, perhaps more signstealing allegations will surface.
This is not the story baseball wants. But maybe it’s the story baseball needs.