By Robert Whiting (2020)
Cheating has a long and dishonorable history in baseball, both in the US MLB and Japan.
The title of greatest team cheater in MLB may possibly belong to the New York Giants. It happened on October 3, 1951, when New York Giants hitter Bobby Thomson hit the famous home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers that sent his team to the World Series. The call on the TV broadcast, a repeating of the phrase, “The Giants win the pennant!” is just as famous as the moment in history. It was one the greatest moments in baseball history, but it was unfortunately also a product of cheating—on the final swing.
Years later, former Giants players told the Wall Street Journal that the team had used a telescope in the Giants clubhouse behind center field to steal the finger signals if opposing catchers. The stolen signs were then relayed via a buzzer wire connected from the clubhouse to the telephones in the Giants dugout—one buzz for a fastball, two for an off-speed pitch, so that every hitter knew what was coming.
This was hardly the first — or last —instance where teams stole signs, but knowing that it happened on one of the most iconic moments in the history of the game kind of waters down the legend of Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”
The 1990s was known as the era of the steroid/PED scandal. Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa all broke long standing home runs records. Sosa hit over 60 home runs three different years. McGwire hit 70 homers and Barry Bonds passed him with 73. Then the news came out they were using Performance Enhancing Drugs. All three were disgraced and kept out of the Hall of Fame. So was Roger Clemens, a 300 game winner, who also used PED.
Now we have the Houston Astros sign stealing scandal in which signals were relayed to batters via outfield cameras, a computerized set up in a secret room in the Houston clubhouse. Someone banging on the trash can forwarded the signals to the batter at the plate. This system helped the Houston Astros win the 2017 World Series and no doubt destroyed Yu Darvish during the playoffs versus the Dodgers. It was deemed so egregious that the manager and the GM of the Astros were recently suspended from baseball for a year and fired by the Astros front office. The Astros were also fined $5 million and deprive of a couple of draft choices. Alex Cora, who was a coach with the Astros, and managed the Red Sox to the 2018 World Championship was fired as MLB investigated an Apple Wristwatch band sign stealing scandal with the Sox in 2017.
Japan has had similar scandals. in the late 50s and 60s Osamu Mihara and the Kintetsu Buffaloes employed the dark art of sign stealing. In the early 1980s, the practice was so common that pitchers and catchers strapped tiny decoders to their wrists during one season to keep all the complex signs straight. They were banned the following year, as was the practice of sign stealing.
And more recently the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks of the late 90’s. A video camera positioned in center field at the Hawks home park zeroed in on the opposing catcher’s fingers as he flashed coded signals to the pitcher. In an office deep within the stadium, Fukuoka team officials watched on a TV monitor and decoded the signs. They then used walkie-talkies to communicate to mobs of student fans in the bleachers what type of pitch would be thrown. The fans, using megaphones, then signaled the type of pitches to the home-team batters, allowing them to adjust their swings accordingly.
What the Daiei Hawks are alleged to have done this time “is regrettable and certainly wasn’t good sportsmanship,” said Masaru Ikei, a baseball fan and professor at a leading Japanese university, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “But they proved they were very good at information processing.”
Of course, sign stealing in and of itself is playing the game the right way — technically. There is no rule, for example, against a runner on second base signaling to the batter what pitch to expect; policing such a policy in the first place would be nearly impossible. As a result, sign stealing is a sort of gray area; it’s allowed, but done stealthily and rarely admitted to.
“If you’re an ethical fan, you want your team to play by the rules and play in a way that is sportsmanlike,” is how sports ethicist Shawn Klein put it to the Washington Post, “But you also want them to toe the line as well and know the rules and use the rules to their advantage … Sometimes that’s going to cross the line.” As a result, MLB says that sign stealing, like analyzing pitch tipping, is okay, so long as it’s restricted to the field and does not become a Mission Impossible type operation.
Which is worse? Sign stealing or Steroid.? Says Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood, who remarked, “I would rather face a batter that was taking steroids than face a player that knew every pitch that was coming.”
The Cincinnati pitcher Trevor Bauer voiced his agreement.
“All day every day for the rest of time.”
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Former manager Gene Mauch famously quipped “He should be in the Hall of Fame with a tube of K-Y Jelly attached to his plaque.” Gene Tenace who caught Gaylord Perry when they played for the San Diego Padres, said: “I can remember a couple of occasions when I couldn’t throw the ball back to him because it was so greasy that it slipped out of my hands. I just walked out to the mound and flipped the ball back to him.”.
Perry reportedly approached the makers of Vaseline about endorsing the product but was allegedly rebuffed with a one-line postcard reading, “We soothe babies’ backsides, not baseballs
Perry was so good at hiding his illegal pitches the umpires could never catch him in the act. In fact, he was not ejected for the illegal practice until August 23, 1982, in his 21st season in the majors. But Perry used his reputation to psyche out the hitters as well. As he looked in to his catcher for the pitch selection, Perry would touch various parts of his head, such as his eyebrows and his cap. In this manner, he may or may not have been applying a foreign substance to the ball on any particular pitch
The spitball/Vaseline ball was not his only method for upsetting batters. Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski wrote of Perry “My favorite trick pitch of his was the old Puffball, where he would load up on rosin so that a puff of white smoke would release while he threw his pitches. This was made illegal somewhere along the way (because of Perry, of course),” would do.”
Let’s hear it for the cheaters. They make baseball more interesting and give sports journalists something to write about.
Tokyo Junkie 