Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch (right) during happier times.
Photo Credit: Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
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The dust hasn’t settled yet over the sign-stealing scandal impacting Major League Baseball.
More sign stealing machinations, this time by the Red Sox might be disclosed by MLB in the coming weeks. The Houston Astros, to be sure, are still smarting from the punishment handed down by Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.
Astros skipper A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, after being suspended for a year, were swiftly fired by Astros owner Jim Crane and sent on their way.
Alex Cora, bench coach for the Astros in 2017 and implicated in the sign-stealing investigation was also cut loose as manager of the Boston Red Sox.
Newly appointed Mets manager Carlos Beltran, a member of the 2017 Astros team and identified as one of the players who pushed for decoding signals was sent to the Tower as well by Mets COO Fred Wilpon.
The sign-stealing scandal clearly was a player directed initiative; the managers, namely, A.J. Hinch was let go because he didn’t put a stop to it.
The Astros players who went unpunished by the MLB hardly leave this nefarious affair unscathed. They’re going to have to prepare themselves for an uncomfortable season of loud boos from fans, and embarrassment when facing their peers. Buzzer or no buzzer, Jose Altuve is more than likely to get drilled by a few pitchers for the suspicious manner in which he refused to take off his jersey after a dramatic walk-off home run in the ALCS against New York Yankees closer, Alrodis Chapman. Many believe the Astros second baseman was wired with a buzzer. Those charges were never proven.
If fans were left to their own devices, I’m sure they would love their stadiums to blast Hank Williams monster hit, “Your Cheatin Heart’’ anytime Houston swings into town.
When the findings of Manfred’s investigation blew up on the Internet, Twitter feeds, and smart phones from coast-to-coast, the reaction was a state of utter shock. Shock quickly turned into anger. Anger by the fans that Astros stole a world championship, beating the Dodgers in seven games during the 2017 World Series by cheating.
I was certainly enraged that this could happen. Channeling my inner-Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks in “A League of their Own”), “There’s No Spying in Baseball!”
The city of Los Angeles who came up on the short end of the stick during the 2017 World Series was so upset of the injustice that the L.A. City Council unanimously passed a resolution to ask Major League Baseball to strip the Astros and Red Sox of the 2017 and 2018 World Series titles and award them to the Dodgers.
As the days passed by and the more I thought about this, however, the more I wondered how different this was from other sign-stealing discoveries.?
For decades, people held deep dark suspicions that New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson was tipped off on what offering was coming from Brooklyn Dodger pitcher, Ralph Branca, before clobbering one deep into the night that clinched the NL pennant for the Giants, a dramatic walk-off home run known as the “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”
In 2001, those suspicions turned into reality, thanks to Wall Street Journal reporter, Joshua Prager, who published an article which confirmed that Giants coach Herman Franks used a telescope to pilfer signs from the Giants’ clubhouse behind the center field fence from Dodgers catcher Rube Walker.
The Giants sign-stealing scheme was enhanced, greatly, through an electrician they hired, Abe Chadwick, who installed a bell and buzzer system in the clubhouse and wired it to the phones in the bullpen and dugout. Pressing the buzzer once or twice would signal either a fastball or off-speed pitch. This story was chronicled by Chadwick’s niece, Ina Chadwick, with a headline that read: “My Family Fixed the 1951 Pennant." According to this testimonial, “when Bobby Thomson stepped up to the plate to face Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca-it was Abe’s signal that told Herman Franks-who then signaled to a plant in the bullpen, who signaled to Thomson-when Branca’s fastball was coming.”
And the sign-stealing engineered by the Giants and Leo Durocher as its ringleader wasn’t isolated to the deciding playoff game against the Dodgers. According to published reports, the Giants hired Chadwick, the electrician, on July 19th of the season. They soon were good to go with the buzzers in right field. The Dodgers held a commanding 13.5 lead over the Giants on August 11. Miraculously, the Giants orchestrated a monstrous comeback to force a three-game playoff against their cross-town rivals.
How influential was the electrician is this heroic comeback is anyone’s guess?
So, in 2001, why wasn’t there any outrage over the revelations of Joshua Prager’s WSJ article? Why weren’t there calls for the Giants to be stripped of the 1951 pennant?
We are well into the 21st Century and Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World is still being lionized. The bat from the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" is in the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp. Sports Illustrated ranked it as the second greatest moment of the 20th century.
When Prager’s article was published, I never recalled any apologies to Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca who endured years and years of public scorn and humiliation for coughing up Thomson’s historic home run.
Branca died in 2016, five years after Prager’s article was published. As he once said at an old-timer’s game, “A guy commits murder and gets pardoned after 20 years. I didn’t get pardoned.”
The Dodger right-hander, for the most part, kept quiet about his real feelings of Prager’s convincing indictment of Thomson being tipped off. Weeks before Thomson’s death in 2010, however, Branca told the New York Times, “When you took signs all year, and when you had a chance to hit a bloop or hit a home run, would you ignore that sign?” He [Thomson] knew it was coming, Absolutely,’’ Branca said.
Cleveland Indians flame-thrower, Bob Feller
Photo Credit: AP
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For those interested in reviewing a kaleidoscope of baseball’s sign-stealing conspiracies over the years, the go to book is author Paul Dickson’s “The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime.” The book was just recently revised.
In this timely book, Dickson chronicles the sign-stealing concocted by Cleveland Indians ace, Bob Feller during the 1948 season in which “Rapid Robert’’ would pick up signs from opposing catchers using a telescope that Feller used as a gunnery officer on the USS Alabama during World War II. “The telescope,” according to Dickson, “was mounted on a tripod, placed in the Cleveland scoreboard and operated alternately by Feller or [Bob] Lemon, who remembered that he could see the dirt under the catcher’s fingernails. They would call out the next pitch to a groundskeeper-brothers Marshall and Harold Brossard or their father, Emil, who would then use another opening in the scorecard to relay the signs to Tribe hitters, by a variety of changing signals, from a space otherwise used to post number four out-of-towners.”
“Hey, it’s all fair in love and war,” Feller was quoted as saying, “when you’re trying to win a pennant.”
Many claim Feller’s spy ring didn’t carry over into the 1948 World Series against the Boston Braves, which the Indians won in six games. Braves pitcher Johnny Sain wasn’t so sure, so convinced was he that Indians outfielder Larry Doby was tipped off on a pitch in Game four of the WS, in which he hit for a home run. When questioned, Doby vehemently denied he was tipped off.
“Stolen signs win a lot of ball games,” said Dodgers VP Fresco Thompson in 1952.
Regarded as one of the hardest throwing pitchers of his era, we’ve come to know a great deal about Feller--he was the first major leaguer to enlist in the armed forces after Japan dropped a bomb on Pearl Harbor. We also know he led the American League in strikeouts seven times, was a 20-game winner six times; and is the only pitcher to throw an Opening Day no-hitter (April 16, 1940).
But what is rarely (if ever) mentioned in his biography, is that he pilfered signs with his telescope during the 1948 season, at least enough times to secure an AL Pennant.
Where is the outrage?
Dickson additionally writes that Ty Cobb entered baseball in 1905, when the “spyglass era was in full swing.”
The Georgia Peach wrote an article for Life Magazine in 1952, titled: “Tricks That Won Me Ballgames.” In the article, he wrote, “Near me was an advertisement on the fence that read: THE DETROIT NEWS: BEST NEWSPAPER IN THE WEST,” Cobb wrote, “If you watched the B in the advertisement closely you would watch little slots opening and closing, If the slot was open in the top half of the B, our spotter had picked off the signal for the fastball. If the slot in the bottom of the B opened, we knew a curve was coming. I don’t know whether the ad sold any newspapers, but it was a great thing for Tiger batting averages.”
Another glaring example of duplicity came in the 19th century (1898) in a game between the Cincinnati Reds and Philadelphia Phillies. Reds third base coach Tommy Corcoran while coaching at third, got his cleats tangled up in the ground. At first glance, Corcoran thought it was a vine only to discover it was a telegraph wire that ran to the Phillies clubhouse in center field, where a backup catcher sat with binoculars picking up signals and communicating them to the third-base coach, presumably, through vibrations from the wire.
Again, where was the outrage?
MLB always appears late to the dance.
They were late clamping down on steroids during the 1990s, which obviously gave players a competitive advantage. That was the culture then. If Jose Canseco was being injected with steroids and amphetamines, why shouldn’t Alex Rodriquez, to keep up with the Joneses?
When new advanced technology came in the 21st century with live feeds from the center field camera and cameras in the dugouts, some teams, certainly not all, started gaming the system and figured out ways to decode signs coming from these live feeds.
When this new technology was installed, MLB should have been proactive enough to know boys will be boys and taken measures to prevent the decoding. From all the reports in the last few days, there seemed to be a culture that developed that if this team is decoding, why not us.
Interestingly, discussing the new technology in baseball, A.J. Hinch told the Associated Press during the 2018 AL Championship Series, “there’s some unintended consequences that come with the advancement of technology. It’s a league wide conversation that needs to happen in time,”Hinch said. “It’s happening right now during a really important series, and I just think it’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than any team. It’s bigger than any series. It needs to be corralled because of the state of the concern over it.”
Cleveland Indians fans can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing their beloved Tribe under the leadership of Terry Francona didn’t succumb to sign stealing. But they may have come close.
Speaking to local networks, the Indians manager said “I can tell you there are a lot of nights when I go home where I know I need to have a conversation with a player -- especially like a veteran player -- where he may view it differently than I do. And I lose a lot of sleep over stuff like that because obviously I feel a lot of obligation to get it straightened out. But you don't just want to beat somebody over the head and lose them.”
Despite the embarrassment they must be feeling right now, Francona said he still has plenty of respect for the managers fired. “They’re good people,” he told reporters. “They’re really good baseball people. They’re paying a penalty for making a mistake. That doesn’t make them bad people. They made some errors in judgment. The penalty came down, they’ll serve it and then I think they’ll be back.”
And contrary to some commentaries, the sign-stealing scandal of 2017 and 2018 doesn’t rise to the level of the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which the Chicago White Sox intentionally threw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
Jacob Pomrenke, Director of editorial content for SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: the 1919 White Sox”, told me, “the White Sox scandal was about taking bribes to lose games on purpose, which is an existential threat to the sport's integrity,” Pomrenke said. “This was about breaking the rules,” Pomrenke argues, “to gain a competitive edge — which has happened many, many times in sports and will undoubtedly happen again. The methods and details evolve, but as long as the rewards are high enough, some human beings will always feel compelled to use nefarious means to gain an edge.”
To MLB's credit, though they were late in putting a screeching halt to the sign-stealing--they sent a clear message of the hard consequences, and humiliation, that comes with trying to game the system.
I think players and most certainly the managers received Rob Manfred’s message loud and clear.
Though this scandal delivered a mighty black eye to baseball; the damage is certainly reparable as long as fans, players, and the media can move on and chalk these unfortunate episodes up to a hard lesson learned underscored by horribly bad judgement.
Speaking at a fan convention for the Chicago White Sox, newly acquired pitcher Dallas Keuchel said he felt what happened was “blown out of proportion,” but he was sorry.
“It’s just what the state of baseball was at that point and time,” the former Astros pitcher said. “Was it against the rules? Yes, it was, and I personally am sorry for what’s come about, the whole situation.”
Keuchel, however, said he isn’t buying the “Oh my gosh, this has never happened before,” mantra that other teams are accusing Houston and Boston of. “I’m not going into specific detail,” the former AL Cy Young Award winner said.
--Bill Lucey
January 26, 2020
