In 1948, while locked in a tight pennant race, the Cleveland Indians resorted to some shady maneuvers, what the team’s owner, Bill Veeck, later cheekily described in his memoir as “gamesmanship—the art of winning without really cheating.” The team had its groundskeeper mess with the height of the grass and the pitcher’s mound to better suit its players, moved the outfield fence in or back depending on each day’s opponent, and, most deviously, instituted a system of sign-stealing. A team employee, sitting in the center-field scoreboard, would use a portable telescope to spy on the opposing catcher’s fingers, decipher the code he was using with his pitcher to call pitches, and signal the next pitch to the batter by putting up a white or dark card in an opening in the scoreboard where the hitters knew to look. Veeck was unapologetic about this scheme, saying that “sign-stealing, even when it is done from the scoreboard, is part of the real byplay of baseball, part of the battle of wits.” The Indians went on that season to win the World Series.
Veeck, who died in 1986, would have approved of the stratagem copped to by the Boston Red Sox this week. On Tuesday, the team admitted to using an Apple Watch as part of a ploy to steal signs from opposing teams during recent home games, including those against their archrival, the New York Yankees. According to the Times, which broke the story, the Yankees’ general manager, Brian Cashman, tipped off Major League Baseball officials to the spying, presenting the league with video evidence; a brief investigation confirmed the allegations and yielded a confession. In response, the Red Sox have accused the Yankees of spying as well, allegedly by using a dedicated television camera at Yankee Stadium to steal signs from catchers. The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, said on Tuesday that an investigation into both sets of allegations is ongoing. For the record, stealing signs is neither against the rules nor uncommon—base runners have been looking in at catchers since the earliest days of the sport, trying to tip their teammates off to pitches. (The practice is, however, considered a violation of baseball’s often inscrutable unwritten code; if someone is caught peeking, they might get yelled at, or else thrown at during their next at-bat). But using electronic devices for communication in the dugout is prohibited, and, according to Manfred, that’s the violation at issue in this case.
The Red Sox’s alleged scheme went like this: when the team was at bat and had a runner on second base—a rare enough situation, yet a vital one—an employee in the video department who was watching the Yankees’ catcher would decode the signals he was using to call pitches then transmit the information to a trainer in the Sox dugout who was wearing an Apple Watch. The trainer would then give that information to a player standing nearby, who would signal to the teammate on second base, letting him know what to look for. The base-runner would then signal in to the batter, giving him the advantage of knowing which pitch was coming before it was thrown—as long as this game of telephone hadn’t garbled the original message. This plot added a few extra layers to Cleveland’s old model, though presumably it was done with the intention of being harder to detect than simply having someone signal in to the batter from the outfield. (The Toronto Blue Jays have, for years, been accused of stealing signs from center field, in a manner much like Veeck’s Indians.)
Apparently, the Red Sox’s efforts worked well enough. The Yankees were convinced that something fishy had been taking place at Fenway Park this season; according to several of the team’s players, the Sox hitters seemed locked in on certain pitches during high-leverage moments with runners on base. The team lodged a formal complaint on August 23rd, and, this week, leaked word of the investigation to the Times. The two teams are locked in a tightening race for the American League East crown and a spot in the playoffs. If nothing else, this caper might be just the thing to reignite the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, which has lately become dutiful and dreary.
Whether you are amused or aghast by these revelations depends on your allegiances and the degree of your baseball piety. For Boston fans, there was the feeling that the Red Sox had, like the New England Patriots before them, embroiled themselves in a ridiculous, unnecessary, and generally embarrassing scandal—something to go with the Patriots’ Spygate and Deflategate fiascos—which would be feasted on by sports fans everywhere else as further evidence that the land of the Puritans is really the land of connivers and cheaters. The Red Sox have contributed to this narrative by responding in Belichickian fashion, scoffing at the very idea that they had done anything wrong, or that anyone would care. David Dombrowski, the Sox president of operations, said at a press conference that teams have been stealing signs for each of the forty years that he’d worked in baseball, and said, “I’ve never thought it’s wrong. Everyone in the game has been involved in it throughout the years.”
Bill Veeck was a full-throated advocate for the stealing of signs, but he was careful to note that the practice wasn’t without its dangers. “If the sign-stealing is effective, the opposition is going to suspect what is happening,” he wrote in his memoir. “They are going to be sure of it as soon as a hitter steps into a pitch he has no right to expect and belts it halfway into the stands.” You can’t, in other words, do it too often, and you can’t be too obvious about it either—both rules that the Red Sox seem to have forgotten. In Veeck’s time, a team’s recourse when they suspected an opponent of stealing signals was to use new ones on the fly. “Now the opposition has a mission in life,” he wrote. “They are going to do their best to cross you up and make it hurt.” Batters expecting a curve ball would get blitzed by a heater. Problem solved. These days, in the more litigious environment of contemporary sports, a team has another option—catch a snoop in the act and turn them in to the commissioner while shaming them in the press. The technology may have changed, but gamesmanship is as valuable as ever.
