Minute Maid Park, Houston (Stealing signs)

 

Stealing signs has been a part of baseball as long as teams have been trying to send signals to their players that they didn’t want the other team to know about. What pitch is the pitcher going to throw? Are you going to have the batter bunt? Is the manager going to order the batter to take a pitch? And there are many others.

However, while decoding signs is a long and honored tradition, using technology to steal signs (for instance, using a telescope or television camera in the outfield to see what pitch the catcher wants the pitcher to throw, then somehow signaling the batter about what is coming) has long been considered to be stepping over the line. That’s not to say that teams haven’t done it – stories abound dating back decades. But the Houston Astros stepped so far over the line in stealing signs during the 2017 season, in which they won the World Series, and the early part of the 2018 season, that the ripples are still being felt.

Rumors about the Astros were rampant (there were apparently rumors about other teams as well), and ultimately, MLB investigated, and concluded in early 2020 that the Astros had indeed been using television feeds to watch the opposing catcher signal the pitcher, then letting the batter know by various means, most famously by banging a bat on a trash can. The Astros’ General Manager and Manager were both suspended, but the most long-lasting effect may be that the way the game is played has been changed.

After more than a century of catchers signaling to pitchers by putting waggling one or more fingers, at the major league level teams now use the PitchCom system, where the catcher wears a remote control on his wrist with a set of buttons, and presses the button for the pitch he wants. It sends a signal to a receiver in the pitcher’s cap that tells him “fastball” or “curve.” It may be that at the high school level, catchers will still put one finger down for a fastball, two for a curve, but not in MLB, ending more than a century of tradition.

But what about the Astros, the team that spurred the change, and the team we’ve watched the last two nights?

Since MLB lowered the boom on the Astros before the 2020 season, the worst they’ve done in the postseason is losing in the 7^th game of the American League Championship Series (they’ve done that twice, won one World Series, and lost one World Series). They have clearly been the best team in baseball overall during that period, and I can’t find it in me to despise them, the way many fans do. At the moment, they’ve got the 5^th highest payroll in baseball, which means they’re one of the better-off teams, but the four teams with higher payrolls (the two New York teams, the Dodgers, and the Phillies) have, combined, made the league championship series three times in those four years, and have won the World Series once in the last 15 years. The 2017 World Series that the Astros won, in the midst of the sign-stealing, feels tainted, which is too bad, because I think that Astros team probably would have been the best team in baseball even without stealing signs. I don’t know if they would have won the World Series, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Furthermore, I believe that the Yankees were using more complicated signs during the American League Championship Series (because of the rumors about the Astros), so unless the Astros had decoded those, the system wouldn’t work.

Yet some fans, particularly those of the Yankees and Dodgers, despise the Astros, and they particularly detest the Astros’ best-known, though shortest, player, Jose Altuve. We’ve seen him play a few places, and it seems my short descriptions of the games mention him every time. Except in Houston, he gets roundly booed every time he bats. It’s ironic, because the MLB investigation didn’t mention Altuve, and some Astros players said that Altuve was one of the few players who refused to use the sign-stealing system. But there were suspicions, some fueled by a tweet from an account purporting to be that of the niece of then-Astro Carlos Beltran. Beltran definitely was a part of the scheme, but there was no evidence that the tweet actually came from his niece. Even the New York Post has come to Altuve’s defense.

It's interesting to talk to people in Houston about it. My brother and sister-in-law became fans of the Toronto Blue Jays (i.e., “other”) as a result. My high school friend Jeff, whom we attended the game with Wednesday, concluded that a lot of teams were doing it, but the Astros got caught. My nephew Danny, who never fully converted his loyalty from the Dodgers when his family moved to Houston, thought other teams were doing it, but that the Astros caught grief because they were so smug about it, plus they won the World Series.

Personally, I think it was over the line, I think it was foolish, and I think that moving to PitchCom has not only eliminated the possibility of that type of cheating, it has speeded up the game. On the other hand, third-base coaches still give signs to batters and runners, and those signs are still susceptible to being stolen, but only if the other team decodes the system of swipes and ear-lobe tugs and hand claps. If they can do that, I say more power to them.

Which brings me to one of the favorite assignments I regularly gave when I was teaching general science for non-science majors at the University of Arizona.

The assignment was called “Applying the Scientific Method to a Magic Trick.” For the 20 or so classes in the semester, each day of class, my teaching assistant would leave the room, the class would select an object, the TA would come back in, I’d start asking questions. “Is it this?” “Is it that?” The TA would answer correctly on every question. Sometimes the correct object would be the first question, sometimes the 10^th, but the TA would always get it right, and it was the students’ responsibility to figure out how we were doing it. And they have to take notes and turn them in. I told them that 99% of the grade was based on how good their notes were, and 1% on whether they got it right.

The thing that was great about it was that it was impossible to look up on the Web. You could find a few ways to do it (after a question about a black object, it’s the next object; the TA answers negatively in any way but the word “NO,” and then once they say that, it’s the next object), but I found lots of other ways (the right question is the sum of the digits of the day’s date, and if the sum is 10 or more, you add the digits of the sum; if I put “umm” in the question, it wasn’t the right answer; and so on). And we’d put in lots of extra words and gestures just to make it interesting. It was an assignment that drove lots of good students nuts, but it was also the only assignment where I was disappointed if I didn’t have one set of notes (of the 100 or more students) that had a big “AH-HA” on a page.

What’s this have to do with baseball signs? Many, though not all, of the techniques involved an indicator sign – the correct object was on the question after some particular thing happened (a black object, an object in a particular part of the room, the TA saying “No”). When it was that type of technique, one group that consistently performed well above their overall grade in class was the baseball and softball players. Signs from the third-base coach (and the more complicated catcher’s signs that will no longer be used) always have an indicator sign (e.g., swiping the right leg), with the message some simple sign right after it. So the men and women who were varsity ballplayers, who had been playing ball and watching signs for years, naturally thought that way.

One other baseball story relating to the assignment: I always had the students turn in their notes halfway through the assignment, and I’d give them comments on how to improve their notes and/or observations. I often got doodles here and there, but one year, I got a set of notes, and on one page, the student’s name was written about 10 times, in what looked like different handwriting each time. I wondered what was going on, whether his friends were goofing off or what. Then I realized that I was looking at the notes from the #3 hitter on a nationally ranked baseball team – he was practicing his signature.

I really wish I had photocopied and kept those. They wouldn’t have been worth much money, but it would have been nice to have the signature (I suspect he decided on one of those) of a future major leaguer, even if his total career did consist of one hit in 13 at-bats.

The game:

After Toronto got no-hit by the Astros in the first game of the series, and didn’t score until two out in the 9^th inning of the second game, their offense was feeble again – they got one hit for the game, and lost 8-0. We were sitting with a friend who is an Astros fan, so he was happy. We did that right, sitting with Blue Jays fans the night they won, and Astros fans the night they won.

The player of the game was the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez. He hadn’t been hitting well to start the season, but crushed the ball all night. His at-bats were, in order, single, home run, double, home run, fly ball to deep center field. The most memorable at-bat was the double. He was up with two out and a runner on first. The count went full, and he hit a line drive down the right-field line that looked like a sure double, but it was foul by inches. On the next pitch, he blooped one down the left-field line that would have been a double, but was foul by a few feet. On the next pitch, he hit one off the right-field wall, and got the double. That's quite an at-bat.