Deflategate? Spygate? Astrogate? Nah.
Truth is, my initial reaction to hearing that Major League Baseball was investigating the Houston Astros for using video cameras to cheat was that this was something that could sully for good the reputation of a franchise that has, to be polite, had a crap six weeks. That it was something that will tarnish the team’s 2017 World Series win and maybe even any future wins; that the Astros have become the New England Patriots without the titles.
Arrogant without the heirlooms, as it were.
It was easy to see the Astros as the game’s new evil empire; a boon to a sport that is always better when there is an immovable force. It was easier to feel that they have somehow crossed a rubicon, in a manner best described by Alex Rodriguez – suddenly one of the game’s grand old philosophers – who suggested on Michael Kay’s radio show Wednesday: "It’s OK to use people to cheat. It’s not OK to use technology to cheat."
Actually, he said the whole centre-field camera thing "wasn’t kosher," after admitting that when he played he always urged his catchers and pitchers to act like "big brother was watching everything." You get the drift.
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But upon further review, and in light of reports Thursday that the investigation has widened, I say well done to the Astros. I hope we find out that they bugged the visiting manager’s office, the visiting clubhouse, and dugout, too – and that other teams are doing it. Because this is in the very best tradition of a game with a rich heritage of skullduggery and subterfuge. And as baseball teams and players have raced to embrace technology and real-time data analysis and all that stuff, it seems almost honourable that teams that are spending money to outfit minor-league ballparks and batting cages with high-tech wizardry might want to sneak in an extra camera in their big-league park to steal signs.
I wonder if Mike Fiers has done for the game’s subtle black arts what Jim Bouton did for clubhouse life and sensibilities when he wrote Ball Four.
You want video review of every scratch and spit? "Robot umpires" or electronic strike zones? iPads in the dugout? Maybe pitcher-to-catcher audio? Well then, here’s your downside. If you can’t secure what you have now, how on earth are you ever really going to be able to secure that other stuff?
As it is now, there are urban legends about some teams (the Boston Red Sox) with armies of minions tucked away in little rooms during games looking at this and that and communicating in whispers to god knows who. We can debate what good sign-stealing does – every current and former player will tell you they had or have teammates who don’t want to know what pitch is coming, that location is more important than type, that the logistics of detecting and transmitting the information from pitch to pitch are difficult, and that the genius of the whole thing is not doing too much of it so that it becomes obvious – but a lot of smart people believe the use of technology to, ahem, "get an in-game edge" is becoming more and more pronounced.
What happens if the robots we build end up turning on us?
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The Toronto Blue Jays, who in the 1990s were the best of the best when it came to sign stealing – Roberto Alomar had a freaking PhD in it – completely and dramatically overhauled their system of signs in-season this past year because the reaction of some teams to specific pitches in specific counts led them to believe some teams "had" their old signs.
We’re not talking simply changing sequences, either. By the end of the year, Danny Jansen and Reese McGuire were flashing so many odd signals they looked like bee-keepers attending to hives without protective headgear. This was essentially counter-espionage, made all the more difficult by the fact opposing teams gossiped about how the Blue Jays as a staff routinely tipped their pitches.
This stuff has gone on forever and ever, folks. Alan Ashby, the former major-league catcher and broadcaster, used to love telling a story about how Nolan Ryan called Ashby to the mound during a game against the Cincinnati Reds and coolly told him that Pete Rose was passing on location every time he was on second base by patting his helmet with his left or right hand whenever he was leading off the bag. "I got this," Ryan told him. Sure enough, it stopped after the first pitch Rose saw from Ryan in his next at-bat. Or didn’t see.
Look: you can legislate and threaten teams with the loss of draft picks or a hefty financial fine – which my guess is where this investigation involving baseball and the Astros is heading – but in the end, you’re going to have to trust the teams’ executives, managers and technical folks that everything’s above board. As was the case 20 years ago when folks first started muttering about TV cameras – never mind the "man in white" nonsense. Former Red Sox pitching coach and manager Joe Kerrigan swore to me that the Rogers Centre was bugged and that the Blue Jays had a TV hidden in their bullpen and had guys relaying signals with … well, we never got that far.
But that’s baseball, isn’t it? A whole bunch of people standing around chewing gum, nibbling on sunflower seeds, spitting tobacco juice, checking out the sights in the stands, scratching and adjusting and waiting for something to happen. So, of course the mind wanders. The imagination flows.
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I suggested to former Miami Marlins president David Samson when he was a guest on my radio show Writers Bloc that perhaps this was an issue that MLB needed to address before it finalized its formal relationship with legalized gambling concerns. That punters would want to know stuff was above board before committing. He rubbished that assessment, suggesting it would simply be baked into the Vegas odds, possibly as early as next season – I guess making it, in a way, part of the calculations that would go into home-field advantage.
So, I’m going to enjoy watching all this play out. I hope we do find out that there really is a bunch of fire behind the smoke of The Athletic report that sparked this investigation, because even if it’s addressed we’ll never, ever, know for sure that it’s stopped. Certainty sucks.
Long live the chaos – especially chaos wrought by technology, which is supposed to bring clarity and conclusiveness to games that were never meant to have much of either commodity. It’s a scandal for our time, and bless the Astros for leading us into it.
