MLB: Cut replay to eliminate sign-stealing? Not so fast!

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Molly Knight of ‘The Athletic’ recently called for MLB to cut instant replay if they want to help eliminate sign-stealing. Here’s why she’s dead wrong.

It had to happen, no matter that in your heart of hearts you hoped otherwise. But now the fallout from Astrogate and its sort-of sidebar Soxgate has delivered. There’s at least one on-the-record call to eliminate replay in MLB or at least restrict it severely the better (so it’s hoped) to stop high-tech, off-field sign-stealing before the cheaters might be able to think about it, most of the time.

It’s not unsafe to think there’ll be more where that came from.

We aren’t that far removed from the days when the purists and the get-off-my-lawn crowd thought replay was going to be the end of the world as we knew it and they weren’t feeling fine. But those of us who welcomed replay and argued that the “beautiful human element” (Joe Torre‘s phrasing, actually) was well and good but so was getting it right, especially when it came to playing for championships, now have to rethink.

Because the human element just couldn’t resist finding a way to employ or pervert otherwise beneficial technology to baseball’s oldest profession. The Astros figured out how to end-run the mandatory eight-second feed delay to set up their Astro Intelligence Agency for sign-stealing; the Red Sox simply used their lawful replay room and some clever eye and footwork without compromising the technology. Boys will be boys and, if you give them new toys, they always find the sneaky ways to play.

The Athletic‘s Molly Knight says nuts to all that. Want to prevent future Astrogates, Soxgates, or pick-your-team-gates? Just abolish the technology, she says. Sort of.

Baseball says it wants to speed up games. You want to shave off 10 minutes a game? Get rid of center-field cameras, and pitchers will no longer have to ask catchers to run through the signs over and over, because now the sequencing has to be so elaborate that rocket scientists can’t decode it with algorithms. You want to cut even more time from the average game length, and eliminate the need to station mostly useless hall monitors in video rooms during thousands of baseball games a year? Get rid of instant replay altogether.

Well, not quite altogether, she hastens to suggest:

Look, I am all for getting important calls right. So why not just save instant replay for the playoffs, and deploy an army of well-trained MLB employees into video rooms, dugouts and center-field camera wells to stop this from happening ever again? The surest way for MLB to put an end to the cheating and soothe the league-wide paranoia is to get real and remove the technology that caused it all in the first place.

MLB: Cut replay to cut sign-stealing? Not so fast!

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There were monitors assigned to the replay rooms. Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich, the Athletic reporters who may yet prove to Astrogate what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post proved to Watergate, dropped the dollars on Soxgate, careful to point out that replay room monitors weren’t always immune to compromise. “We had (them) in our back pocket,” quoted Rosenlich (what the hey, the diminutive worked famously enough for Woodstein) from “one Red Sox person.” “If we wanted to whisper something or they walked out, then we could do something if we needed to.”

They also cited an unnamed video scout from a different team, “who saw the monitors in action said that their efficacy varied widely depending on the city and the monitor on duty. Some would stay in the video replay room the entire game, while others would disappear for periods of time.” And the scout told Rosenlich how inconsistent the monitors really were: “You knew this guy was a stickler, and with this guy you could get away with some stuff. “How does it stop cheating? The teams that were going to cheat were going to cheat, no matter what.”

That being the case it’s a little difficult to understand why Knight thinks just saving replay for the postseason and accompanying it with “an army” of highly-trained people to keep the replay rooms and off-field camera wells from falling prey to espionage would do. An army? Some might think nothing short of armed Pinkerton guards would suffice. And even then.

You can accept Knight’s point that we probably don’t need a review of some close call on a stolen base in an August game between two basement occupants. (Her example.) But you can still believe it’s mandatory in a stretch drive game between two postseason aspirants one of whom might have a division title on the line. When Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog (in You’re Missin’ a Great Game) called again for replay, he nailed it in one sentence: “This is for the championship—let’s get it right.” Keeping replay down the stretch is for playing toward a championship, so let’s get that right, still.

Persuading teams to surrender their in-game replay room access wouldn’t be a simple sell, anyway. Even if they’re not up to a little chicanery, they might still be looking for crash remedial courses in beating, say, particular pitchers. That’s how the Yankees battered Diamondbacks closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, on back-to-back 2001 World Series nights in Yankee Stadium.

Kim hadn’t yet appeared in the Series until he opened the bottom of the eighth in Game Four. He introduced himself to the Yankees by striking out the side. The Yankees ducked to the replay room as soon as possible to draw a tighter bead on Kim’s submarine-style delivery and how to time themselves up to it. Thus Tino Martinez (on the first pitch) and Derek Jeter (on a full count) bombed Kim in the ninth and tenth. Thus was Scott Brosius, one of Kim’s Game Four eighth-inning strikeout victims, fully prepared to sink the submariner with a Game Five-tying bomb (on 1-0) in the bottom of the ninth.

Maybe MLB could try closing team replay rooms until or unless games get very late and very close, with guards adjacent to every camera in the ballpark otherwise and the feeds still sent to New York for play reviews. If and when the games get very late and very close, allow only one player into the room. Accompanied every second by guard(s) who are trained thoroughly to pick up whether the player’s just looking for an edge against a tough pitcher or whether he’s trying a little espionage. Another way to forestall espionage: when the player comes to the room late game, show him nothing but the opposing pitcher from any angle other than the one that includes the catcher’s signs.

You think guards and other non-baseball insiders can’t be trained to recognize baseball espionage?

Once upon a time, a vice president of the United States was given a crash course in it. As Paul Dickson related in The Hidden Language of Baseball, Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher—the mastermind behind the spyglass-and-buzzer off-field sign-stealing technique that enabled the 1951 Giants’ stupefying pennant race comeback to force the once-fabled playoff, but working in 1965 as an analyst on ABC’s weekly Game of the Week analyst for 1965—got a guest in the booth: the network spotted Hubert Humphrey at the game and sent him to banter with Durocher. And Durocher promptly gave Humphrey an on-the-air lesson in better sign-stealing through television. Which got the Lip a prompt reprimand from then-commissioner Ford Frick and left Humphrey blushing in embarrassment.

The bad news, of course, is that just because we solve the Astro Intelligence Agency or the Red Sox’s replay room spying it doesn’t mean cheating, high tech or otherwise, will disappear. Consider pitcher Trevor Bauer‘s still well-known enthusiasm for building and flying drones. (Once upon a time, he demonstrated one for television tech people by having it follow Lonnie Chisenhall around the bases on an inside-the-park home run.) Bauer’s toys might yet give some baseball spymaster an idea: Sign-stealing drones! Which might give another MLB strategist a counter-idea: Time called!—to deploy a team’s own strategic defense initiative and shoot the winged cameras down.

Next. Minnesota Twins: Miguel Sano Gets Extended. dark

So long as boys will be boys and they’re paid the equivalent of a tropical island economy to play or manage the game, that could happen, too.

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