MLB: In baseball, the cheater's don't always prosper

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Baseball will survive the current Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal just as it survived lots of old scandals, including the PED era.

Little by little, MLB players weighed into assorted extents regarding the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal (aka “Astrogate”) and its ramifications after the commissioner’s report and the suspensions and executions to follow. I’m not going to suggest I have a particular favorite, but San Francisco Giants third baseman Evan Longoria’s seemed to blink in neon and with light bulbs framing it to me:

“What happened to the term ‘cheaters never prosper’?”

Clearly the 2017-2018 Houston Astros (back-to-back American League West title; AL pennant and World Series conquest in 2017) and the 2018 Red Sox (AL East title; AL pennant and World Series) prospered well enough. The problem with Longoria’s question is that the term “cheaters never prosper” is usually answered by a wry and not always approving reply that cheating is probably sports’ oldest profession.

It’s tempting to send Longoria a copy of Paul Dickson’s The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign-Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime, whose second edition was published last year. But Longoria can relax. The cheaters don’t always prosper. The 2017 Astros and the 1948 Cleveland Indians (stealing signs by way of a telescope observer inside the Municipal Stadium scoreboard down the stretch, then winning the 1948 World Series, though Tribe first baseman Eddie Robinson swore in his memoir they didn’t do it in the Series) to the contrary, the evidence includes:

(Photo by Jim Sugar/Corbis via Getty Images) /

MLB: The Cheaters Don’t Always Prosper

* The 1899 Philadelphia Phillies. Caught stealing signs by way of a reserve player with binoculars behind a billboard past the fence buzzing a third base coach under the coaching line. They finished third in that year’s National League race with the Brooklyn Superbas (the Dodgers-to-be) winning the pennant.

* The 1940 Detroit Tigers. They took their best shot at sign-stealing—literally: the day after pitching a game, pitcher Tommy Bridges showed infielder Pinky Higgins in the upper deck how to steal signs through the scope that belonged to Bridges’s high-powered hunting rifle. Bang! Those Tigers won the pennant and led the American League in runs scored—but they lost the World Series in seven to the Cincinnati Reds.

* The 1951 New York Giants. That staggering comeback from thirteen MLB games out of first, by way of Leo Durocher’s scheme to have coach Herman Franks in the Polo Grounds clubhouse behind center field steal signs with a Wollensak spyglass—provided by former Cub reserve Hank Schenz (who’d used it previously to steal signs from the Wrigley Field scoreboard)—and buzz them to the Giants’ bullpen. The Giants stole the pennant! The Giants stole the pennant! And, got flattened by the Yankees in five in the World Series.

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* The 1960 Milwaukee Braves. Two presumed fans sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers turned out to be Braves pitchers Bob Buhl and Joey Jay, stealing signs with binoculars and relaying them to the Braves dugout. Supposedly, a Cub fan caught on and sent the message to the Cub bullpen, whose men let the dugout know there was espionage afoot. The ’60 Braves finished in second place, seven back of the pennant- and World Series-winning Pirates.

* The 1960 Chicago White Sox. They, too, had a binocular sign-stealing system in full swing, from inside Comiskey Park’s fabled exploding scoreboard. Newly-acquired relief pitcher Al Worthington—who’d actually talked Giants manager Bill Rigney (an infielder on the ’51 team) out of one the year before—couldn’t persuade White Sox general manager Hank Greenberg to stop the scheme. The same Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg who played first base on the 1940 Tigers . . . and eventually admitted their sign-stealing shot in his autobiography.

* The 2010 Philadelphia Phillies. Bullpen coach Mick Billmeyer was caught on camera with binoculars up to his eyes. Billmeyer claimed he was doing nothing more than monitoring Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz’s positioning, but the Colorado Rockies’ television broadcast caught Billmeyer training his binoculars on Rockies catcher Miguel Olivo. After moving on to the Tigers, Billmeyer swore it was cherchez le femme—he’d left a ticket for his girlfriend and wanted to be sure she’d found her seat. The Phillies went on to win the National League East but lose the National League Championship Series to the Giants.

* The 2010 San Diego Padres. St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina caught onto a San Diego Padres employee in the camera well behind Petco Park’s center field, wearing a Padres sports shirt, brandishing binoculars, and clutching a walkie-talkie while he was at it. If you believe he was just keeping in touch with his kids in the stands between innings, I have a Siberian beach club sell you cheap. Those Padres finished second to the Giants in the National League West.

* The early 2010s Toronto Blue Jays. Perhaps no team was more suspect for subterfuge than they. The suspicion centered around their notorious Man in White, believed to be sitting behind center field in Rogers Centre stealing signs. The Blue Jays haven’t even entered a World Series since the Clinton Administration.

MLB: The Cheaters Don’t Always Prosper

Early in the unfurling mushroom cloud of Astrogate, we learned that two teams had either direct knowledge or founded-enough suspicion to outsmart the electro-cheaters. Then-White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar, in a widely-circulated video clip, caught onto the bangs on the can as his catcher put down signs for a changeup and finally switched the signs up while pitching to the Houston Astros slugger Evan Gattis. And the 2019 World Series-winning Washington Nationals—winning every game on the road, but knowing the Astros’ pre-Astrogate reputation for sign intelligence—handed their entire Series pitching staff as many as five sets of signs to switch around just in case the AIA was operating at full strength.

Back in 1951, the Dodgers smelled a Polo Grounds rat down that fateful stretch, too. Coach Cookie Lavagetto (he told it to Peter Golenbock for Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers) had an idea: he brought a pair of binoculars to the part hoping to catch the Giants in the act. The problem was, one of the umpires spotted the specs and had them confiscated. As Thomas Boswell eventually snorted, “Why, it would be unfair for the victims to use binoculars to expose the telescopic cheaters!”

When Worthington took a hike rather than acceded to the 1960 White Sox’s high-tech-for-the-time sign stealing, the White Sox tried to trade him but discovered Worthington now had a reputation inside the game as something of a nutbag. That image would be aided and abetted in due course by no less than Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, who provoked a small uproar in spring training 1962 that Dickson reviews in his book in its own full chapter.

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Hornsby published an article in True entering spring training (the embryonic New York Mets engaged him as a spring batting instructor) under the too-telling title, “You’ve Got to Cheat to Win.” Hornsby had something to say about Worthington, who’d later be one of the American League’s most distinguished relief pitchers as a Twin, including their 1965 World Series team: “[M]ost of the newspapers said [Worthington’s] was a salary argument,” Hornsby wrote about Worthington walking off the White Sox. “In my book, it wasn’t. In my book he was a baseball misfit—Worthington didn’t like cheating.”

Let’s see. Hank Greenberg couldn’t quite enunciate the distinction between corner-cutting on the bases, ball trapping in the outfield, and spying, buzzing, and binocularity, and Rogers Hornsby decided a guy who didn’t like to cheat was a misfit. And Worthington needed psychiatric attention?

Almost a full century ago, another Hall of Famer, whose identity might surprise you depending upon whether you continue buying into much of the negative mythology around him, had something to say about the distinction between on-the-field gamesmanship and from-off-the-field low-to-high-tech subterfuge:

There is another form of sign stealing which is reprehensible and should be so regarded. That is where mechanical devices worked from outside sources, such as the use of field glasses, mirrors and so on, are used . . . Signal-tipping on the fields is not against the rules, while the use of outside devices is against all the laws of baseball and the playing rules. It is obviously unfair.

That was Ty Cobb, whose reputation as the dirtiest, most rules-be-damned MLB player of his era came mostly from one writer whose Cobb-ographies have been debunked completely.

If beyond-the-playing-field technological theft was bad enough for Cobb, it should have been bad enough for the Houston Astros. And, the Red Sox. And, whoever they thought they knew were doing it thus provoking them to see and raise. And, every honest MLB player who knows the distinction between a little on-the-field cunning and a lot of off-the-field, against the rules espionage.

And, every fan who expects to see an honest contest won straight and lost graciously, whether their team is a late-2010s dominator like the Houston Astros, the unlikely fourth-time 21st Century World Series-winning Red Sox (quick: name a longtime Red Sox fan who entered the century expecting their star-crossed heroes would go from 20th Century Greek tragedy to the 21st Century’s most frequent World Series winners), or the once proud but reduced to rubble Baltimore Orioles.

Seeing Astro fans having to face the pre-Astrogate revelations that the team’s administrative culture was as toxic as the play on the field was inspiring was painful enough. It’s been worse seeing those fans done by the Houston Astros the way the 1919 White Sox did their fans. You could only imagine what it was for still-living 1951 Giants fans to face the reality that their heroes cheated their way to one of the most fabled pennant playoffs in MLB history.

And it’s going to be worse seeing Red Sox Nation, already reeling over Alex Cora’s purge, coming to terms when Manfred’s final report on the Red Sox Replay Reconnaissance Ring shows the extent to which Cora’s Red Sox graduated from gamesmanship to Spy vs. Spy.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred (Photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images) /

MLB: The Cheaters Don’t Always Prosper

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Now, guess what? Baseball has survived the worst ever since Billy the Kid shot his first victim, Thomas Edison invented the record player, the Washington Post was born, and four Louisville Grays were caught tanking games for fun and profit and banned for life, forcing the Grays to fold out of the National League of which they were charter members.

Baseball survived the 1877 Grays. It survived the 1910 St. Louis Browns trying to hand Hall of Famer Nap Lajoie the batting title against Ty Cobb. It survived the 1919 White Sox and the rampant gambling further exposed. It survived first the disgrace of the color line and then the growing pains that followed Jackie Robinson‘s courage. It survived Cincinnati’s semi-organized campaign of stuffing the All-Star ballot box on behalf of the 1957 Reds, which cost fans the All-Star vote for over a decade to follow. (And, alas, didn’t quite end such stuffing in the long term.) It survived two in-season strikes, the Pittsburgh drug trials, owners’ collusion, Pete Rose, and the era of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances.

Just as every last presidential and Congressional election in our lifetimes has been called the most. important. election. in. history. (with or without hysterical tones), practically all baseball’s most notorious scandals have been called the most. embarrassing. scandal. in. baseball. history. But I have something to say to Evan Longoria and to everyone who loves the game as deeply as I do, the foregoing history notwithstanding.

As you do not go gently into that good grey night, as you rage, rage, against the blasting of our faith if you must, remember while you rage the wisdom (and double-negative mastery) of a baseball sage named Sparky Anderson: “We try every way we can think of to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it.”

Next. Astros: here are the next sign-stealing casualties. dark

It doesn’t feel that way, now, and how long it feels that way depends in great part on what further baseball’s government can and will do to thwart Astrogate-like espionage without wrecking the technology that (yes, it does) enhances rather than embalms our game. But it always proves true in due course. For which those who love the game, and those who play the game honorably, should never lose gratitude.

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