MLB: Don’t hold your breath for the ’17 or ’18 World Series being vacated
By Jeff Kallman
The 1948 Indians—First, Boston Braves pitcher Johnny (Spahn and) Sain (and Pray for Rain) accused the World Series-winning Indians of having a spy in the Municipal Stadium scoreboard. Then, Hall of Fame pitchers Bob Feller and Bob Lemon used a World War II battleship telescope to read Braves signs (Feller served in the Navy during the war) and send them to a groundskeeper who’d signal the Indians hitters. Indians first baseman Eddie Robinson eventually admitted the Tribe had a spyglass network operating that year.
The Indians haven’t won a World Series since. But nobody clamored for their last known World Series title to be forfeited, either.
The 1951 New York Giants—Nobody really knows whether Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World itself off a stolen sign. But in 1962 came the first disclosure that the Giants mounted that pennant race comeback with a little off-field espionage: Associated Press sportswriter Joe Reichler published a story that featured an unidentified Giant copping to manager Leo Durocher‘s intelligence operation.
And thanks especially to Joshua Prager, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2001 and expanding it to 2006’s The Echoing Green, we know now that the Giants stole the pennant! The Giants stole the pennant! A coach in the Polo Grounds clubhouse above the rear of center field, armed with a Wollensak hand-held spy scope. A buzzer relay from that clubhouse to the Giants bullpen. Stolen sign sent with flickers of light to the batters. Thirteen-game deficit erased to force the fabled pennant playoff.
Even classy Ralph Branca never went far enough to demand vacating the Giants’ pennant when he thundered a couple of decades later that he faulted them for stealing a Dodger pennant from the club and from Brooklyn. Maybe the Giants getting waxed by the Yankees in the World Series took enough of the telescopic cheating sting away.