MLB: Don’t hold your breath for the ’17 or ’18 World Series being vacated
Don’t expect MLB to do anything about the 2017 or 2018 World Series titles.
Unless MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has either a change of approach or a heretofore undetected reservoir of cojones none of his predecessors even thought of having, everyone waiting for the Houston Astros’ 2017 World Series title to be vacated has to hurry up and wait.
It isn’t going to happen. Neither will the Boston Red Sox’s in 2018. No matter what the Los Angeles City Council or anyone else says. Individual games have been forfeited—only five since 1970, four for fans running amok and one because Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver didn’t like the visitors’ bullpen tarp and wouldn’t let his Orioles take the post-rain delay field unless it was changed.
But never a postseason series, World or otherwise. They’ve been delayed for reasons running the gamut from rain to earthquake, but they’ve never had a pennant or Series title vacated because someone or an entire team was caught cheating.
Manfred isn’t allergic to setting or breaking precedents, of course, but it seems he’d rather break the ones that don’t need to be broken (the three-batter minimum) than break the ones that should be broken. And whatever you think about the ’17 Asterisks or the ’18 Reconnaissance Sox, the best you can hope is to see special symbols next to their titles, meaning, “But–.”
Unless, of course, you’re ready to open a few more cans of eau de le pew over a few previous pennants and maybe (big maybe) a couple of pre-Astrosoxgate World Series championships, that is. Thanks to the work of Paul Dickson, in The Hidden Language of Baseball, whose second edition appeared just before Astrogate erupted and exploded, we have a solid idea who went beyond on-field gamesmanship to off-field cheating.
Would you care to vacate the following in retrospect?
The 1911-1914 Philadelphia Athletics—They won three American League pennants and two World Series in that span. Owner/manager Connie Mack was known for being a master psychological warrior. Suspected but never proven: their hunchbacked bat boy, Louis Van Zelst. He sat with those A’s on the bench and was suspected of catching onto pitch signs as he walked out to retrieve discarded bats, then sending stolen signs from the bench, off the field.
Never proven, but much suspected in its time. Likewise, stories that A’s reserve Danny Murphy perched atop a Philadelphia rooftop armed with bincoulars and relaying stolen signs to A’s hitters by moving a weather vane north for curve balls and south for fastballs. (To my knowledge, nobody’s suggested what would have moved east or west.)
The 1940 Detroit Tigers—In his memoir published posthumously, Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg admitted the ’40 Tigers had spies in the stands behind the outfield fences. They used the scope of pitcher Tommy Bridges‘s hunting rifle to steal opposing signs starting that September. The Tigers won the pennant but lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.
Greenberg’s admission didn’t exactly lead to demands that the pennant be handed in retrospect to the Cleveland Indians—who finished a game out of first.
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.
The 1961 Reds—Theirs was a kind of miracle pennant. And the miracle’s curtain was pulled back by spare pitcher Jay Hook, who didn’t appear in the ’61 Series against the Yankees. Hook jolted spring training 1962, by which time he’d become an expansion Original Met, when he said in a United Press International story that those Reds had spies in the Crosley Field walk-in scoreboard, stealing signs with binoculars and phoning them to the Reds dugout.
Former Reds pitcher turned scout Brooks Lawrence rejected Hook’s charge, claiming it was impossible to see inside the scoreboard, where Lawrence admitted sneaking in for an in-game smoke. But New York Post sportswriter Leonard Shecter, later known as Jim Bouton‘s editor for Ball Four, said a hitter accepting stolen signs to know what’s coming compared to “the driver who knocks down an 89-year-old pedestrian. It’s easy but unsporting.”
Nobody since has demanded the National League’s 1961 pennant be awarded to the second-place Dodgers, either.
(Victims in 1951, 1961, 2017, and 2018. Are you getting the idea that the Dodgers—winners of only one World Series in their Brooklyn years, who haven’t won a World Series otherwise since the Reagan Administration—might be among the biggest schlemazels in baseball?)
When Reichler’s article hit the press running then-commissioner Ford Frick said he couldn’t act on the ’51 Giants’ cheating without hard proof. He didn’t exactly rush to swing the hammer on the ’61 Reds, either.
The 1911-1914 A’s were suspected but never proven, and somewhat autocratic American League president Ban Johnson wasn’t about to take them to the retroactive woodshed. Former players on the ’40 Tigers and the ’48 Indians confessed their teams’ sins in due course, but when Greenberg’s and Robinson’s memoirs finally hit print then-commissioner Bud Selig wasn’t exactly prepared to pull the retrospective cheaters’ pennants and World Series back, either.
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Manfred got the hard-enough proof right from the Astro horses’ mouths . . . but he gave the players immunity in return for that proof and suspended the bosses who got fired post haste, anyway. Right there the commissioner would have even less call than mere precedent to vacate the ’17 World Series title. And for all we know it took Manfred promising the same player immunity to get the full story of the Red Sox.
The Astros have to live with images as apologetically-unapologetic cheaters. They’ll be known as the Asterisks everywhere they go for a long time to come. The Red Sox will be known as the Reconnaissance Sox or the Spy Sox likewise, though whether it’s apologetic or unapologetic depends on how they respond publicly to the final report and hammer on their espionage.
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And they’ll both have all the booing, catcalling, insulting banners, and snarky Twitter trash talk you might expect attached to that. Especially the Red Sox in Yankee Stadium, where the Olde Towne Team is normally considered about as welcome as the coronavirus. In today’s over-under-sideways-down world, that may yet be more than enough punishment. In the baseball world, it’ll have to be.