MLB: Keeping baseball's technologies while avoiding cheaters-to-be

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On Friday, MLB pitcher Max Scherzer addressed the question of how not to throw the high-tech baby out with the Astrosoxgate bathwater. Here’s what he said.

Max Scherzer earns respect for more than just his tenacity on the mound. When he opens his mouth, he’s either a rich source of good humor or a splendid source of thoughtfulness. And when it comes to MLB government and its player’s union talking seriously about preventing future Astrogates and Soxgates, Scherzer knows it’s got to be done but it won’t be simple.

It never really is.

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To hear Scherzer’s talk with The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal in an MLB Network interview Friday, it’s not a question of whether to restrict camera mounted in the ballparks or in-game access to replay rooms in the clubhouses, it’s a question of how much to do it without negating the reasons they’re present in the first place. While still blocking illicit off-field-based electronic sign espionage.

“Really trying to get in talks with players across the league to try to come up with as fair a system as possible,” said Scherzer, the world champion Washington Nationals’s pitching ace and player representative to the Major League Baseball Players Association. “Replay has been in the game and enhances the game, but we’ve seen the unintended consequences of this.”

And how.

The Houston Astros have been exposed as electronic cheaters with their staggering success of 2017 and beyond now under permanent taint. They graduated, we know now, from front-office sign-stealing algorithms and replay room reconnaissance to either installing or altering (off the mandatory eight-second delay) a camera behind the outfield to send stolen signs to their clubhouse for transmission to their hitters.

It cost general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch their jobs. Concurrently, the Boston Red Sox have been exposed for their own replay room reconnaissance ring, at minimum. Commissioner Rob Manfred has yet to swing a disciplinary hammer down upon their heads, but married to Astrogate it cost manager Alex Cora his job in light of Cora’s in-it-up-to-his-kishkes involvement in the Astro Intelligence Agency. Leaving the Red Sox’s 2018 success under permanent taint, too.

Manfred is on the record as saying he’s considered barring teams from their video rooms once a game gets underway, and no video access other than a single replay screen with a security guard accompanying it. Scherzer and his fellow players may well think that’s just a little extreme, especially considering the value of being able to break down previous plate turns or mound innings for immediate benefit.

But Scherzer knows today’s tech advance benefits can turn only too swiftly into tomorrow’s espionage or other cheating. He knows boys will be boys, always have been, always will be, and every advance brings six parts benefit and half a dozen parts abuse.

“We need to come up with rules now that limit how many cameras we can have on the field, how much replay we can actually have,” he told Rosenthal. “We’re trying to decide how much access players should have to that during the game.”

That’s the big key. You don’t want to remove a player or pitcher’s chance to adjust during a game, and you don’t want to remove replay reviews on close plays that can turn games around, particularly down the hot stretch of a postseason race and especially in the postseason itself. But you don’t want the high-tech cheaters to corrupt and taint the game and its championships anymore, either.

Baseball’s Luddites will always harrumph, hem, haw, and heave, but technology applied properly has enhanced our game. Do we really want to neutralize or remove it solely because two cheating teams that we know of weaponized it?

(Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images) /

MLB: Keeping baseball high tech while avoiding cheaters-to-be

The Manfred administration and the players’ union agree: something has to be done to kill future Astrogates/Soxgates-to-be in the womb. But what?

Guards in the replay rooms, hired and trained by MLB?
Limiting the number of cameras teams can install in the ballparks and posting guards near them to stop alterations?
Eliminating center field cameras entirely, or block them from feeding the replay rooms?
Raising feed delays from eight to ten seconds?
Keeping players and coaches out of the replay rooms from the first pitch to the last out?

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Scherzer probably isn’t the only player who’s turning things like that over in his mind the way he turns a hard slider over on the mound. He’s calmly aware without putting it into these words exactly that its patently unfair to punish every player in the game for the crimes of a comparative few by removing a tool that’s done everybody a heap of favors.

It’s been to the benefit of players as a whole, and to the game as a whole, for players to be able to watch their [plate appearances] and watch themselves pitch during the game, be able to go in between innings and check out what just happened, maybe check out a pitch location, just for knowing what just happened, to be able to see that. That’s a positive. That’s good for the game. I don’t want to necessarily take that out of the game. We’re trying to thread the needle here of exactly what we want to do with the games and the rules. That’s fluid as we speak.

Neither does Scherzer want to erase old-fashioned gamesmanship. Steal signs while you’re on the field? Not exactly sanctioned officially, but not even close to the same thing as running an off-field intelligence agency or turning the clubhouse replay room into the KGB. Or, assuming someone’s been paying too close attention to Cincinnati pitcher Trevor Bauer‘s hobby drones, hovering one above and beyond the field for a little espionage.

Flashing the classic grin of a still-young man who knows Hall of Famer Roy Campanella‘s maxim that to play-ball as a man you still have to have a lot of little boys, Scherzer said, “Stealing signs, we get that. That’s what makes the game fun, is trying to steal each other’s signs, and we want it to be that way, but some of this high tech stuff I think we need to get out of the game.”

Spoken like a man whose World Series pitching staff was so well aware of the Astros’ sign-stealing that they were sent to work, one and all, with five or more sets of signs to switch up just in case.

The benefit, of course, was the Nats winning the World Series in the unprecedented manner of winning all four needed wins on the road. In the Astrogate playpen. The drawback, of course: Pitchers have enough to stuff into their minds going in without added counterintelligence to make things more difficult that they might be already.

A veteran pitcher as thoughtful as Scherzer when it comes to resolving man’s temptations in and around his game is hardly unaware of the point that the less you have to worry about beyond beating the hitter at the plate, the simpler it is to play the game.

Next. 10 MLB teams with new managers for the 2020 season. dark

How easy it is to police the game and thwart the high-tech cheaters-to-be is another question he, his union, and his game’s administration must answer. Soon.

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