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

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.

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.