MLB: Is it tough for GMs to know if their players are cheating?
Several GMs say they hope to be aware of every last thing in their organizations but can’t always guarantee they can stop MLB’s oldest profession.
When Astrogate turned from time bomb to explosion upon the release of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s report last month, deposed Houston Astros GM Jeff Luhnow said he didn’t know about the Astro Intelligence Agency’s off-field-based electronic sign espionage and would have stopped it if he had known.
We’ve learned since that Luhnow wasn’t exactly out of the cheating loop, what with the Codebreaker sign-decoding algorithm presented to his office before the AIA went into business. But The Athletic‘s Andy McCullough wanted to know whether MLB GMs would know it if their teams were cheating.
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And he found no few GMs willing to ponder the question.
Kansas City Royals GM told his players two springs ago—in the wake of the Boston Red Sox’s AppleWatch sign-stealing mini-scandal—that he’d rather lose a hundred games than flout the rules. That’d teach him: the 2018 Royals would lose 104 games. But Moore now tells McCullough that actual such oversight could be easier said than done, more or less.
“It’s hard until you put yourself in that situation,” he said. “I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that I would know.”
McCullough popped the question to Moore and other MLB GMs on Tuesday during a Cactus League media session. “All expressed hope they would be able to sniff out an illegal operation,” he writes. “All also admitted there was a chance it could slip through the cracks.”
MLB: Is it tough for GMs to know if their players are cheating?
Jon Daniels (Texas Rangers GM): “It’s a challenge to suggest that you know everything going on at every time, every minute of every day. Certainly, if it’s bigger than a bread box and it’s in your hometown big-league park, I think you have a lot more likelihood of being aware than otherwise.”
Jerry Dipoto (Seattle Mariners GM): “I would like to believe that I’m dialed in enough to know what they’re doing. I would also like to believe that I’ve watched the game for long enough that I know when something just doesn’t look right. I hope so. But I can’t say for sure.”
David Forst (Oakland Athletics GM): “I would hope so. A big part of my job is to be in touch with everything that’s going on in the organization. That’s not easy to do. But I would hope so.”
Andrew Friedman (Los Angeles Dodgers GM): “I’ve actually wondered that question a lot this offseason. I think the answer is I’m not sure. But I do think it’s fair to say that it’s a failure to manage on my part if I don’t . . . if I didn’t know about it, there could be a concerted effort to make sure I don’t. And if that’s the case, it’s hard, because it’s so nuanced with what the infraction is and how many people were complicit in it. There’s just so much to it that I don’t know the answer. But I think being held responsible for failure to manage is fair.”
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Among those GMs, Forst might have one of the least concerns about whether his team plays straight, no chaser. As a pitcher Brett Anderson pointed out to McCullough, the Oakland Coliseum video rooms are so far away from the dugouts that using them to start a sign-stealing plot, as the Astros did pre-AIA and the Boston Red Sox are still under investigation for doing, might be two things: difficult, and impossible.
“I know the A’s weren’t cheating,” said Anderson, now with the Milwaukee Brewers and formerly an A’s teammate of Astrogate whistleblower Mike Fiers. “Because, one, I don’t know if they could afford it. And to relay from [fornicating] 300 yards away in the video room? What were we going to do, get some vendor to throw some popcorn up in the air, or something? It’s too [fornicating] far to relay something.”
What Moore, Daniels, Dipoto, Forst, and Friedman may not be aware of is that there have been a past instance or two of off-field based, device-abetted sign-stealing cheating where a guilty team’s general manager was very well aware of the scheme if not encouraging it explicitly. Now and then, so was an owner.
MLB: Is it tough for GMs to know if their players are cheating?
When two-time Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck wrote his seminal memoir Veeck–as in Wreck, that cheerful smasher of precedents and sometimes decorum admitted he sanctioned sign-stealing by any means necessary, including from inside Comiskey Park’s original exploding scoreboard.
The bad news was that that didn’t sit well with relief pitcher Al Worthington, a deeply religious man, whom the White Sox had acquired from the Red Sox after he struggled following his acquisition from the San Francisco Giants. The Giants had dealt Worthington after he objected to their apparent 1959 sign-stealing from the grandstands.
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Worthington walked off the White Sox because he didn’t like their scoreboard-based sign-stealing chicanery, either—which he told GM Hank Greenberg. The same Hank Greenberg who’d eventually admit the pennant-winning 1940 Detroit Tigers stole signs from the grandstands by way of the telescopic sight on pitcher Tommy Bridges‘s hunting rifle.
Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby floored MLB in 1962 when, writing in True, he led off an article headlined “You’ve Got to Cheat to Win in Baseball” by attacking Worthington: “In my book, he was a baseball misfit—Worthington didn’t like cheating.”
As late as 2010, Worthington—who’d move on to the Cincinnati Reds and then the Minnesota Twins, where he anchored the bullpen for their 1965 pennant winner—still objected to off-field device-abetted cheating. Speaking to the Liberty University student radio station, he said, “Went home, came back to Birmingham. My preacher came over the next day and he said, ‘You didn’t have to quit, you didn’t do any of that cheating..’ And I looked at him and thought, ‘How in the world did you become a preacher?'”
Today’s wary GMs might care to note that Veeck also owned the 1948 Cleveland Indians. The pennant-winning, World Series-winning, scoreboard spying Indians. In Veeck–as in Wreck, he devoted half a chapter to the Tribal treason; the chapter was titled, tellingly, “The Name of the Game is Gamesmanship”:
Cleveland had a long tradition of scoreboard espionage, with rather indifferent success. As we returned home for the final month of 1948, following a disastrous road trip that had dropped us out of the lead, we were in third place, four and a half games off the lead with only 21 games left . . . Desperate measures were called for. [Player-manager Lou] Boudreau and the boys decided to take another shot at sign-stealing—and this time with more modern methods. Instead of binoculars, they bought a spotting scope, the kind of portable telescope used on rifle ranges. The spotting scope put the scoreboard observer right in the catcher’s lap. . . . The sign was passed on by covering one of the scoreboard openings with either a white or a dark card, depending on whether the pitch was going to be a fastball or a curve.
Veeck may or may not have misremembered the Indians’ scope. No less than Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller told longtime Cleveland Plain-Dealer sportswriter Russell Schneider, for The Boys of the Summer of ’48, that the Tribe’s telescope was actually one he’d used aboard the USS Alabama during his Navy service in World War II—and that he was “probably” one of three co-conspirators, with fellow Hall of Famers Boudreau and Bob Lemon, in developing the scoreboard spy ring.
“Hey,” Feller told Schneider, “all’s fair in love and war and when you’re trying to win a pennant.”
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Today’s GMs may want to be a lot warier than they probably are already, with or without Astrogate. Because, with or without the Astros seeing and raising the spy sophisticates of the past, cheating remains MLB’s oldest profession.