MLB: Is it tough for GMs to know if their players are cheating?

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.”

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.