99% Invisible - 418- Sign Stealing

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

In the early days of baseball, sign-stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get a glimpse of what the catcher was signaling to the pitcher. Even with this long history, when the Houston Astros were recently caught stealing signs during their championship season it became a huge scandal. Sign Stealing The New York Times Bestseller The 99% Invisible City is on sale now! This episode is adapted from The Edge, a six-part series hosted by Ben Reiter.

This is 99% infasible. I'm Roman Mars. For a lot of people being a professional baseball player sounds like a total dream job. I mean, you get paid millions of dollars to play a game, but there are downsides. Like if you have a bad night at work as a baseball player, it's usually in front of 40,000 screaming fans. This story is about one of those nights in Houston, Texas. The Toronto Blue Jays were losing to the hometown Astros when they called in pitcher Mike Bulsinger. That's baseball reporter Ben Rider. He covered the game for 15 years as a rider at Sports Illustrated. Some major league baseball players have job security and 20 million

dollar salaries. They're paid huge bonuses just for getting drafted and their teams of spent years developing them. Then there are guys like Bolesinger. I signed for a thousand dollars with a billion dollar organization so a thousand dollars. I think it was six hundred and sixty seven dollars after taxes. They don't have $667 after taxes. They don't have that much invested in you. He make jokes about it. It's like a bucket of baseball for them. The night both of them came in, he was facing a stacked Astros lineup.

It's star players like Alex Brugman and Carlos Beltran. They were a total juggernaut. Oh yeah. I mean, they were unbelievable. From what you see, they're runs there putting up in my head. I was like, this is the best team of baseball. Bulsinger came into the game with a man on first in two outs. All he had to do was get one more out and the Indian was over. Just get one out. I mean, in theory, it should be easy. But instead, Bulsinger walked his first batter. The second hit a three run homer. Then the

Astros really started pouring it on. There's belt shunts on the first pitch. They're just kept getting hits, laying off pitches. I'm trying to remember a time I was rocked more than that and I just don't remember a time Mike Bolsinger was stressed. He was a journeyman one bad outing could be the difference between hanging on to his job or being sent down to the Minor leagues his major league career hung in the balance every single time he took the mound his major league career hung in the balance every single time he took the mound. The eighth batter he faced was Alex Breggman. With the bases loaded, Bulsinger was desperate not to give up another home run. So he turned to his best pitch, his slow looping curve ball. But Breggman was ready for it and he hit it deep.

At that point I was like, well, what else is new? Everyone else is hitting everything off me and my eyes will just go over the fence. The ball kept going and going and going. And actually, the blue chase caught it. Bulsinger got his one out, and the inning was finally over. It had gone just about as badly as an inning can possibly go.

Mike Bulsinger gave up four runs on four hits and three walks. He was stunned by what happened. He felt good that day. He was throwing good pitches. But the Astros just kept hitting them. I remember in the interview after the game, I told the reporter, I was like, man, it's just like, it was like they knew it I was throwing. Like, they were all over my stuff.

There's nothing I could do. Mike Walsinger was demoted to the minor leagues that night, like right after the game was over, and he stayed in the minor leagues. After 2017, he played a few seasons in Japan, but he would never pitch in the big leagues again. Bolesinger had a lot of time to replay that final inning in his head. He thought he'd thrown the ball well against the Astros. His arm felt good, his velocity was normal, his curve ball was biting.

It just hadn't mattered. It turns out there was a reason the Houston Astros hitters seemed like they knew exactly what pitches Btsinger was going to throw, and that's because they did, and they knew because the Astros were engaged in an age-old practice called sign stealing. They were cheating. Baseball is a game with a ton of nonverbal communication between players and coaches, all of which happens out in the open. Coaches will swipe their hands across their chest and down their legs to tell a player to steal a base or lay off a pitch.

Infielders will wavid each other to move over a couple of feet to the left or to the right. There are thousands of moments like this in every game. And the most important nonverbal communication is between the pitcher and the catcher. The catcher is responsible for knowing the opposing hitters' strengths and weaknesses and for suggesting what pitches to throw. He does it using a system of discrete hand signals. If you've seen a baseball game, you've seen this happen. The catcher crouches down, he puts one hand between the shin guards, and he starts pointing

his fingers towards the dirt. One finger means throw a fastball, two is a curveball. Teams will mix up their signs like when a runner is on second who has a clear view of the catcher, but for the most part, this is just how it's done. If a batter knows what pitch is coming, it's a lot easier to get on base, because that knowledge means they can figure out exactly when to swing or let a pitch go. Here's Mike Bulsinger. I think the hardest thing at doom in any sport

is to hit a baseball. So a pitcher already has an advantage right there. But a hit or not knowing what you're going to throw, or where you're going to throw it, I mean, it's almost like hitting, unless you're extremely good at it, it's a guessing game. This is where sign Stealing comes in. If you can decode an opposing picture of Signs, you have a big competitive advantage.

Sign Stealing is a two-step process. First, someone has to see the capture signals, and then they have to communicate that information to the batter, and this whole process has to take place in a matter of seconds. This may sound like a lot of effort, but as long as there have been nonverbal signs in baseball, crafty players have been stealing them. In the early days of baseball, sign stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get a glimpse of what the catcher was signaling to the pitcher.

If the axiom, which I heard many times, you're not stealing, you're not trying. That's Paul Dixon, the author of the Hidden Language of Baseball. He says the picture. That's Paul Dixon, the author of the Hidden Language of Baseball. He says the first recorded instance of sign stealing goes all the way back to 1876, the very first year of the National League. The shack was hidden away from fans almost like a hunting blind. hanging from a telegraph bowl, overlooking the stadium in Hartford. The shack was hidden away from fans almost like a hunting blind. Details are sketchy because this happened in 1876, but apparently there was a man hiding in the shack, probably with a pair of binoculars.

And they were stealing the signs from there and giving them somehow down to the guys on the field and they were taking it from there. In those early days, Signed Stealing wasn't against the rules of baseball. There was no clear line that teams knew not to cross. Lots of people considered it cheating. But much like, you know, in Airbud, there was nothing in the rule book that outlawed a dog from playing basketball. Nothing in the rule book stopped players from building a shack on a telegraph pole

and spying on the other teams with binoculars. The sign stealing arms race may have had some big impacts on the game. Catchers in baseball used to lean over to receive pitches, but that made it too easy for other teams to steal their signs. So it's believed that that's why catchers began to squat. There have also been some more outlandish and creative efforts. Like in 1900, there was an incident during a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies.

The red shortstop Tommy Corcoran noticed the Phillies third base coach was always putting his foot in a specific patch of dirt on the field just before a pitch was coming in. And Corcoran thought something's wrong here. He goes tearing across the field and starts kicking with his foot, digging up the dirt and dirt is flying everywhere. And he comes with his little box. And in the box is a buzzer. Corcoran discovered that the Philly's coach had been stepping on the buzzer box. And the buzzer is taking a telegraphed signal and buzzing,

but it's not loud enough to be heard, but you could feel it at the bottom of this foot. It turned out that Philly's coach was receiving a modified Morse code to tell him what pitch was coming. The message was coming from a Philly's player who is using binoculars to look through a people in the outfield fence to watch the other team's signs. The player relayed those signs to the coach using the buzzer, and then the coach sent

that message to the batter. Again, this might sound like way too much effort to steal signs, but every team was looking for even the smallest edge to win ball games. And it worked. Signed stealing probably helped the team win the World Series in 1948. Bob Veller, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland team, used a telescope he brought back from World War II to pick up signs. They won the championship and Veller was pretty unrepentant about it.

Later he said, hey all-sphere and love and war and when you're trying to win a penit. And the 1948 World Series is all over. Signed stealing occupied a grey zone in baseball ethics. On one hand, players were hiding it from their opponents and from fans. On the other, everybody knew it was happening. One player, a Hall of Famer named Roger Swornesby, did an interview with True Magazine that was published under the headline, You Got to cheat to win in baseball. Because of this ethical gray area for years, it went like this.

A team would be caught sign stealing. The other team would say, hey, cut it out. And then they would come up with a new way of doing it. For years, Major League Baseball did nothing. But their view on sign stealing changed after a technological breakthrough in the 1950s. NBC had just invested in a camera with an 80-inch space master telephoto lens and unveiled it for a game of the week. The broadcasters realized that they could now clearly see the catcher's signs and told the audience what was coming before each pitch. One of the people who happened to watch the game that day was the commissioner who was

forward-fric at the time and he thought it was a horrible idea. He immediately wanted NBC to agree not to use the camera again ever. If the guys in the booth could pick it up, the dugout could have the TV on. In 1962, the commissioner took a baby step to discourage sign stealing. Frick said publicly that he would overturn any game if it was proven the winning team had stolen signs using mechanical means, like a camera or a buzzer system, or even binoculars. This was the line in the sand in terms of baseball ethics. Players were allowed to steal with their eyes because that was considered a skill.

But you couldn't steal signs using technology. Frick never actually punished anybody for sign stealing. And it took Major League Baseball 40 years to make an official rule about it. In 2000, they finally banned sign stealing by electronic means. They had to do it because technology was moving so quickly at that point. The 2000 rule was meant to stop cell phones from being used to steal signs. But by the early 2010s, baseball clubhouses were filled with video screens. Some of them were installed by the league itself when they started allowing teams to use

video replay to challenge umpires' calls. The presence of all of these new screens made cheating incredibly tempting. Major League Baseball brought the snake into the garden of Eden, and then were surprised when the players took a bite of the apple. After a century of back and forth by the 2010s, there was finally a clear line in the rules of baseball. Sign stealing using technology was not okay. But with screens everywhere, it felt like a matter of time before someone crossed that

line, and got caught doing it. Before there were winning games, and sending opposing pictures back to the minor leagues, the Houston Ashows were one of the worst teams in the history of baseball. Starting in 2011, they lost 100 games, 3 years in a row. Some of their games had local TV ratings of 0.0, which meant that Newlson couldn't confirm a single Houstonian who watched the games. They earned nicknames like The Last Rose and The Disast disastrous, which are pretty good. To turn things around, the Astros took a page from the Moneyball Playbook and hired a fleet of math nerds.

They worked on sophisticated algorithms that would help the Astros decide which players to draft and what strategies to execute on the field. The stats team was called the Nerd Cave. And so Ben, you know this because you actually covered the Astros first hand. Yeah, I did. So in 2014, I spent a lot of time in the team's front office for a story for Sports Illustrated. And when I got there, I found I was really impressed with what I saw. I came away convinced that they were on the path to turning things around.

So before the story ran, my editor asked me to estimate the year it's all going to come together. And I gave him my best guess. So at the end of 2014, the issue containing my piece hit mailboxes across the country with a cover that reads your 2017 World Series champs. Turns out I was right. In October 2017, Mike Bulsinger was sitting at a bar watching the Houston Astros play game 7 of the World Series. This was only three months after his final major league game. The Astros were playing one of Boastingers old teams, the L.A. Dodgers. The Dodgers, you know, I love every single one of them. It was the greatest organization I ever played for him. So I wanted them to win. But you felt the Astros deserved it.

Oh, what, I mean, yeah, 100%. I mean, I think to me, they had the better lineup. The Astros deserved it. Mike Bulsinger had mixed emotions about the whole series. He respected the Astros for their talent, and baseball fans everywhere were rooting for them. The Astros weren't just winners, they were likeable winners. They were playing in Houston's second world series ever, and they made it the same year Hurricane Harvey devastated their home city. Their stars like Jose Al-Tuva and Alex Bregman were fun to watch. It was a real Cinderella story. The sports illustrated cover in 2014, and the article by Ben Reader, they nailed

it. Hey, that's you. Yeah, although they kept pronouncing my name wrong. Anyhow, the Astros were champions. You have a line up like that. If you're hitting the ball like that, putting up numbers like that, there's no reason why you shouldn't win. You know, when you have good bitching, you're putting up 10 plus rounds of game.

It feels like, how can you lose? Me, Mike Bulsinger, and almost everybody else assumed the Astros took the World Series because of their mix of young talent and the shrew decision making from the Nerd Cave. But two years later, we learned the truth. There was a lot more to the story. The Houston Astros cheated their way

to a World Series championship in 2017. The publication, The Athlet 2017. In late 2019, a whistleblower came forward, a pitcher who had played with the Ashrows for three seasons. They have a guy on the record, a guy that was on the team. Mike Fires, a pitcher who laid out exactly what they do. Mike Fires alleged that the Ashrows sign-stealing during their championship season. Well the team had these fancy modern algorithms and an entire cave full of data nerds. Their sign-stealing plan was a lot like those used 50 years earlier.

It was a mix of high-tech tools and low-budget mischief. The Astros had a camera aimed directly at the other team's catcher, which broadcasts to a TV in the tunnel behind the dugout. To communicate the pitch to the batters, Astros players would watch the TV, and when they saw a fastball coming they did nothing. Any other pitch, they would hit a bat against a plastic garbage can. It sounded like this. Here it is again.

We tried to come up with an analogy for what it sounds like, but really, it sounds exactly like a bat hitting a plastic garbage can. Major League Baseball opened a full investigation into the accusations. The Astros manager and general manager were suspended and then fired by the team. The team was fined $5 million, which is not a lot of money for a franchise worth nearly $2 billion. The investigation confirmed the Astros had been signed stealing during the 2017 and 2018 seasons, and during the playoffs. And maybe even the World Series.

The Astros are still the 2017 World Series champions, even though many baseball fans insist they deserve a massive asterisk. still the 2017 World Series champions, even though many baseball fans insist they deserve a massive asterisk. Some of the games biggest stars think that too, like Aaron Judge of the Yankees. And Mike Trout, the best player in baseball. It's sad for baseball. It's tough. They cheated.

I don't agree with the punishment. The Astros scandals created many what-ifs that can never be answered. No one denies that the Astros were a really talented team. But would they still be World Series champions if they hadn't cheated? Data analysts have tried to answer that question, and several prominent ones have found the advantage the Astros got from sign stealing might have been surprisingly small. Of course, a small advantage can mean a lot in such a competitive sport. These questions aren't so abstract for someone like Mike Bolsinger. An analysis by a computer

programmer revealed that when the Astros face Bolsinger They banged on their trash can lid 54 times the most times the Astros had used that system in all of 2017 And a lot of those bangs happened during bolsinger short appearance in the game Someone hit the trash can immediately before 12 of his 29 pitches It just makes you mad it thinks you, what would happen if I hadn't a pitch like that game? So then you start to question things about your career now. And then it truly was the most embarrassing moment

in my career. 100%. I've never been more embarrassed myself ever. Mike Boltsinger filed a legal complaint against the Astros on February 10, 2020. In the complaint, he blamed them for effectively cheating him out of his career. He's seeking damages. And he wants the team to give up $31 million in bonuses that the players received for

winning the World Series, which would be donated to charity. It makes you matter once in a while. It truly does because you put so much work into getting to this spot in your career. And then you kind of find out, hey, this was taken away by people that cheated. This isn't exactly the first time somebody's broken the rules of baseball. In the early 2000s, there was the steroid scandal, and since the beginning of baseball, players have doctored the ball or put cork in their wooden bats or slid into their opponent's legs, cleats up.

They say baseball is a game of inches, a game in which every small advantage matters, and the Astros embraced every edge they could find as they transformed themselves from a laughing stock into a champion. But when it came to baseball's age-old tradition of sign stealing, the Astros didn't just push to the edge, but over it. This episode is adapted from the edge, a six-part series hosted by Ben Rider.

You can download it now wherever you get your podcasts. What more would Ben? After this. So I'm back again with Ben Rider, and as we're talking this week, the Amy Coney Barrett hearings are happening in Washington and during the hearings, the Senator Ben Sass started attacking the Astros for seemingly no reason. So here's a clip of that. I'd like to talk about the Houston Astros who are miserable cheaters.

Sorry, Cornyn and Cruz, but both of the Texas senators said on this committee, but I think all baseball fans know that the Houston Astros cheat. They steal signs, they bang on cans. They've done a whole bunch of miserable things historically, and they deserve to be punished probably more than they have been. And then Ted Cruz, like defended the Astros and it feels really weird this is happening during a Supreme Court hearing. What did you make of all this? What I made of it, Roman, was that the Astros are now the go-to symbol for villainy for everybody, right? No matter who you are, no matter what you think, you can point at what the Astros did as representative of villainy,

as representative of corruption, and there's little risk in doing it. That's what I took away from that. Right, right. So you mentioned on the show that you've covered the Astros and you wrote about them for Sports Illustrated and you actually wrote a whole book called Astro Ball.

So when you heard about the sign stealing, what did you think? Were you personally disappointed? I was really, really surprised because I had spent so much time with this team over the years I'd written a whole book about them, as you said, and I had no idea about this. But I was also interested in part of my own reaction,

which is that while I was surprised by the particulars, I wasn't entirely shocked to hear that the Astros had been the one to do this, just because they did everything to an extreme, right? Their pursuit of the edge went so far in every way, most of them perfectly legal, that it kind of made sense that, oh, maybe they just took sign stealing, which as we know from the episode is an age-old tradition, and baseball to a new extreme as well. So that was kind of what sent me on my quest here and sent me into the making of my podcast to answer that. And many other questions about a subject I thought I knew really well. So we talk about this long history of sign stealing in various ways in which, you know, people did it and it was really egregious and violated

norms in ways in which it was not so egregious and people kind of thought it was okay. Where did the Astros fit into all this? Well, as we heard, everybody cheats in baseball. But it's kind of like everybody else is going 75 in a 65 mile an hour zone, right? And the Astros went straight to 100. And what they did also fit into their kind of technocratic MO, which the baseball world had really started to turn against. This was an age-old, fun, admired tradition. And they took all the fun and artistry out of it, right? It almost used to be like a paper film.

The telescopes here, the binoculars here. What the Astros did was this kind of like mechanized dominance and it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. So one of the big questions that we ask in this episode and is part of like mechanized dominance and erode a lot of people the wrong way. So one of the big questions that we ask in this episode is part of the series is would the Astros be World Series champions without sign stealing. They made the playoffs this year. They did not make it to the World Series.

Out of the right of second in the pitch, swing it off, pop fly shallow right, charging Margot he is under it. And the Tampa Bay rays have just won the American League Pemet for the second time in franchise history, the rays are on their way to the world, Siri. Does that kind of settle the question? I mean, what do you think? No, I don't think it settles the question. And that's one of the tragedies of this entire story is that we'll never be able to go back and replay that history fair. And why did a team that was already so talented feel like they had to do this. They were so good anyway, right? We met Mike Bulsinger in our episode just now.

A guy who throws 90 miles an hour whose ERA is near five in his career, which isn't so great. A team like the Astros could have knocked him around. They could have ended his career anyway fairly, but it wasn't fair. So one of the things I really want to know is why did a team with all this talent take this extra step? It didn't even necessarily need. It kind of reminds me of the Watergate break-in. Nixon was so far ahead,

but they still had to break into the DNC to make himself feel better about to make him more comfortable with winning. I had to cheat to win, even though it was winning. It's sort of a weird tragedy to have people like that, you know. You know, I made this podcast with Prologue projects, including the guys who made the Watergate season of Slowburn. They're not big sports people, but they certainly know about scandals like this. And I think it was that element that really connected with

them and continues to. So we're only covering one small aspect of the entire series that you're doing called the edge. What can people expect when they subscribe to this? They're going to rush out and subscribe right now to the edge. What are they going to hear? There's a lot more to this. You learn a lot more about why they did it, exactly who was doing it. The specific dynamics within the organization that led to corruption like this taking root.

Now I'm gonna give you a little teaser. You also learned something else that they were running a second sign stealing system parallel to the first at the same time. But you're gonna have to subscribe to the edge to find out about that. I'm not giving that away right now. Oh, I love it. I love it.

That's fantastic. Well, that's so cool. It's called the Edge. Ben Ryder is our reporter and was the host of the whole series. Thank you so much for doing this story with us. It was a lot of fun. So much fun, Roman.

Thanks a lot. This week's episode was adapted from The Edge, which is produced by Prologg Projects in partnership with Cadence 13. The show is made by Ben Rider and Sam Lee. The team at Prologg Projects includes Leon Nayfok and Andrew Parsons. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Barubay, music by Sean Riel, soundmits by Kevin Ransom, like checking by Francis Caw. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Leigh, Christopher Johnson, Abby McDonald, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, which has scattered across the North American continent, but the geographic center, the exact mathematical geographic center, is centered right there, lands right there, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from BRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative Lister supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.evm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org on Instagram and write it too.

But you can get the brand new New York Times best-selling book 99% InvisibleCity at 99PI.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.