Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1459: The History of Sign-Stealing

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller talk to Paul Dickson, author of The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign-Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime, about, well, what the book’s subtitle says, including the origins of sign-sending, the earliest allegations of sign-stealing, historical precedents for the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme, the effects of […]

I carry this upon my back always If you've fallen I will put you back I do love you but it's just a fact The history of a cheating heart Is always more than you know Hello and welcome to episode 1459 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam.

Hey, Ben. We are doing an interview episode. The whole thing is an interview. We're going to talk about the history of sign stealing to provide some context for the sport's current sign stealing scandal, draw some historical parallels, see what we can learn from past examples. We will go right into that. So you may know our guest today from any one of his more than 60 books, several of which are about baseball. His name

is Paul Dixon. And of course, there's the Dixon Baseball Dictionary, an invaluable reference, and baseball's greatest quotations and his biographies of Bill Veck and Leo DeRocher. But today he is here in his capacity as the author of The Hidden Language of Baseball, which is about signs and sign stealing and came out in 2003, but just recently was released in a new paperback edition this September and now may need another edition already. Hi, Paul. How are you? Hi. So the history of signs in baseball goes back to the beginning Essentially it's hard to have baseball It's hard to play baseball at a high level without signs

You write in the book that even the 1869 Red Stockings The first fully professional team They were reported to have used signs at the time But is there anything less known about the origins of signs Or where signs came from, the lineage? One of the things I posited and played with in the book, and I got to really believe after a while because the more I looked into it, that baseball really, the way we see it now, came out of the Civil War. And the idea of the battery, the pitcher and the catcher, therefore there. But even the positioning, the catcher being the first sergeant, the top sergeant, the

general who wears the general's uniform is the manager, hence the manager wearing the same uniform as his troops, the officers being the first and third base coaches, et cetera, et cetera, that you build into this. And the other reason I go to that, the analog of the world of the Civil War, the Civil War is the first war in history in which the enlisted guy, the average grunt out there on the battlefield was dealing in signs and signals and in cracking those signs and signals in sort of espionage, counter espionage role. cracking those signs and signals in sort of espionage, counter-espionage role.

And they were using torches and they were using lanterns and they were using flags, just like the Navy still uses flags to communicate between ships. And so the idea was, as soon as you started using signs, which was early, using your fingers and down between the catcher's knees, and also using various signs, using the coaches of the first and third, the natural reaction was to start stealing. And very early on, right after the Civil War, you start to see accusations of sign stealing or even admiration of sign stealing coming in. So all of this stuff is very 19th century.

And then, of course, it goes to a fine sort of development in the 20th century and has all sorts of ramifications and more stories than can be told in an encyclopedia of signs and sign stealing and of tells, which is an important part of that whole story, which is the idea that a runner or a pitcher or a catcher, somebody gives up what's about to happen by what they do with their body. For example, there were some opposition players who knew that Ty Cobb, before he was going to steal a base, stuck his tongue out. So it's as bone simple as that,

or that a pitcher that before he was going to throw a curveball or a changeup might move his shoulder in a certain manner or touch his ear or something. It's at every level. When I was doing the book, I interviewed a couple people in college, including a coach in one of the college teams. including a coach in one of the college teams. And he said, every college kid in America has been looking at, or plays baseball on the college level, have been looking for tells since they were in Little League, that it's so universal that you're looking to break that code,

sort of the bodily code of the pitcher especially, but also base runners. So was that connection that you made to the players having both participated in and then in later generations being very familiar with the Civil War, do you mean that in a sort of like, to them, would it have been a figurative sense? They were just sort of unknowingly adopting some of the practices that had been kind of glamorized in the war? Or do you mean like they literally saw this as a peaceful metaphor for the combat that they had just been in? Were they aware that they were play acting the same scenarios? I don't think they, of course, we have no knowledge of what they were actually thinking, but I don't think so. I think it was just the idea that they were learning, the idea that you entrusted a private in an army with, you know,

doing the signs and another private to try to decode those signs such as. And so that sort of became part of the whole way of life. The unwritten communications that were they were developing in other places. Braille was developing, you know, the people in the in the looms who worked in these fabric places in Massachusetts and Lynn and Lawrence and those places, the women who worked on these looms, the sound of the looms was so intense that they had all these signs and signs that they give. Dormant in hotels in New York will have signs to tell a cabbie if the next ride is to go to LaGuardia or Kennedy or if it's just a short ride because they favor certain cabbies. So there's all these things in life in which there are these signs going on and then other people trying to figure out what the signs are.

So I think it's going to be very important that we go back to the beginning and what you just said, but I want to bring it into the sort of semi-modern era for a little bit. There's a passage that I want to read. So if you want to make a cup of tea, you're going to have a couple minutes off. That to me is just an extraordinary passage, not because it's unique in this book, but just because of how dense it is. So this is from the book, and I'm just going to read for a little bit. During the 1990s, sign stealing seemed to arouse feelings of previously unexpressed personal disrespect. The tone for a new sensitivity was set when Norm Charlton of the Reds hit Mike Socha on the arm. After realizing Socha had been stealing signs from Second and relaying them to the batter,

Charlton claimed that what the Dodger had done was unsportsmanlike and admitted throwing at him. He'll be lucky if I don't rip his head off the next time I'm pitching. Many in baseball were taken aback by this sudden public display of anger. Gene Mock, a major league manager for 26 years, called the comments an absolutely stupid overreaction by a guy who doesn't seem to know anything about his business or how it's transacted, or used to be, at least. In 1997, a bumper crop of accusations materialized with varying degrees of merit. The Angels claimed the Red Sox were stealing signs and to underscore the point, drilled one of their batters in retaliation, while the Orioles claimed that Angels coach

Larry Boa was stepping out of the third base coaching box to steal signs flashed by Chris Hoyles, though it was later reported that the Angels were actually reading Hoyles from the dugout because he was flashing his fingers too low in his stance. Cincinnati manager Ray Knight nearly came to blows with Los Angeles coach Reggie Smith, whom he accused of stealing catcher signs from outside the first base coach's box. San Francisco manager Dusty Baker and Montreal manager Felipe Alou exchanged strong words over signed stealing allegations. Baker said Expos runners on second base were picking up signals from the catcher and relaying them. The alleged incident took place when the Expos scored 13 runs on 13 hits in the sixth inning of a 19-3 victory.

Baker had a point in that stealing signs in lopsided games is considered a violation of baseball's unwritten rule about running up the score. The year 1997 saw a season in which television became an issue. Claims made by the Phillies that the Mets might be using video cameras to steal signs were looked into by league office and disregarded. During the next visit to Shea Stadium, the cable to a camera in the visitors' dugout was mysteriously cut. In May 2002, Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan suggested Sammy Sosa had taken pitch location signs from coaches that had allowed him to hit a leadoff homer. Somebody on the team let him know locations. We let them know we knew what they were doing and that it would be in their best interest to stop doing it, Duncan told the Post-Dispatch. Somebody might get a fastball in

the ear, Morris said. It's Bush League baseball. Sosa's an all-star and they're tipping off location. Come on. Sosa, a reactive hitter with a reputation for not wanting signs, was perplexed. Cubs manager Don Baylor called it paranoia. The Washington Post's Dave Scheinen wrote, if the Cardinals were going to single out a player, they probably picked the wrong one in Sosa. Despite such testiness, John Miserock, bullpen coach of the Royals, said, the unwritten rule is everybody is trying to steal signs nothing is wrong with stealing from second that's been going on 100 years said don zimmer it's part of the game added don mattingly it's your job on second

base to do anything you can to help your batter picking from second is acceptable but the rule is you have to be subtle added rich dower the roy the Royals' third base coach. One thing our guys resent is a base runner giving a body lean one way or the other on location, said Tom Gamboa, then the Royals' first base coach. Our pitchers are working on ways to get the catchers to set up later after giving the sign. On the other hand, many claim that one practice is universally unacceptable, a batter caught peeking back at catchers to see where the catcher is setting up or trying to pick up his signs. In baseball, nothing is considered more verboten or dangerous to your health than being a sneaky peeker, writes Tom Boswell. The tactic is not against any written rule,

but among unwritten codes, it may rank number one in this era of field level cameras. It's doubly dangerous to fudge. Teams, watch those tapes. If you're a hitter, whatever you do, don't get caught cutting your eyes back at the catcher at the last split second. So that's a brief period of history, a very condensed period of history, and only two pages of text. And I caught 16 different areas of dispute, 16 different places where there was a debate over what the unwritten rules were and whether anybody had violated them. And so those 16 are Socia relaying from second base, Norm Charlton hitting Socia with a pitch in retaliation, Norm Charlton then admitting to hitting him, which seemed to elevate it, and then Norm Charlton

making a specific threat about future violence, Larry Boa stepping out from the third base coach's box, and also somebody stepping out from the first base coach's box to pick up signs, picking up a call from the dugout, managers fighting each other in retaliation, using video to pick up signs, cutting another team's video feed to defend against them using video. Matt Morris offering a vague threat, accusing, quote, the wrong player, in this case, Sammy Sosa, tipping in a blowout as opposed to in a close game, stealing signs from second, which is probably okay in this story, but not being subtle about it is probably not being okay. Not stealing from second would be perhaps a violation of the unwritten rules because you're not helping your team, according to Don Mattingly,

I think, or somebody else, peaking at pitches, which is apparently the number one violation of these things, and using cameras to catch people peaking. So these are all so, in some ways, contradictory, some ways overlapping. And I guess this goes back to your original answer. In all of this research, back to your original answer. In all of this research, is there any consistent philosophy that any first principle that you can look at and say whether the decision tree is going to go toward acceptable or unacceptable? Or are all of these things completely made up on the fly? I think the latter. I think that a lot of them are made up on the fly and a lot of them are made up to get the old days to get print, and in this day and age to get things online and comments quoted in various places.

And I think a lot of it's a tempest in a teapot, because the reality is, if you go back to when I first did the book, I remember talking to both Robin Yount and Paul Molitor, and they were at spring training. They were out of the game, and they were down there as coaches. And they were saying that between the two of them, getting somebody on second and then picking up the guy on second, picking up not only the sign, because that's very difficult because you're coding the signs all the time, but to pick up where the batter where the catcher was leaning what it looked like what the setup was and trying to signal

that your batter he said they could basically get they could win a couple games a year just from what they one of them could get from second then getting it back to the back to the batter and so i think all of this stuff is ingrained and it goes in waves and people, this moral indignation, which is now at a high pitch with the latest thing with the Astros, because 2017 was a benchmark year. Now they're saying the Astros had this camera, you know, in the field. But this is going back to year after year. And you just covered a couple years, but it goes back years and years and years.

And my favorite one is 1965, where Leo DeRocher is doing Game of the Week. And he's in Washington with the Senators in 65. And he sees Vice President Humphrey down watching the game. And he brings him up to the booth. And then DeRocher says, using the Southern Field calendar, he said, Mr. Vice President, we're going to steal all these signs. Humphrey's very nervous. He's Vice President of the United States.

And he says to DeRocher, he says, isn't there something wrong with this? And he says, nah, everybody does it. And then he's calling the pitches on television. Of course, the league comes down on DeRoier and everybody's all upset and Sporting News editorializes against it. But it's been going on and the snake in the Garden of Eden if you want

is electronics. And they've gone through these extraordinary things. Last year they took all of the bullpen phone wires out and Major League Baseball is now monitoring the phone in the booth that goes to the bullpen to make sure that isn't being used as a channel. So they've actually put a new set of landline phones in,

which are tapped during the whole game by Major League Baseball. So there's a paranoia here there's a ballet here there's a for a writer it's a it's a dream because you always get you always get stuff new stuff to write about you know we hold your breath and you've got a new sign stealing accusation and again i'm editorializing here but to me the great sign stealing story of 2017 is in ben writer's book on astro ball in which in which he talks about the degree to which Carlos Beltran could read towels. He was their secret weapon in 2017. He could sit there and analyze film and also analyze real-life stuff, and he could tell you when the changeup was coming based on their body language.

when the changeup was coming based on their body language. Of course, now we hear that Beltran is accused of maybe having perpetrated or helped develop this video sign stealing scheme too. So who knows what combination of approved and unapproved sign stealing or pitch tipping he was doing at that time. You can read that differently now than we did at the time. But you trace the history of sign stealing back to almost when sign giving began. And you have an 1876 allegation. That's the first year of the National League. And supposedly there was a shack hanging off a telegraph pole outside a ballpark, and there was some sign stealing

going on there. But I guess the beginning of mechanical or electronic sign stealing as we know it today would be maybe the 1900 Phillies buzzer scheme. Is that sort of the first one that is more than someone with binoculars hanging out in the outfield, but actually transferring those signals via mechanical means? Yeah. I mean, the buzzer scheme, and that's probably the beginning of it, and that was parallel to the development of electricity. Playing Thomas Edison for that one. Yeah, and that's gone all the way through,

where every time there's a development of electronics. I mean, the most difficult thing to do right now is to figure out you've loaded all these ballparks, all 30 major league ballparks, with elaborate sensing devices, elaborate cameras, as we all know, these things that measure velocity and all these other things. And so you've created this huge universe of electronics out there. And then you're not supposed, and of course you've got people using iPads in the dugout, but only for certain things. And the, after the Apple Watchgate incident, which was also 2017, where the, the, the Red Sox played a fine for having relayed signs,

stolen signs via an Apple Watch. Now, theoretically, the Apple Watch is really a Timex that costs a lot of money because you're only supposed to use electronic watches for telling time. So you've got this strange business where you either have to ban everything entirely or come to grips with it. But the thing that confuses me a little bit about the latest thing with the Houston accusations was, A, the first accusation was really that the scouts were supposed to be stealing signs coming from the dugout.

There's a puzzlement there because there are signs coming from the dugout, especially for, There are signs coming from the devil, especially for, say, double steals or steal or this or that hit and run. But the managers know to code those things. I mean, you go back in history and managers use towels. They've used other people to sign. They've only used trainers even. When the Yankees had Don Zimmer was the associate coach or the assistant coach, he was the one that gave the signs, not the manager. But he would sometimes pass it off. So you've got that part of it.

And then the other part is the camera out there. Every team in the baseball in 2017 had elaborate, elaborate systems of changing their finger signs, the ones you see on TV, the one where you drop down a finger for this or two fingers or three fingers for that. And those things are so mixed up with dummy calls or so many dummy signals. Sometimes the real signal is when the catcher touches his face

and that activates the next signal. You'll see a catcher throw three or four signs, and then all of a sudden, and the pitcher's shaking them off. And the difficulty I'm having to figure out is, if everybody in baseball is trying to really hide those signs and decode them, some teams are changing with every batter, some pitchers are changing with every inning, the codes, and throwing in the dummies.

How does that guy looking at the camera figure it out that quickly that he can bang on a drum or bang on a garbage pail in time to get it? It confuses me because the counter-espionage is so strong. For what it's worth, when I looked at these they uh there usually was not a garbage can being thumped when there was a runner on second and the teams uh switched to their more complicated multi-step signs it was all it was always just the one finger down uh sign that was being stolen in the dozen or so games that i reviewed uh which was why they were able to do it on you know the second or third pitch of the game. They were just using standard fastball one, slider three, or whatever.

Slider four, change up three. Yeah, I think a lot of those countermeasures have been put in place perhaps as a response to the suspicion of what the Astros were doing and the Red Sox and these other teams. So now you watch teams and they're switching signs every batter. So maybe they're less susceptible to this than they were even just a couple of years ago before this justified paranoia became so widespread. But there's not much difference

between what the Astros were doing and what the 1900 Phillies were doing, which is just having a second string catcher sit out in the clubhouse which was in center field and then he had a peephole where he had binoculars and he'd steal signs and then they would have this underground telegraphic system and he'd have a morse code where he would signal to the coach who was i guess standing where a third base coach stands and it would just be like one dash for a fastball and two for a curve and three for

a change up and then the coach standing there would feel these vibrations and signal to the batter and another team at least the the pirates that year were aware of this and they had kind of a non-aggression pact where they wouldn't steal signs against each other and they had their own different system and there was a dramatic moment in game where an opposing player who suspected the system went over and just charged this coach and dug up the telegraph box that was under the ground which i don't know if that's is that the only example of this actually being exposed in game by a player because so often you don't know that this is happening until decades later when you hear about the 51 Giants or the late 40s Cleveland teams or whatever,

and it comes out way after the fact. But this was catching them right in that moment doing it. But here's what I would love to say at this point there's a lot of stuff going on where there are decoy signs so the simple being able to pick up a one and a two or this for a change up i mean even if the tape sort of emphasized that i they may be picking up something else they may be picking the way the catcher moves in anticipation of a change up because there's so many dummies in there. And even going back to the 50s and 60s, they were going through a fairly elaborate system of decoy, using decoys and changing the signals. I mean, there have been teams reported on the book that

had different sets of signals for every inning or every half inning. And so I still think that maybe the major thing they were picking up was a tell rather than actually looking at the finger signals. And why they wouldn't go into the same thing we'd do on a man on second. I mean, one of the reasons that I've always disputed in this book, I've always disputed the whole thing with the Dodgers, with the 51 Dodgers and the Giants, was that the, it came out in 62 of the, when that first came up,

that whole business, Wendy Lockman was on second and he claims he could not see the catchers signals. So how could a guy in the outfield, Rue Walker said that he was working on seven different sequences that day. Who was also the, you know, was the,

was the catcher. I think it's a whole sort of soup of things that they were interpreting. If it was as accurate as they say it was, I bet it was not only just the one finger, two finger, three finger, but it was in fact the way the catcher was setting up, the way that the catcher may have been moving his shoulder, anticipating a change up, which means it might have more likely get into the go down into the dirt as opposed to a fastball. And it may be a classic interpretation of things, of tells and signs and signals all mixed together. And whoever was looking, if this is is all true whoever was looking at all this

on the monitor in the next to the trash can was able to get a snapshot of what was going to happen and interpret that snapshot based on the whole series of motions because the other thing the tells were and the other thing is fascinating about the about this last year's playoffs was Strasburg, just getting back to the matter of tells, where Strasburg in the game six of the World Series against when Strasburg wins the victory over the Astros in game six of the World Series, he realized that in the first two innings, he was tipping his pitches. to winnings, he was tipping his pitches. And when he realized that, then that's when the Astros got their hits. When he realized that he started doing all these things to confuse the batter and not give up his tells, to me, the whole thing is, as you probably inferred by it, it's just fascinating. It's a combination of human intelligence know, human intelligence and human deception and human everything else.

Because baseball is basically a game of deception. So, you know, the pitcher is always trying to deceive the batter by the way he throws the ball. You mentioned the 1951 Bobby Thompson's home run. And in your book, you have the quote from Bobby Thompson that denies that he knew what was coming. He says, no, I never wanted to know what pitch was coming. I was so overeager. If I'd known a fastball was coming, I'd likely have swung too soon and missed it. And I have seen a lot of versions of that quote over the years, which go completely in opposition to the actual practice of baseball players, both trying to steal signs constantly for 100 plus years,

and also trying to keep the other team from stealing their signs. And so the evidence, all the evidence suggests that teams do want, or hitters do want to know, and that the defense doesn't want them to know. But you just over and over and over, I hear players deny that they even want to know. Have you come across many examples of players saying, yes, I want to know. That's why I'm good. I stole the signs and it helped me. No, but I think, I mean, there are some that were so definitive and they said it so many

times over the years and they said it screwed them up. Basically, they lost their timing they had an eye and dimaggio joe dimaggio being the most famous one who just he loathed he didn't want to know he said he didn't want to know and barra backed them up later and said no he drew measure never wanted to know uh what was coming he just he just felt he had his eye was he relied more on his eye and he said he could get hurt if he interpreted or was given the wrong sign and then reacted, and then it was a fastball, and he was crouching down for something else.

So I think there are players who don't want to know, who have a certain eye. I think Wade Boggs was another one. I said he didn't want to know. I mean, the players don't talk to know, who have a certain eye. I think Wade Boggs was another one. He said he didn't want to know. I mean, the players don't talk about this stuff. That's the other thing a lot, but they do in retrospect. But I think DiMaggio was consistent about that, and there was evidence that he probably didn't. But again, it's one of these elements that makes baseball fascinating because it's like this ongoing minor drama on the side of the...

It's almost like having ballet with another ballet going on in the other room. You're watching Swan Lake on the stage and you're watching this other sketchier ballet on the side of it, which is this whole business with signs and tells and everything else. But I agree with you that very few players have ever said they really valued this, getting the signs. I've always been very suspicious of those quotes, but over the summer I talked for a different topic, a different article, I talked to a scientist who had studied people's brains while they were making the decision of whether to swing or not at a pitch and was able to identify exactly when a batter is able to identify a pitch and all that. And so I asked him, like, if Major League hitters who have these outrageous response

times that are just so much better than any normal human has in a lab setting, if they have good reaction times in other things as well. If you recreated a different sport that was also based on reaction time, would these players be super at it? And he said, no, not really. What makes them great at picking up pitches isn't that their brains are better. It's that they've developed this pattern recognition over so many years of facing so many pitches and learning the patterns and seeing progressively more difficult pitches and that it is really a cognitive trick more than it's something

internal or inherent in their brain and if you think of hitting that way then part of the skill is the the natural recognition it's the brain picking up the pattern. And it might, I have come to kind of believe after this Astros thing with, you know, what statistical evidence we do have about 2017, that it is maybe possible that in fact, if this is the anomaly, if this is not how you normally have hit in your life, then you would not necessarily have the same pattern recognition if your brain is already anticipating a pitch, if it's already expecting a pitch, and that it could backfire. And so I don't know, I'm sort of starting to believe it. And the quotes in your book are so, yeah, they're so consistent from the players that

it's compelling. And it is amusing to think that we've had this 120 year intelligence operation and counterintelligence operation and counter counterintelligence operation and cables being cut and fights being done by managers and all of that, all for what is arguably maybe worthless intelligence. It seems like it sort of fits the the original premise that you had that this all in some ways mimics war play, because that's kind of been the story of intelligence in the real world as well. And the other thing, you could play it all the way to the line. I mean, in the 2018 ALCS when the Red Sox beat Houston, Alex Cora, after the whole thing was over,

was saying that they knew that Houston had become almost paranoid about signs and sign stealing. So they had all sorts of people roaming the stage, playing around with cameras, and they were doing all sorts of dummy signals on the field. And it was a radio show that he apologized. He said, well, I know it made the game longer, but boy, we had them all psyched out. So some of it's psychological warfare, too, you know, you sort of and trying to interpret all these dummy signals. And yeah, I'm on your side on this. I think I think that it's there's sort of a tempest in the teapot here and it's a harmless pursuit.

It's not like we're talking about war casualties or something. It's not like we're talking about we're casualties or something. yes, we took money, but we didn't actually, you know, throw the game or things that would kind of be exculpatory. Or maybe it's just not wanting to attribute your own success to some sort of larceny. Like, you know, you have Mark McGuire, for instance, saying, well, yes, I took steroids, but it didn't help me hit more home runs, which is that might be true. But on the other hand, you thought it was helping you at the time, seemingly. And everyone who's ever stolen a sign seemed like they thought it would help them. So I don't know. I agree that it's not clear cut that there is a benefit or a big benefit here. But there's that at work, too.

a benefit or a big benefit here, but there's that at work too. And I wanted to ask you, because you document this whole history of scoreboard spies and in an earlier era of baseball, you'd have people at the scoreboard and they would manipulate numbers or letters on there to send some signal or they'd open or close a box to show what pitch was coming. And at that time, this was all frowned upon. But was it not until 2000 that this was actually ever officially banned, that you couldn't use mechanical means or electronic means? Oh, that happened earlier. I mean, I think it had become so rampant. That was the era where, you know, Bob Feller had the telescope left over from his Navy service,

and he would sit up there on off days and try to break signs. A lot of stuff was going on, and they cracked down on it then. But it was very unofficial. It was sort of a, pardon the expression, gentleman's agreement that nothing would happen anymore outside of the... You had to be either... You could do anything you want as long as you're in uniform and not, and in the ballpark itself, you know, between, you know, in the actual fenced off

ballpark. And that calmed it down for a while because it was so, I mean, the eras of, you know, when it was Vec and, and, uh, well, actually the people I've written about Vec and DeRocher and Stengel, it was, it was unbelievable, the whole business of science and science dealing. And Stengel even brought it to the point where he would make his bullpen calls by doing, or a lot of the managers said Stengel was one of them. But he would call you if it was somebody named Burns that he wanted to call in. He'd light a fire with a newspaper. Somebody named Burns that he wanted to call in, he light a fire with a newspaper. I remember the story of Bubba Church, the bullpen call.

A manager would step out and use his hands to make a steeple with his hands. There was a call for Bubba Church to come in. There was a whole thing that was building up at that time with these shenanigans. And that was when they really started the thing with the first and third base coach, when it looked like they were swatting off a swarm of mosquitoes with arms flailing here and there, touching their cheek and pulling their ear. And that still goes on.

There's a whole lot of that decoy stuff. But again, it's not... but I really go with you. I think a lot of it has to do with your interviews with the cognitive scientists. A lot of the best hitters are the ones who have the best, learn these patterns. And you write somewhere in the book that the lore and history of baseball are so intertwined with signs and sign stealing that it would seem all but impossible to stop it. And I think you were writing there about legal sign stealing, you know, sign stealing from second base, let's say. But you could essentially say the same thing about sign stealing using electronic or mechanical means because that goes back well over a century now, too, and it keeps happening over and over. So do you believe that it's impossible to stop it, that any rule that you put in place, someone will find a way around it? And if that's the case, then should you just say anything goes and have at it? Sure, because where do you draw the line and it tells

is it is it watching a is it somebody in the dugout say your manager or somebody in the dugout the trainer for that matter and he notices that every time the pitcher's about to throw a change up he touches his belt and that's essentially sign stealing right how do you ban that i mean it's human nature once you're on that ball field and you're playing another team, even at Little League, anywhere you go, I mean, no matter how low down you go, you're always, the

brighter people in the field and the more devious people in the field are always looking for a way to break the other team's code, the sequences, how they do, how do they behave in a hit-and-run situation, how do they affect a double do, how do they behave in a hit and run situation? How do they affect a double steal? What do they do before a double steal?

So you're never going to ever, ever, and you're going to be looking at films. And the films go back a long way. And you study the films and you study a pitcher for, you know, study 30 innings of a pitcher pitching before you face him. And you see, you notice he has a pattern. How do you stop that? So once you, you know, it's so hard to ban it because it's so much a part of human nature.

And baseball is just set up for it just because of a static element. And it's not like it's moving all the time, like football or basketball, but it's a lot of it's a static element. So you're, you know, everybody's in place. So, you know, I point's in place so so uh you know i point out in the original version of the book that when you take all the signs on the field into account

the short stop in the second basement just go discussing who's going to you know take care of the guy on first base the opponent posing player they are signing their own players have all sorts of signs that are covert that are signing between them therepires have all sorts of signs that are covert, that are signing between them. There are all these other signs going on. The catcher is using many signs to place the men in the field, his men in the field. So I was told by several people that in any closely played Major League Baseball game, and counting dummy signs and signals, which are set, there are probably a thousand signs and signals given.

So you're not going to change all that. You could draw a line with real-time sign stealing using some kind of technological device, which seems to be where most people consider it to have crossed the line. If you're using a camera or a telescope or whatever, and you're relaying that in real time, and it's someone who is not directly involved in the game, I mean, those seem to be the taboos. But again, even those go back so, so long that evidence suggests that that's just going to keep happening. And it's getting increasingly difficult to ban technology or ban screens because they're omnipresent. So I don't know. MLP is doing a better job, it seems like, of policing these things.

And it's possible that they could stop at least, say, the specific behavior that the Astros were doing in 2017. But will that stop the next counter? I don't know. You have to up the penalty. In other words, what they promised in 2000 with the Apple Watchgate thing, where they find the Red Sox of $500,000, and then they find the Yankees for something

that occurred several years earlier. The word from the commissioner's office was that if this gets out of hand, we're going to start charging draft choices. And if that's the ultimate penalty, that would – but boy, it's going to get hard to prove that one team was doing it and the others weren't and all the rest. But on the other hand, you could just throw it up and say, all right, we don't care what you do.

Because all those cameras are there. I mean, the horse is sort of out of the garage here because you have all these multitude of cameras and multitude of electronic censoring material and phenomenal amounts of data coming in from the field, which these new analytics people, as you know, are dealing with. And so once you set up a system that's so dependent on electronic information gathering, you're going to build into it some espionage. Yeah, in that earlier passage that I read with, you know, all those different incidents of dispute, the league office only makes a very, very brief cameo in which the one case where the Mets complained that the Phillies were stealing signs using cameras,

the league office disregarded the complaint. And so then even in that case, the Mets just went ahead and cut the feeds. So they took justice into their own hands even there. And it seems to be a theme in all of these things that the players and the teams are perfectly content in a lot of ways to litigate these things without the league coming into it, that they don't generally go to the league. And they don't really let the league's findings keep them from taking steps on their own. Do you get the sense

from, you know, the century of these things being litigated through unwritten means that players and teams actually prefer that this is something that they police and that they feel like they police it more effectively and more consistently than the league does anyway? Or am I reading too much into that? You may be reading too much. I think it's just a slight bit less than that. I think they're more than – I mean, you do hear certain managers and certain people in key situations complain, but when I go back to that thing I told you about, Alice Cora,

the Red Sox, when he said, you know, we were just doing everything to make them more paranoid. And I think the thing that may push it over the line will be electronics. I mean, one of the writers in the Washington Post wrote, he said that Major League, it was after the Apple Watchgate thing, he said, Major League Baseball does not have a sign-stealing problem. It has an electronics problem. But boy, if you

ban every bit of electronics from the dugout and the field, which I've tried to do, it gets pretty hairy. The other one, this was last year, 2018, was they caught this guy one of the games where a guy was out in a Major League Baseball

game, was screaming out in the outfield like a fan was saying he's setting up it was yelling how the catcher was setting up and they had him removed from the game but he was a guy just yelling out you know he's he's setting up to the left he's setting up to the left meaning you know for the for the batter can hear him but and and he was thrown out of the game so it it's it's i don't't know, to me it's almost like a carnival, the whole business. And I keep, I'm sure you're disappointed with me saying that, but it's almost fun to just watch all the huffing and puffing that everybody does.

There is a lot of outrage about what the Astros were doing, and I understand that, especially if you were a fan of a team that was playing the Astros and now you know what they were doing. But on the other hand, when you read the history and very, very similar schemes have been employed for essentially the entire modern era of the game, I don't know, I guess it makes it a little harder to get worked up about it because you figure, well, this has always been part of things

and the game goes on and players find a way to counter it. And we didn't even mention the incident in the late 60s when Leo DeRocher was managing the Cubs and he had the visiting team's clubhouse bugged. And so when the other team detected this, they would then have phony meetings and have bogus pitching plans that were getting picked up by the bug. Or in the 70s, the Rangers thought the Yankees were doing that, so they sent an electronics expert in to sweep the visiting clubhouse. And I don't know if the league got involved in either of those incidents or whether teams just handled it themselves. I wanted to read this one passage from your book.

I wanted to read this one passage from your book. You write, president Joe Cronin for a ruling. The senators did not deny the camera, saying it was there to tape the game to be used the following day to analyze batter swings. Metro did not accept the training argument and insisted that other teams were doing it, adding, they had one in Chicago when I was with the Cubs on the coaching staff. It was a closed circuit camera and its receiver was kept in a little room behind the Cub dugout that was always locked until the game started. The picture was so clear you could see the cuticle of the catcher's fingernails metro who became the cubs manager partway into the 1962

season then had the camera removed quote i didn't like the device and besides our batters were so poor they couldn't hit the ball even if they knew what was coming once when we were using the camera against the cards they beat us in a doubleheader, 9-0 and 11-0. So that sort of touches on everything we've been talking about, the fact that this video sign stealing goes back several decades and then the idea that maybe it didn't work so well. And also you had this one manager accusing another team of doing it and saying, well, I know they're doing it because we used to do it and my own team did it.

So it's just this back and forth thing that never seems to stop. Absolutely. I guess we haven't come to a major conclusion here other than the fact that this is all cyclical and it's all, it's more amusing than it is. If you wanted to list all of the problems baseball has today, this would be pretty close to the bottom of the list, I think. this would be pretty close to the bottom of the list, I think. You know, I mean, when you're thinking of things like attendance and this and that and length of game and everything else, I think this is pretty minor. You know, a lot of the fans, it's almost like, you know,

the old hot stove league. It's people who discuss this all winter long. They'd be, oh, the Astros should have won and they should give them an asterisk and, you know, put it, you know, the whole business. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about sign stealing. I still am, after all these years, somewhat ambivalent, and I change depending on the circumstances.

But one thing that I do find to be quaint and that I like about it, and this is even true with the Astros, the Astros were, according to the reports, doing this at home, not on the road. And I like the idea of home field, your home field having, you know, its own character, its own advantages, the idea of it being hostile to the other team and that you figure out the way over your years of playing in a park to use it to your advantage. the way over your years of playing in a park to use it to your advantage. And whether that's legal or non-legal, I find the idea of that fairly charming. And a lot of the stories that we've talked about today were also home field specific. They required a knowledge of or an exploitation

of the infrastructure of the park itself and the familiarity with the park. I don't know if you're capable of surveying 200 pages of examples that you've documented, but like what percentage of the sign stealing in baseball is home field specific in your estimation? A large percentage, with the exception, the true exception being the people in the dugout who are, and there's people, Del Baker, there are people over, Charlie Nossick, there are people in the dugout who are, and there are people, Del Baker, there are people over, Charlie Nossick, there are people over the years who sat in the dugout, either as managers or as coaches, who could basically, one of the main reasons they were there was to crack the code. So they're at it all the time.

So that part of it, it goes on the road with them. They're still analyzing certain things. But I'd say probably 75% of what's going on or 80% is home team stuff. And it's probably analogous to groundskeeping where you do the groundskeepers basically keep the field in shape for the home team. And we know all those stories about groundskeeping. And other things, you know, deficits, not deficits, but idiosyncrasies. The Green Monster, for example, works to the benefit of the Red Sox.

So maybe in the same league as that. Yeah, the Astros, you know, they've seemingly had alternate schemes too, and they may have been employing those on the road. So maybe in the same league as that. in subsequent seasons to listen for trash can banging in Houston specifically, but they didn't attempt to do a public investigation at that time, not until it came out in a public report, which kind of goes along with the idea that the league has often been slow or unwilling to get involved in these things, that they consider it something that players police, I guess, and adjust against each other. And then occasionally there will be a big public blow up where this will surface in a report and then fans get upset about it and the league says, oh, okay, well, then now that everyone knows about it, we'll

do something about it or we'll try to. But as long as it's just the players and the teams are handling it among themselves, it seems like they're often happy to just sit back and let it play out. What I love about the trash can banging is it's so 19th century. Right, yes. I mean, the first time I heard it, I was thinking about one of those old zinc, you know, big metal trash cans, but it was actually a plastic can. But it's something that sounds like it happened in 1932 or something. Yeah. All right. Well, we appreciate your time and insight and knowledge.

And the book that we have been discussing, which is very relevant right now, is called The Hidden Language of Baseball. It is current up through the Apple Watch incident, but perhaps you can get another afterword in there at some point in the future to cover this too. And all of the things that you have written are available or listed on pauldixonbooks.com if anyone wants to browse your vast bibliography. So, Paul, it has been a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate your writing. I'm reading your MVP book now. Oh, very much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate your writing. I'm reading your

MVP book now. There's going to be some new words for your next dictionary. I noticed that. In fact, I have been working on the fourth edition for a while, but

the book is so big now that we're now going online. But I'm just in the process of making a deal with Baseball Almanac that there'll be an online version of the dictionary with a lot of new terms in it and stuff. And I'll have to call you and we're checking with you to consult because you've got a nifty glossary in the MVP book. All right. We look forward to that Thank you Paul good talking to you

Okay great talking to you thanks Alright that will do it for today Thanks to Paul and thanks to you for listening To be clear I do think that the Astros Should be punished for what they did Even though there are precedents for that type of behavior It was against the rules And it's become a big problem for baseball

I don't know if it's a huge competitive problem, but it's certainly a huge PR problem. One that Rob Manfred tried to contain on Tuesday when he said, right now we are focused on the information that we have with respect to the Astros. I'm not going to speculate on whether other people are going to be involved. We'll deal with that if it happens, but I'm not going to speculate about that. I have no reason to believe it extends beyond the Astros at this point in time. I would say we have pretty credible reasons to believe that it extends beyond the Astros or that it has extended beyond the Astros, given the other reporting out there

and what we know the Red Sox were doing in 2017 and just the general history of sign stealing, which suggests that it's very rarely only one team at a time doing something that they shouldn't be doing. I continue to think, though, that we may just have to pivot away from traditional signs. Yes, players are being more vigilant now, they're guarding against these things, and maybe that will prevent some of the signs from being picked up, but it comes with costs, right? It comes with longer delays between pitches and players having to keep these different

sign schemes in their heads. And it just seems to me that if technology is going to make it more and more difficult for teams to use signs without them being intercepted, then we should try to leverage technology. Have white hat technology instead of black hat technology that will make it more difficult for teams to crack that code. So whether it's headsets, whether it's haptic feedback devices, there's got to be something you can do. One complication that we haven't really discussed on the show is that there is some benefit to fielders knowing the signs. So if you only had headsets or only the catcher and the pitcher

had some device to pass signs between each other, that would be good. But then infielders wouldn't know what pitch was coming and where to lean. Outfielders might not get as good jumps on the ball. I guess you could say, well, what's the harm? We'll just have more hits and more offense, and that's not the worst thing. More base runners, especially today when fewer base runners seems to be a problem. But if you wanted to preserve that traditional system of fielders having some inkling of what's coming and where the batted ball might go, then give everyone a watch. Give everyone a little device that vibrates before each pitch, just the way that the 1900 Phillies box vibrated under the third base coach. This does seem like a solvable problem, although then of course you can get teams trying to intercept those signals

that are being sent. And that's a whole new arms race. So this may never totally end. But baseball has survived this long. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Suzanne, Mark Montgomery, Matthew Gardner, Jesse Coomer, and Nick Feely. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you're a supporter, even if we don't answer them right away, you may need a stockpile of listener emails to get us through the slowest months of the winter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Our next episode will be the Fangraphs Live event that Meg and I are hosting in New York on Thursday night. Sold out, unfortunately, for those of you who don't have tickets already.

What can I say? We're a big draw. So, assuming that we get the audio from that event back from the venue quickly, sold out, unfortunately, for those of you who don't have tickets already. What can I say? We're a big draw. So assuming that we get the audio from that event back from the venue quickly, you can expect to hear that a little later this week. So talk to you then. Thank you.