Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1505: Sign Stealing is a Flat Circle

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

In a special narrative episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh traces the parallels between baseball’s latest sign-stealing crisis and an almost 60-year-old sign-stealing scandal that caused a comparable upheaval in the sport, drawing on archival clips, contemporary music, and interviews with author Paul Dickson and former major leaguers Eddie Robinson, Al Worthington, and Jay Hook […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1505 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast Oh, it used to be Labor Torres sounded off about baseball's sign-stealing scandal, and hours before Braves outfielder Nick Marcakis, when asked about the Astros, answered, every single guy over there needs a beating, I called 99-year-old Eddie Robinson the oldest living former major leaguer. Robinson, who played first base in the big leagues before and after serving in the Navy during World War II, is a native Texan who still lives in the state and once worked in the Astros front office. He's also the last living member of the 1948 Cleveland Indians, who stole signs during their stretch run via a spy stationed in the center field scoreboard and equipped with a tripod-mounted telescope. The spy, an off-duty pitcher, would relay the signs to a member of the grounds crew, who sat in the bleachers wearing a white uniform and closed and opened his legs to indicate

fastballs or off-speed pitches. Using that system, Cleveland finished strong, eked out a pennant by a one-game margin, and went on to win the World Series. Based on Robinson's background, one would think he might go easy on the Astros. Yet here's what he said, speaking over the sound of the old movie he was watching when I called. Well, there's always been science demon going on, you know, here and there, There's always been science demon going on, you know, here and there. But it was haphazard, nothing sophisticated. This was absolutely abominable. It was sophisticated. It was pure and simple taking advantage of the other team unbeknownst to them.

I don't think it was in any way proper. As Robinson said, there's always been sign stealing going on. In fact, there have always been two types of sign stealing going on, the respectable kind and the crooked kind. New York Giants manager John McGraw drew the distinction in 1913. According to the best ethics of baseball, wrote McGraw, who didn't always act as if he was bound by them, any signal which can be grabbed through a quick eye and smooth intelligence may be fairly used to the advantage of the grabber. By contrast, he continued, the unfair method of getting signals is to employ artificial means such as field glasses and buzzers and other devices that

have broken into baseball from time to time. McGraw added that any manager in baseball would use a sign if he could see it because the opposing catcher was not careful in covering it, but he claimed that far fewer would risk discipline or disgrace by stealing signs through mechanical means. Decades later, long after McGraw's time with the team, the 1951 Giants would become baseball's most notorious illicit sign-stealers, until the 2017 Astros eclipsed them. Buzzers, binoculars, telescopes, telephones, lights, cameras, the implements of sign-stealing change, but the practice is a constant. The documented history of the frowned-upon style of sign-stealing dates back to baseball's

beginnings. In 1876, the inaugural season of the National League, the Hartford Dark Blues stole signs from a shack attached to a telegraph pole that stood outside their park. Robinson is right, though. The Astros' methods were sophisticated compared to their predecessors, if a practice dubbed a banging scheme can be called sophisticated. In 2017, the year they won the World Series, the Astros displayed a feed from a camera located beyond the outfield fence at Minute Maid Park on a monitor in the tunnel next to the dugout, where players would decode catcher signs and relay them in real time to batters by banging on a trash can. In 2017 and 2018, the Astros also used replay review monitors to crack catcher's codes and convey them to the dugout during games. When runners reached second base, they could signal the signs to the batters. The Red Sox reportedly engaged in a similar scheme in 2018 after using Apple Watches to

illegally relay stolen signs in 2017. Whether the sophistication of the Astros' scheme makes it morally worse than Cleveland's is debatable. Both teams used the best tools available at the time to steal and pass on signs. Nor was the Astros' approach necessarily more advantageous. The Astros sometimes relayed the wrong signs, which came at a cost. Baseball prospectus writer Rob Arthur, relying on a database of bangs logged by Astros fan Tony Adams, discovered that the incorrect relays hurt Astros hitters more than the correct

relays help them. Plus, as Major League Two taught us, some pitches are hard to hit even if you know they're coming. I've got your timing now, but I'll bet you don't have enough hair on your ass to throw me another. Well, here it comes, Parkman. are hard to hit even if you know they're coming. Arthur calculated that the banging scheme didn't help Houston's hitters on the whole. Of course, the Astros may have profited from sign stealing at certain pivotal times or benefited from sign stealing methods that Arthur couldn't quantify, but they did hit better on the road than at home during the banging-infused 2017 regular season, and they had their best batting year yet in 2019, when they aren't known to have cheated, although

their earlier larceny has placed that season under suspicion as well. What we can say for certain is that the Astros' actions were deeply unethical. Sign-stealing of the sort McGraw decried before World War I was always considered unsportsmanlike and strongly discouraged, but by 2000, the use of technology to relay signs during games was explicitly banned. The Astros' scheme was also uncommonly scandalous and sensational because of the clear auditory evidence supplied by the banging, the public confession of 2017 Astro Mike Fiers, the Astros' pre-existing reputation for unprincipled behavior,

the teams and the league's self-sabotaging, insincere-sounding statements, MLB's slow response to Astros' sign-stealing rumors, the unsubstantiated claims about buzzers that spread on social media, and the dismissals of Mets manager Carl Speltron and Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who had helped engineer the Astro system, the sign-stealing scandal became the biggest story of the 2019-2020 offseason. In January, Commissioner Rob Manfred released a report about the league's two-month investigation into the Astro's sign-stealing activities,

handed down draft pick and financial penalties to the team, and issued suspensions for Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luno, whom the Astros immediately fired. But the report failed to placate people who expected Astros players to be punished. The scandal continued to dominate the discourse surrounding the sport as star players reported to Sprig Training and took turns savaging Manfred and the Astros alike. Baseball is burning, wrote ESPN's Jeff Passan on February 15th. how players routinely, when those first went in, the replay rooms, that players would wander in and out of the replay rooms and take a peek at what was going on. I mean, it was like MLB brought

the snake into the Garden of Eden and then wondered why Adam Boyd bit the apple or something. That was historian Paul Dixon, the author of a book about sign stealing, The Hidden Language of Baseball. There's very little in baseball that hasn't happened before, and as Dixon's book makes clear, MLB should have foreseen that some teams would be tempted to abuse the latest technology because baseball had already weathered this sort of sign-stealing storm. Although the specifics of the Astros' scheme differ in some respects from previous sign-stealing strategies, the uproar over sign-stealing in the spring of 2020 echoes a crisis from 58 years earlier. In the spring of 1962, as the Beatles played the Cavern Club, John Glenn orbited the Earth,

and Jackie Kennedy took TV viewers who were worried about nuclear war on a remote tour of the White House, sign stealing suspicions in baseball boiled over and publicly besmirched the sport. You know, I think it was at that particular time it had come completely out of control. Dixon's book begins by chronicling the most famous sign-stealing offenders of the deadball era, the turn of the 20th century Phillies and Pirates, the 1909 to 1910 Highlanders, the athletics of the early 1910s, but it mines much of its material from the middle of last century. In the 1950s especially, scoreboard surveillance was rampant and unpoliced. Periodically, Dixon wrote, someone would complain that they were being spied upon by men out of uniform hanging out in the scoreboard,

and they would be answered by the official equivalent of a shrug and a scowl. But the discontent spiraled on the eve of the 60s, and by the beginning of 1962, Dixon wrote, sign-stealing was becoming so sordid, so widespread, and such an embarrassment to the game, that Major League Baseball even flirted with the idea of banning the practice. Almost 50 years earlier, McGraw had claimed that crooked science stealing was scarce and that most managers think too much

of their reputation to try it. But in 1962, the Tampa Tribune noted, "...charges of espionage have now reached such proportions, some baseball men are advocating rules and fines to stop it. Suspicion torments my heart. Suspicion keeps us apart. Suspicion, why talk to me? To understand the origins of the 1962 sign-stealing panic, we have to travel further back in time to September 1959. sign-stealing panic, we have to travel further back in time to September 1959. This part of the story stars a right-handed swingman on the staff of the San Francisco Giants,

Al Worthington, who was then 30 years old. Like Robinson, Worthington, now 91, is up to speed on the ubiquitous Astros sign-stealing scandal. When I called him, in fact, he was watching a report on catcher Jonathan Lucroy's comments about switching up signs to thwart Houston spycraft. They got that on TV right now. So the veteran catcher says he went to great lengths to combat Astros sign stealing. When Worthington was a much younger man, he went to greater lengths than Lucroy to combat sign stealing. He's the only major leaguer who's known to have quit a team over sign stealing, and he was happy to tell me why.

Would you have a few minutes for me to ask a few questions? Yeah, I got a couple hours. I got a couple hours, so you go ahead. Okay. In 1959, the Giants were managed by Bill Rigney, who had been an infielder on the infamous 1951 sign-stealing squad. In mid-September, the Giants held a slim lead over the Dodgers in the race for the NL pennant. When the Braves came to town for a two-game series on September 16th and 17th, the Giants

enlisted a simple sign-stealing system in which a spy kept two slats in the scoreboard open. For fastballs, the spy closed the right slat, and for curves, he closed the left one. The Braves' Lou Burdette shut out the Giants on the first day of Operation Scoreboard Slat, but San Francisco scored 13 runs in the next game, which Warren Spahn started. Two days later, the Dodgers, who trailed the Giants by two games, visited Seals Stadium for a crucial three-game series. The Giants planned to keep stealing signs in that series, but Worthington wouldn't have it. When he found out about the method his teammates had debuted against the Braves, he went to talk to Rigney and threatened to leave the team. I think they just started it. I'm not real sure. But Bill Rigney, I had played with him before

in the minor leagues and before we went to the big leagues and then went to New York and then we went to California. When I found out about it, I went right to him and talked to him, but he quit. When I told him that I was cheating and I'd have to leave the team, he quit. Quit that night. The Dodgers swept San Francisco, won five of their remaining seven games to take the pennant, and beat the White Sox in a six-game World Series. The Giants lost four of their remaining five games and finished in third place. I always thought we would have won the pennant if we had kept the spy system, an anonymous member of the 59 Giants told the San

Francisco Examiner in March of 1962. But Al has no regrets. Let every 2017 Astro utilized the banging scheme, but as far as we know, none of them was tempted to walk away from the team. Why was Al so adamant? According to Worthington, his conviction came from his faith. The righty was always religious, but in 1958, five years after he broke into the big leagues, he saw evangelist Billy Graham speak in San Francisco. Graham's speech made a profound impression on Worthington, and he became a born-again Christian. Here's how he describes the effect his conversion had on him. When your heart is changed, it's like I smoked when I was in the fourth grade, all right? And I didn't smoke much. I didn't have any money. But I smoked all the way. And then when I wanted to quit through the years sometimes, and sometimes I'd try, it seemed like two weeks or more, and the pressure caught me and got me, and I couldn't do anything about it.

But when I got saved, see, all that was lifted. I just walked away from cigarettes. I didn't ever smoke again. That was wonderful. I never had wanted another cigarette like gambling. I was a paper boy, and we threw quarters to the line. It was fun and exciting. When I finished Arizona and I played the dogs at the racetracks, that was exciting. But now I wouldn't do that at all. I mean, I wouldn't even go there. You got a piece in you

that's wonderful. It's just wonderful. The sense of peace that Worthington says stopped him from smoking and gambling also stopped him from sign stealing. But Worthington would be tested again. In March of 1960, the Giants traded Worthington to the Red Sox, who sent him to the White Sox later that season. The American League champions Chicago White Sox charge on field at Sarasota. Losers in the last World Series to the Dodgers. They'd like to go, go, go all the way this year.

Worthington made his White Sox debut on September 4th, but he wouldn't last long with the team. After four outings and five and a third innings, he learned that the White Sox were stealing signs too. Amid the subsequent 1962 sign-stealing strife, Worthington's former White Sox teammate Bob Shaw, who had since joined the Braves, told the Sporting News about what the White Sox had done in 1960. According to Shaw, the Sox had used a special device, which Shaw described as a tube with a light in it, located adjacent to the famous and newly installed exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park. There's a video from the 80s in which the exploding scoreboards operator talks about how he set off fireworks. Where do you activate the fireworks when somebody hits a home run? Well, the switch is just up on the wall over my right shoulder. When we're sure the home run is

hit, we'll flip the switch and automatically it'll fire the fireworks. In 1960, some home runs that led to those fireworks may have been hit because of another nearby switch. A White Sox spy sat in the scoreboard and flipped that switch to turn the light on the tube on and off. The light went on for a fastball, stayed off for a curve, and blinked when the spy wasn't sure what was coming. The White Sox hitter could look at the light above the opposing pitcher's head. That wouldn't fly on Al Worthington's watch. This time, though, he couldn't appeal to a friend and former teammate. He had to protest to three people, all of whom were Hall of Famers or future Hall of Famers. Manager Al Lopez, GM Hank Greenberg, and owner Bill Veck. This wasn't an easy assignment. The White Sox had also stolen signs during their pennant-winning 1959 season, so the trio would

have been wary of messing with success. Feck had owned Robinson's 1948 team and was aware of that team's sign-stealing activity too. Feck was happy to move fences, lower mounds, and water down infields if he thought it would help his team, as he later wrote, It is my job, as I see it, to get my players the greatest possible advantage within the rules. And technically, the rules of the time didn't preclude White Sox-style

sign-stealing, and Greedberg had benefited from technology-aided sign-stealing when he played for the 1940 Tigers, another pennant-winning team. The Tigers had started relaying signs from the stands in early September after pitcher Tommy Bridges, an avid hunter, had noticed that he could pick up the catcher's signs from the upper deck by peering through his new rifle's telescopic lens. Why Bridges brought the rifle out to left field and what anyone else in the area thought about a pitcher pointing a rifle at the field during a game remain mysteries. It was a less vigilant time. I can tell you, though, that in May of 1957, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals accused Ted Williams of slaughtering 30 to 40 pigeons with a shotgun while sitting in a chair

near the Red Sox dugout at Fenway, so evidently a lot of old ballplayers were packing at the park. Williams claimed they were clay pigeons, and when pressed by a reporter, responded, I don't care anything about you or your paper. Although Robinson said he didn't want the Solon signs when he was hitting in 1948, Greenberg was happy to have them in 1940. It was tremendously helpful to know what the pitch was going to be, he admitted in his autobiography. From September 4th, 1940 through the end of that season, Greenberg batted.415 and hit 15 homers and 82 at-bats, good for a.1633 OPS. Over the same span, the Tigers went 18-7. Greenberg won the AL MVP award, and the Tigers, like Cleveland eight years later, won the pennant by one game. It was picking up those signs that was instrumental in enabling us to win that 1940 pennant, Greenberg said decades later.

Unsurprisingly, Worthington couldn't convince those committed sign-stealers to repent. According to the 2013 biography, Hank Greenberg, the Hero of Heroes, Greenberg told Worthington, Baseball is a game where you try to get away with anything you can. Everybody tries to cheat a little. Worthington told the Hero of Heroes that he wasn't everybody. I talked to Al Lopez. He was the manager.

And I told him, you know, that that wasn't right. And, you know, we had a conversation about it. Since I was a Christian, I couldn't go along with it. He said it wasn't cheating. And then he told me to go talk to Greenberg. I went to talk to Greenberg, and he just more or less sent me up here to talk to Bill Veck. And I didn't get much said. He talked all the time. But anyway, it didn't work out. So I went and packed my bag and left. Inspiring as it is that Worthington snuffed out San Francisco's sign-stealing,

it's unsettling that speaking up only worked once. In San Francisco, he caught the corruption early and stopped it from spreading. In Chicago, the moral rot was too entrenched for one new arrival to root out. Sign-stealing is a trivial version of an ugly group dynamic. Say something early and you can change the system, but wait too long and the system will spit you out. After the White Sox spat him out, Worthington thought his career was over, so he started preparing for his next one. I just called my wife and hate to call her and

tell her because a lot of things have happened to me since I had become a Christian. And so I left and went back to Birmingham. You know what I did? I went home and started college again because I had to have a job. And I figured I was through in baseball. Well, I'm going home to see my baby. Yeah, I'm going home to see my gal. Well, don't you know she really loves me. Oh, don't you know she really cares. A short item in the Chicago Daily Tribune on September 9, 1960, two days after Worthington left the team,

reported that Worthington was said to have disapproved of the White Sox practicing the age-old custom of stealing signs. But Worthington says he wasn't the source for that story. Even his teammates weren't aware of why he had left. Not a one of them that I know of. I didn't tell anybody. A number of writers called me and asked me why, and I couldn't of them that I know of. I didn't tell him about it. A number of writers called me and asked me why, and I couldn't tell them, you know. But Ted Williams came to Chicago and let it out, let the story out. And then when they called me up, I said, yes, that's true, that we were cheating. So that's the way it got out. Ted Williams brought it down. If I let my best companion drive me right into the canyon, it ain't nobody's business if I do.

By abandoning baseball without a backup plan, Worthington, a child of the Great Depression, was taking a real risk. You know, now, sometimes I sit around and think about it. I had a wife and two children at the time, and I didn't have any job. So I left, and I think, good night. But I'd have to do it again. The conscientious sign-stealing objector says he played with other people who disapproved of the practice, but no one else made the same choice. Most of them are good guys. I had some of them tell me they didn't like for them to do that, but guys don't want to quit. They don't like doing it, but there wasn't anything

they could do. They got wives and children, and a lot of them felt like they couldn't quit, I guess, That decision didn't end Al's career. After his first semester at school, the GM of Chicago's AAA affiliate, which was based in San Diego, invited him back to baseball. Al accepted the offer and pitched well, but he spent the whole 1961 season in the minors. He pitched even better the next year in Indianapolis, another White Sox affiliate, and again got no call to go back to the big leagues. It was clear to him that he'd been blackballed because of his stance on sign stealing. Yeah, that's the reason they didn't want me. I don't think they told me that directly, but yeah, I kind of sensed it, I guess. After the 1962 season, Lopez admitted,

we could have used Worthington ourselves the last two years, but we couldn't bring back a player who had quit on us. According to the Hero of Heroes, Greenberg said, We tried to sell him, but the word was out that he was some sort of cuckoo. But Worthington's story had a happy ending. After his two-year AAA exile, Worthington was saved again, this time in a secular sense. The Reds selected him in the 1962 Rule 5 draft and promoted him back to the big leagues in 1963, and he stayed in the majors for the rest of the decade, pitching for the Twins until he was 40. While he was in the minors,

Worthington had been born again as a pitcher. He'd learned to make his fastball sink, and the new pitch paired well with his breaking ball, making him much harder to hit than he'd been before. Now, Worthington, the 36-year-old right-hander, hails from Birmingham, Alabama. ball, making him much harder to hit than he'd been before. All right, Worthington, once again, just a sign from Batty. Checked hard, the pitch to Pepitone, the curveball in there. Good one. One and one. Say one thing, the curve that Worthington throws is a honey. It really snaps. From 1964 through 1968, Worthington trailed only Hoyt Wilhelm in reliever wins above replacement, and he led all American League relievers in saves, the non-evangelical kind. I should have known

How people spy Now since you're gone All I do is cry Though I cheated all in fun In 1961, an article in True magazine by Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby and writer Bill Surface started this way. When Al Worthington quit the Chicago White Sox last summer and went home to Alabama, most of the newspapers said it was a salary argument. In my book, it wasn't. In my book, he was a baseball misfit. Worthington didn't like cheating. The irascible Hornsby, who had coached Robinson in spring training in 1948 and served as a player manager or manager for 14 years in the majors, asserted that you've got to cheat, and his tell-all article contained ample evidence that his wasn't a minority opinion. So did the 1961 season, which,

as Dixon wrote in The Hidden Language of Baseball, was notable for the number of sign-stealing accusations. Jay Hook, a right-hander who pitched for the Reds and Mets from 1957 to 1964, remembers tech-assisted sign-stealing being baseball business as usual. Back then, a lot of the teams had guys that would, you know, go out in the stands in center field or be in the scoreboard or whatever. You know, when people would come to Wrigley Field in Chicago, they'd have people sitting out in the outfield with binoculars. In September 1961, AL President Joe Cronin sent Cleveland a letter that cited complaints about sign stealing and stressed the severe penalty that might be involved. The Cubs accused the Cardinals of stealing signs from their scoreboard that season, and the Braves played a game under protest because they claimed the Cubs had stolen signs

against them. That was ironic, given that both the Cardinals and the Cubs had stolen signs against them. That was ironic, given that both the Cardinals and the Cubs had complained about the Braves stealing signs in 1960 via a pair of players posing as fans in the stands. Everyone was convinced that everyone else was engaging in crooked sign stealing, and almost everyone was right. Every ball club has done it one time or another. 1960 Cubs skipper and 1948 Cleveland player manager Lou Bidreau confessed, although he vowed not to do it again. The current climate of sign-stealing suspicion is reminiscent of the 60s. The Dodgers correctly suspected the Astros of electronic sign-stealing in late 2017, but in late 2018, the Brewers suspected the Dodgers. And in late 2019, the Brewers became

the objects of suspicion themselves. The most insidious aspect of sign-stealing is that it's impossible to prove it's not happening, which calls every contest into question. The 1961 Hornsby Exposé and that season's sign-stealing spats set the stage for what Dixon called an unprecedented spring training season, during which much dirty laundry would get aired. At first, it seemed exciting. Florida Sunshine agrees with Mantle. First, it seemed exciting.

Florida sunshine agrees with Mantle. His 54 home runs and Maris' record 61 made last year memorable for baseball and the M-Boards. They'll be at it again. It was an odd time because there should have been almost a celebration that spring that baseball had this marvelous contest the year before, you know, between these two great Yankee batsmen, and it turned to feathers, sort of. When Hornsby wrote about what Worthington was in his book, he may have meant it literally, because he and Surface had much more to say. In early 1962, they published a book called My War with Baseball, in which they went after Worthington again. Worthington didn't fit into baseball, Hornsby wrote. His statement that it isn't nice to cheat is fine for a game

between the Humane Society and Salvation Army. Hornsby echoed Boudreaux by claiming that every team with a scoreboard had at some point placed a spy inside it. He concluded, cheating started when they threw out the first ball in the first game ever played, and it's been going on ever since. When he wasn't selling stories and hawking books by bragging about baseball's moral bankruptcy, Hornsby was working as a batting coach in Mets camp. Before Worthington went to the Reds in 1962, he had almost ended up with the Mets. Hornsby wouldn't have been happy to see him if he had, but Worthington would have been teammates with Hook, whom the Mets selected in the 1961 expansion draft months before the team's disastrous debut season. The new Mets are bringing National League Baseball back to New York for the net of detraction.

Old Professor Casey Stengel himself did talk things up. He admits his pitching is weak, but he has men like Roger Craig, ex-Dodger, and a former Cincinnati player, Jay Hook, to build upon. Hook, who pitched in parts of eight big league seasons, is most famous for snapping the 62 Mets' season-opening nine-game losing streak and winning the franchise's first game. But about a month before that, Hook had made headlines for a different reason. In 1961, he had pitched for the pennant-winning Reds, who had supposedly sent former pitcher Brooks Lawrence to the scoreboard during games to steal signs and telephone them to the dugout. In spring training in 1962, a reporter

put Hook on the spot. In spring training, a writer from New York, one of the papers, came up to me and said, Jay, I understand the Reds were stealing signs from their scoreboard. And I said, you know, I don't want to get caught in the middle on something like this, you know. Unfortunately, I said, I can't deny it. And I said, you know, and it's, you know, pretty common knowledge. And the next day, that release, UPI release or AP release or whatever, Hook says Red Stole Pennant across the whatever, you know, it said something like that. I'm not sure exactly the wording. But I thought, oh, man, how could I get, you know, in the middle of this?

Active players tend not to talk about illicit sign stealing because a clubhouse code of silence makes it taboo. That's why fires coming forward to own up to the Astros cheating was such a big break in the case. Dixon learned that there are very few fires out there the first time he tried to interview players about sign stealing. In spring training, I was all over Florida interviewing people, but no, I could find a single active player would talk about it. sign-stealing. Yet here was Hook in March of 1962, on record about the Reds, whom he had pitched for the preceding season. The AP article makes him sound like an anti-sign-stealing crusader, quoting him saying, I didn't say anything about it, but now I'm on the Mets and I want to protect the Mets against that sort of thing. I think it's wrong. The commissioner should see that a ruling is put in against it and enforce it. A $10,000 fine would

be a good idea. But Hook didn't feel as strongly about sign stealing as Worthington, so when the story came out, he set out to do damage control. You know, I knew Fred Hutchison really quite well because he had been my manager in Seattle. He's the one that brought me up to the majors, you know, and he was the manager of the Reds. And I knew that they were having a bowling party or something that night. And they trained in, I think, Tampa, and the Mets trained in St. Petersburg. So they were quite close. And so I thought, well, I think I'll go over and explain what happened to Hutch.

And I did. And he said, hey, Jay, I know how these things happen. And he said, we'll have to rip on you for a couple of days, but it'll go by. So that's what happened. Hook didn't have to worry about being the center of science-dealing attention for long. Three days later, the AP's Joseph Reichler broke the story that the 1951 Giants had used a system of binoculars, buzzers, and centerfield spies during their miraculous march to the pennant. You might say, said Reichler's anonymous informant, that the shot heard around the world was set off by a buzzer. Although the Giants initially denied the report, surviving members of the team corroborated it decades later. In the wake of that bombshell, veterans came out of the woodwork to attest to sign-stealing on other teams from the era,

including the 1948 Dodgers and the mid-'50s White Sox and Cleveland teams. The same year, Vec and sportswriter Ed Lynn published Vec's memoir, Vec as in Wreck, in which Vec acknowledged that his Cleveland and Chicago clubs had stolen signs the unsavory way. Throughout the history of baseball, going back to the first time Abner Doubleday crawled out of a cave and lit a fire, information has been passed on to the hitter by less intellectual and less sportsmanlike means, Vec wrote. Amid the cascade of sign-stealing stories, media members and players conducted the same debates about baseball's dark arts that they do today. Expert sources disagreed on whether sign stealing was effective or unreliable and distracting, and some struggled to define the line between permissible and impermissible sign

stealing. Like Lucroy, Burdett, and Spahn noted that switching up signs was slowing down games, which had lengthened by almost half an hour on average over the previous 15 years, although they were still half an hour shorter than they are now. At the National League's annual meeting in December 1961, NL owners had given League president Warren Giles the power to declare a forfeit if a game could be proved to have been won with signs obtained through mechanical means. In the spring of 62, Commissioner Ford Frick responded to the proliferation of reports about sign stealing by asserting the same authority. I am definitely opposed to such practices, he said. If such a charge were substantiated, I would forfeit the game, but I would have to have

evidence. I certainly would not be guided by rumor. Rob Manfred must have taken notes. Frick sounded like former AL president Ban Johnson, who in 1910 had fruitlessly offered a $500 reward for proof of improper means to detect signals. In the absence of audible banging and MLB TV, though, the burden of proof was heavy. The other thing you've got to realize, back then, MLB doesn't come in until 1999. There's no such thing as MLB, per se.

There's a commissioner, but there's not this same merger. The league presidents in 1999 overnight lose their power. So it was a different hierarchy. The commissioner is now being looked upon for all sorts of answers that in earlier times he wouldn't have been. And so there's much more, what is he going to do next? What is he going to do next? There was some of that sentiment in 1962. is he going to do next? There was some of that sentiment in 1962. In June, longtime player and manager Bertie Tebbets lamented that long-distance sign stealing was getting worse and called on the commissioner to intervene. Tebbets spoke from experience. He confessed to stealing signs with

Cleveland in the early 50s when he would connect to the scoreboard spy by telephone from a special booth behind the dugout. The spotter relayed each pitch, and Tebbets passed it along to the players. If you believe in the integrity of the game the way I do, this practice has to stop, he said. It's cheating, and cheating is just as contemptible in baseball as it is anywhere else. Arthur Daly of the New York Times declared, It's time somebody in authority brought it to an abrupt halt. Come down, light fall and rain You toss around and call my name You're gonna walk up the floor The very way I do

Your cheating heart Is gonna tell on you Not long after Daly's column, the flood of sign-stealing stories receded. An unwritten rule had somehow been instituted without benefit of an official ruling, to the effect that this had gotten out of hand and was now taboo, Dixon wrote. Perhaps Daly's influence as a journalist had been felt. Perhaps it had been accomplished by quiet fiat from the top, or been passed along from manager to manager as a gentleman's agreement,

maybe during batting practice or post-game dinners. Under the new unwritten rules, the only way one could steal signs from a point beyond the outfield fence was to be in uniform in the bullpen and to use the naked eye. Whatever had changed seemed to work for a while. Over the next several decades, accusations of sign stealing from the scoreboard or the stands only occasionally came to light. Reports about improper use of cameras started surfacing in the 70s, although it was obvious that they posed sign-stealing risks as early as 1959, when Mel Allen and Phil Rizzuto cracked catcher's codes on an NBC broadcast with So, you know, you knew what was happening, whether the players were on the field or, but now they study everything so carefully. Technologically, the whole game has changed. There's so many cameras that, you know, probably there's more of that that goes on. Eddie Robinson started us off. So let's bring

this thing full circle. Given that Robinson described the Astros' sign-stealing scheme as absolutely abominable, I wondered whether he thought their punishment was appropriate. I thought the punishments were pretty good. You know, you can't, the ballplayers are really guilty, but how can you just sit a whole team down for a year? That's one thing you could have done, I guess, was take their rings away, declare that a non-World Series. That could have happened. But other than that, what do you do?

You go on from here. You use this to warn everybody else that they shouldn't do it, and they better not do it, and then you go on. If anyone in baseball is qualified to take the long view, it's Eddie Robinson. The Astros have inflicted a fresh scar on the sport, but we will go on. Baseball abided after its 1960 sign-stealing scandal, and it will likely last long after the dust someday settles around this most recent blow to the belief in fair play. The settling might just take a little longer this time than it did in 1962,

when the media environment made it more difficult for a sign-stealing scandal to be so self-sustaining. And of course, the other thing that didn't keep it going longer, that was all going on in spring training, the headlines. And there just weren't that many people in spring training those days. It was really carried by the AP and UP, United Press International. headlines, and there just weren't that many people in spring training those days. It was really carried by the AP and UP, United Press International, whereas today what's fanning this thing is with everything from ESPN to the, you know, the, I mean, there were just, there was not such a thing as sports radio. So you'd have people hashing this thing hour after hour after hour on the radio, and you

didn't have the same post-steroid sort of nose for this stuff. So it's a more inflammatory period. In February, former player and manager Davy Johnson joined the giant chorus of critics of Rob Manfred. But Johnson's beef was the opposite of the common complaint. He argued that Manfred had overreacted. It is human nature in baseball to try to get an edge, whether you are pitching or hitting, Johnson said. They've been trying to steal signs forever. Different ballparks. This is nothing new. This is what you expect.

Johnson isn't entirely right about the Astros scandal offering nothing new. Codebreaker counts and sort of viral tweets about trash cans. Memes about invisible buzzers, mysterious tattoos, and mild-mannered Mike Trout saying something salty. And while rule-breaking may be human nature, that doesn't mean society can't take steps to curb bad behavior. Shady sign-stealing has happened before, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate it now. Johnson is right about one thing, though. If you know the story of the spring of 1962, the spring of 2020 doesn't seem quite so surprising. No, it doesn't surprise me, no.

They did it. There's more than, again, there's more than one club doing it when I was there. So all these 60 years passed, what happened? When you listen to the litany of past pennant winners that stole signs or talk to the people who played for them, Manfred's reluctance to strip titles starts sounding more reasonable.

To paraphrase Chancellor Palpatine, professional sports are a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. The only surefire way to avoid having signs stolen is to send signs that spies can't intercept. Up to this point, technology has mostly been used to steal signs, but like a white hat hacker, it may soon switch sides in the struggle for secrecy. Finding a technological alternative to flashing fingers sounds easier than putting together a team of 26 Al Worthingtons. There's only one Worthington, and fortunately for us, he still has time to talk. Thank you very much for your time, Al. I'm glad I could talk to you about this. Well, you know, I said we had two hours, though. That's fine. I appreciate you

calling me. That will do it for today. We hope you enjoyed this Effectively Wild experiment in narrative podcasting. If so, let us know. Thanks to Paul Dixon for writing an illuminating book that probably needs a new edition now. And to Newspapers.com and the Sabre Sporting News Archive for sparing me from microfilm. And to Eddie Robinson, Al Worthington, and Jay Hook for answering my cold calls. If you're interested, you can hear a whole interview with Eddie from last year on Effectively Wild episode 1454. All of the songs selected for this episode were recorded between 1959 and 1962 to keep the podcast period appropriate. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following

five listeners have already signed up. Pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Anne-Marie, Noah Rothman, Ben Trombley, Ryan Vianot, and Fayaz Munir. 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. Send your comments and questions for me, Meg Rowley, and Sam Miller to podcast at fangraphs.com. Or message us via Patreon if you are a supporter.

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