But, no. The media constantly echoes with more and more furious denunciations and demands for acts of contrition. here is perhaps the most over the top reaction I have seen:
"It's anger. I feel like every single guy over there needs a beating. It's wrong. They're messing with people's careers." -- Braves outfielder Nick Markakis on his reaction to the Astros' scandal and the ensuing response.
And now, ESPN.com asks: "What we lose when we can't boo the Astros on Opening Day".
My quick answer is yet another chance to engage in ritual displays of anger. A habit that does not exhaust the emotion, but instead stokes it. Anger is something people in this country need a lot less of.
I would like to argue on several grounds that the incident is less worthy of attention than the amount of electrons, the media has spent on it. I believe that there is a lot less here than meets the eye and that we can drop the matter and go back to worrying about coronavirus and the stock market.
First, there is the matter of terminology. Sign stealing is a bit of a misnomer. The signs are not traffic signs stolen by undergraduates to decorate their living rooms. They are gestures made by players and coaches to communicate plans for the next play to their teammates. A coach may touch his chin or rub his scalp to tell a base runner to try to steal a base on the next pitch. Catchers put fingers down between their legs when squatting for the next delivery to tell the pitcher what type of pitch he should throw.
Signs cannot be stolen because they are displayed in public for all to see. The only thing that is not public is the exact system of meaning assigned to each sign by each team each game. But, the signs are not that obscure. There are a limited number of signs and most teams have a few coaches or players who know what the signs of other teams are and what they mean.
Sign stealing is not like handbag stealing. The latter is mallum in se [violation fundamental morality]. The former is sort of mallum prohibtium [violation of published rules]. In fact, the signs are displayed in public. The signers hope that the opponents will not decode them, but, we are not talking about the NSA and AES 1024.
A very important system of signs is the ones used by catchers to ask the pitcher for a certain type of pitch on the next offering from the mound. Of all signs, these are least accessible by the opponents because they are usually displayed by the catcher while holding his hand between his thighs while he is in his crouch behind the plate awaiting the pitch.
The catcher's signs are not, by any means, invisible to the public. The fans at home watching the view from the centerfield camera can see them clearly. Occasionally the announcers will decode the signs for the fans. Further, opposing players standing on second base often have a good view ot the catcher's signals.
What, the Astros did was having a team employees watch the feed on a television monitor near the team’s dugout, decode the signs, and bang loudly on trash cans to warn batters of upcoming curveballs or changeups. The idea was that the information would allow Astros hitters to more accurately gauge the next pitch and have a better chance of hitting it. Some sports media people call that technology. I guess it is prohibited. To me this on the level of bat corking and Vaseline on the pitchers cap.
Second, the scheme was not innovative. The ESPN story above relates:
In 1961, the Reds won the National League pennant. That offseason, one of their pitchers, Jay Hook, admitted that the Reds had put a scout in the scoreboard with a set of binoculars. The scout peered to see what the catcher was signaling, then phoned the signs to the dugout. It was one of a number of bombshells about sign stealing published that winter: Rogers Hornsby wrote in a memoir that the league was awash with these schemes, and the Associated Press quoted insider revelations that Bobby Thomson's famous Shot Heard 'Round The World in 1951 was assisted by the same type of sign stealing. NL owners gave the league president power to declare forfeits if teams were caught in the act.Another ESPN story says that:
It's nearly certain the 2017 World Series wasn't the only one marred by players stealing signs using illegal technology or personnel. If you had to pick another team to go nuts over, it might be the 1948 Cleveland club. According to Paul Dickson's "The Hidden Language of Baseball," Cleveland that year "employed a telescope that Bob Feller had used as a gunnery officer during World War II. The telescope was mounted on a tripod, placed in the Cleveland scoreboard, and operated alternately by Feller or Bob Lemon, who remembered that he could 'see the dirt under the catcher's fingernails.' They would call out the next pitch to a groundskeeper, who would then use another opening in the scoreboard to relay the signs to Cleveland hitters."Both Feller and Lemon are in the Hall of Fame.
Third, violating the rules of baseball has seldom been seen as very serious. The ESPN Booing Story goes on:
Cheating was incredibly common in baseball up to that point [1961]. It has been incredibly common since. People in the Hall of Fame have done what the Astros did, and they've done worse, and many of those stories of cheating are now told as charming pieces of baseball arcana. Baseball has an approving proverb about cheating -- if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- and it has a loose moral code, in which it's up to your opponent to catch you and not up to you to not do it. What the Astros did might have been immoral, but were they immoral? They assumed that their opponents were probably cheating, too. They didn't seem to feel shame among themselves.On the point of opponents acting, ESPN published an article: "Catcher Jonathan Lucroy says he was changing signs every pitch vs. Astros"
"I knew about that two years ago, that it was going on," Lucroy said Thursday. "I know it just recently came out. Everyone in baseball [knew], especially in that division that played against them. But we were all aware of the Astros doing those things and it was up to us to outsmart them, I guess you could say.
"... We actively changed signs. Every single pitch, we were changing signs. You had to because they would relay them to second, stealing them from first, too -- from between your legs. They had a very intricate system going on. We were well aware of it, and it was a challenge. It was a mental challenge to really overcome that. It's easier said than done. But it's a shame, and I'm glad it came out and it came to light."
Lucroy added that he never heard the banging of a trash can, but he would not have been listening for it in the first place.
Lucroy said that Mike Fiers informed him of Houston's tactics once they became teammates in Oakland in 2018. The revelation led Lucroy, who signed a minor league deal with Boston earlier this week, to create more and more intricate sign-calling patterns to preemptively fight any tactics used by the Astros. Working with different pitchers called for different tactics as well.The ESPN writer of the Booing story, wallowing in the same moral dudgeon as everyone else alive in this God forsaken year, goes on: "If I were an Astros fan, I wouldn't have booed the Astros for being bad people. I would have booed them because I'm against even good people acting corruptly."
This is a classic example of the fallacy known as begging the question but better named as assuming the consequent (even better in Latin: Petitio Principii). He has assumed that the Astros scheme was mallum in se. But, he has just established that they were only mallum prohibtium.
The English sometimes say that an something contrary to traditional standards of fairness or rectitude is not cricket. It is phrase familiar to Americans. But, nobody says something contrary to traditional standards of fairness or rectitude is not baseball.
Note: I was amused to read a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the impact of the epidemic on cricket: "Virus Threatens a Revered Tradition in Cricket—Spit on the Ball: Players have long sought to tilt the flight of the ball, using substances from resin to sandpaper to hair oil. A legal one, saliva, now faces potential doom because of the pandemic." Baseball has explicit rules going back a century, against doing any of those things. But cricket views it as part oif the game. I think it shows that there are few things in sport that are mallum in se.Fourth, the Astros simply did not achieve a competitive advantage from the efforts. It is easy to see. Using BaseballReference.com, I assembled a 20 year chart of the Astros offensive output on the road and at home. The chart starts in 2000 when the Astros left the Astrodome to play in what is now known as Minute Maid park. It shows the runs the Astros scored at home and on the road in each of the years 2000 through 2019. This comparison is immune to park effects. The home and road stadiums are a constant. It also does not depend on any artificial calculation of runs created [Bill James formula OBP × (TB + BB)].
| Runs scored at Home | Runs scored Away | Home Minus Away | ||||
| 2019 | 489 | 431 | 58 | |||
| 2018 | 373 | 424 | -51 | |||
| 2017 | 395 | 501 | -106 | |||
| 2016 | 334 | 390 | -56 | |||
| 2015 | 367 | 362 | 5 | |||
| 2014 | 318 | 311 | 7 | |||
| 2013 | 298 | 312 | -14 | |||
| 2012 | 311 | 272 | 39 | |||
| 2011 | 325 | 290 | 35 | |||
| 2010 | 297 | 314 | -17 | |||
| 2009 | 334 | 309 | 25 | |||
| 2008 | 367 | 345 | 22 | |||
| 2007 | 361 | 362 | -1 | |||
| 2006 | 372 | 363 | 9 | |||
| 2005 | 360 | 333 | 27 | |||
| 2004 | 405 | 398 | 7 | |||
| 2003 | 425 | 380 | 45 | |||
| 2002 | 405 | 344 | 61 | |||
| 2001 | 440 | 407 | 33 | |||
| 2000 | 505 | 433 | 72 | |||
| Avg. | 10 | |||||
| Std. Dv. | 43 | |||||
| Std. Dv. | Excluding 2017-2018 | 31 | ||||
I show the average and the standard deviation, which is a simple statistic that allows us to calculate the likelyhood of the result being random fluctuation. A measure that is within one standard deviation of the mean has a 1 in 3 chance of being random. In the above chart the Astros in 2017 (the year they won the World Series) had a home deficit of 106 runs, which was 116 runs less than the average. That was 2.7 sd less than the mean using all of the sample and 3.7 sd excluding the years they schemed. The first one has a 0.6% chance of being random, the second is less than 0.01%.
I think the Astros sign "stealing" scheme harmed the Astros more than it harmed their competitors. I think it is quite understandable. A hitter facing a major league pitcher must command every resource of concentration available to him in order to avoid being injured by the ball and in order to have a chance of hitting it into fair territory. Trying to communicate the pitch information by banging on a trash can could easily be imagined to break the concentration necessary to face down a major league fastball and hit it successfully.
Conclusion: Yes, the Astros violated a rule. No, they did not obtain a competitive advantage by their violation. Indeed they hurt their ability to compete. They violated a rule, albeit a poorly defined and sporadically enforced rule, for which they were punished. Case close. But, don't boo the Astros. Laugh at them.
*The DEFCON warning system prescribes five graduated levels of readiness (or states of alert) for the U.S. military. It increases in severity from DEFCON 5 (least severe) to DEFCON 1 (most severe). DEFCON 1 has never been issued. DEFCON 2 was only reached during the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.
Note: The Dodgers real problem is that Kershaw sucks in the post-season, and not just against the Astros. Clayton Kershaw: Regular Season W 169 L 74 ERA 2.44 Postseason W 9 L 11 ERA 4.43. He sucked against the Nationals in 2019.
