Sign-stealing has long been a strategy for baseball teams to predict how a pitcher will throw, but the controversy about the Red Sox’s behavior underscores the litigiousness of modern sports.
"In 1948, while locked in a tight pennant race, the Cleveland Indians resorted to some shady maneuvers, what the team’s owner, Bill Veeck, later cheekily described in his memoir as 'gamesmanship—the art of winning without really cheating.' The team had its groundskeeper mess with the height of the grass and the pitcher’s mound to better suit its players, moved the outfield fence in or back depending on each day’s opponent, and, most deviously, instituted a system of sign-stealing. A team employee, sitting in the center-field scoreboard, would use a portable telescope to spy on the opposing catcher’s fingers, decipher the code he was using with his pitcher to call pitches, and signal the next pitch to the batter by putting up a white or dark card in an opening in the scoreboard, where the hitters knew to look. ... Veeck, who died in 1986, would have approved of the stratagem copped to by the Boston Red Sox this week. On Tuesday, the team admitted to using an Apple Watch as part of a ploy to steal signs from opposing teams during recent home games, including those against their archrival, the New York Yankees. ..."
New Yorker
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SI (Video)
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Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia sits in the dugout prior a game against the Cleveland Indians.
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