In the world of baseball, the postseason is the road to the World Series, the most coveted event in baseball where every club wants to be. To get there, however, some teams will take some pretty shady routes to make it. Scouting opponents dugouts at practice, recording signals from catchers and even hacking into other clubs databases to gain a competitive edge. These lucrative methods aren’t new. According to the Society for American Baseball Research, the 1951 New York Giants had a designated signaler, who would hold or toss a baseball in the bullpen which allowed the hitter to know what the pitchers was throwing. To get the actual signal from the clubhouse to the bullpen, the Giants used the same method the Phillies had used a half-century before: a wire.
With today’s technology, the situation has only gotten worse. Pitchers, catchers and clubs alike are all on the defense trying to protect their signals and keep other clubs from learning or “stealing” their signals. According to an article last week in the New York Times, “the Astros are one of baseball’s most tech-savvy teams; everywhere you look at their spring training complex, it seems, you will see a camera.”
This is in part due to the Astros getting hacked by Chris Correa, an Arizona Cardinals official, in 2013 and 2014 to look for trade talks and scouting reports in their private database. Correa has since been banned from the MLB for life but, the fear is still there. Pitchers will refuse to play at certain games, have meetings on the mound during games and change up their signals constantly to keep up with suspicions. This causes many problems such as miscommunication and the dreaded dragging out of an already long game.
The World Series is supposed to showcase the best teams in the league and should feature the clubs that put in the work, not cheat their way to the top. For teams like the Astros, they are trying to protect their assets and even though it might be deemed overkill, it is for the betterment of the team and their season. According to the New York Times the MLB has placed a limit on mound visits during the game but they don’t outrightly discourage the search for technological edges in the game, for defense or foul play. This is a huge problem that the league has been ignoring for way too long and now the problem is to widespread to get a handle on it. Baseball used to be an honest game, “The American Pastime” in fact, but as the stakes to get to the World Series has gotten higher the constant search for a competitive edge even by cheating, has reached its peak.
