Ultimately, the Houston Astros didn’t get away with the biggest baseball imbroglio since the Black Sox Scandal of 1918. But the Astros kind of did. Even if baseball strips them of their 2017 World Series title and goes around and collects the trophies and the rings and forces players and others to pay back whatever extra money they received for winning (good luck with that one), they still won the World Series, enjoyed the victory, and will always have the memories of the journey and the destination.
But now it’s obviously tainted, in a way that morphed on Thursday from the finding of decidedly low-tech communication of stolen signs (banging on trash cans to alert the batter as to the type of pitch) to a marginally higher-tech wearing of an electrical wire that buzzed the players regarding the location of the pitch. That’s the equivalent, in football, of actively intercepting the play calls from the coach to the quarterback and having a mechanism for instantly providing the information to the defense. (Or vice-versa, swiping the play call made to the green-dot-wearing defender and feeding it immediately to the offense.)
It’s much harder in football to get 11 guys on the same page regarding the stolen information. In baseball, the challenge is much more simple and streamlined: After stealing the sign from the catcher to the pitcher, find a way to get the information to the batter. (Maybe baseball should have the manager or someone on the coaching staff talking directly to the pitcher and catcher, so that there are no signs to steal.)
The Astros stole the signs and communicated the information to the batter, using the trash-can thing (according to Major League Baseball) but not using wearable devices (according to Major League Baseball) aimed at buzzing the batter as to the location of the pitch. The online evidence, however, has mounted that there may indeed have been plenty of evidence to support the buzzer buzz, including but not limited to video of Jose Altuve trying to prevent teammates from removing his jersey after the walk-off home run that sealed the 2019 AL Championship. (Altuve has denied wearing any type of technology.)
Here’s the difference between football and baseball, when it comes to actual or perceived cheating. Due to the various (but far less serious in comparison) cheating scandals that have unfolded in football over the past decade or so and in light of the propensity of teams and fans to blame a loss on something other than the fact their team wasn’t good enough to win, the league, the fans, and the media seem to be far more sensitive to anything that would look even remotely amiss during the TV broadcast of a football game. With so many more millions consuming live football content and reacting to it immediately on Twitter, the chances of someone noticing something that could suggest that something fishy is happening are much greater.
If, for example, baseball had the following of football, someone would have heard the banging of the trash cans and quickly would have connected it to the type of pitch that came after the trash cans were banged. Likewise, someone would have asked whether Can’t-Be-Shirtless Jose Altuve may have had something in common with Shoeless Joe Jackson. And there may be other indications from the hours and hours and hours of regular-season and postseason games involving the Astros that went entirely unnoticed but that would have been instantly recognized by an NFL crowd.
Every other week, it seems that someone is pointing out something that may or may not be evidence of cheating in a football game. From whether a guy has a phone to whether a guy has an earpiece to whether the guy has a walkie-talkie to whether spies are present on the sideline to whether someone is taping a team’s signals to anything and everything that can be noticed in the cluster of bodies present on either sideline in an NFL game.
The attention and scrutiny become very useful. The Astros thought they would get away with it, which meant they had no natural deterrence. NFL teams have seen and heard enough about cheating and suspicion of cheating to have a healthy fear that they’ll get caught -- not two years later but in real time.
Moving forward, baseball may not have that luxury. Which actually is good for baseball, and every other sport.
