Stealing Signs

Stealing Signs was once an Art

In the last couple of years, there has been a lot of controversy over sign stealing by the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees. You can bet your life that all the other teams in MLB have also stolen signs using technology and may still be doing it.

The once honorable art has been tainted by technology and using technology to steal the opponent’s signs should never be allowed.

I yearn for the days when stealing your opponent’s signs was a specialized art. Watching the third base coach or manager flash signals that may or may not mean something and being able to figure out what was a real sign was fun. In fact, when I watch a baseball game, especially in person, I watch it much differently than the average fan. I watch the coaches and the runners while trying to catch the steal sign when the situation calls for a steal. I get a kick out of sign stealing when I am right and my friends say, “how did you know he was going?”

I miss those days, the days of colorful names like Blue Moon Odom, el Tiante, Vinegar Bend Mizell, The Scooter or 3- Finger Brown (although he was before my time.) Those were the days when players were not worried about those big paychecks and played for the love of the game and did not sit out when they got a hangnail.

I also miss those colorful players like Jimmy Pearsall, who delayed the start of an inning at Yankee Stadium because they could not get him to come out from behind the monuments in centerfield, where he said he was having a conversation with the late Babe Ruth, and the Jose Lima’s and the Mark Frydrych’s of the world who had fun, win or lose.

Getting back on track with the real issue, we need to keep the technology in the dugout and clubhouse to track the hitter's and pitchers’ records against their opponent and to prepare the teams for game that is about to start. Any other use of technology on the field or hidden in the scoreboard should be banned, as it is, and continue to be banned. Technology, as I have written before is a double-edged sword, and can threaten our way of life in many ways. When it is brought into the realm of professional sports it is no different. There are some uses that are good and some that are bad.

When I played, we often stole the steal sign and that helped me gain a reputation for my pickoff move to first base. We would steal signs the honorable way. We had no cameras and, no technology to help us, we used pure baseball know-how. A flash of my first baseman’s pearly whites let me know the runner was going and then it was not hard to catch the runner leaning the wrong way. My pick-off move became almost legendary, and the fans were on the edge of their seat waiting for the move that would catch the runner before he knew what happened. That is what baseball is all about, outthinking your opponent.

When technology gets in the way of good ole baseball there should be serious repercussions both monetarily and with suspensions.

Let us loosen up and bring back the days when baseball was more fun than business and bring back the characters, that made us laugh, like Bob Uecker who said, “I knew when my career was over. In 1965 when my baseball card came out with no picture.”

Those were the days my friends.