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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality. And listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Baseball's back. The reigning World Series champions, the Washington Nationals. I don't know, why do they call it the World Series anyway? It's just like a bunch of American teams and one Canadian team. Doesn't really seem fair. Anyway, the World Series champion Washington Nationals had their season opener last night. None other than Dr. Anthony Fauci threw out the ceremonial first pitch. It was a pitch to remember. and a bunch of other teams have their season openers today.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: You reported an episode for Today Explained a couple weeks ago on all the sports coming back in bubbles. Is baseball doing the same thing? Is there a baseball bubble, a base bubble?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, actually, baseball's kind of on its own here. Men's and women's soccer have come back inside bubbles. Men's and women's basketball are coming back inside bubbles. But MLB is planning to play the whole season with every team in its home stadium.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: And is that going to be safe for Major League Baseball? Well, they're testing. They're doing temperature checks. They've got a lot of new rules. No spitting. No sunflower seeds. No seeds! No seeds.
--:-- Dr. Tara Kirksell: They have a lot of distance between players and they are outdoors. So if they're controlling what's happening in the clubhouse, especially with the testing they're doing, I think it is okay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Dr. Tara Kirksell. She's a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. You know, if there was a sport that you could avoid doing a bubble, and I think baseball is probably one of those. There's definitely a risk here, just like there is with any other type of reopening.
--:-- Dr. Tara Kirksell: But honestly, her biggest concern isn't about the players. It's that fans might have watch parties at home or that it might just give us this sense of normalcy that we don't really deserve.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, that seems totally fair. What are the fans going to do here? No fans. No fans. No fans. They are going to pump artificial fan noise into stadiums, but the fans themselves are not going to be back.
--:-- Jimmy O'Brien: It all started last fall. On November 12th, I had three Verizon employees installing cable and internet, and I was hiding in my empty office, just scrolling Twitter. When I scroll across the athletic article, Astros cheated in 2017, banging scheme. And from there, my eyes kind of widened and my jaw dropped.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I said, oh, okay. Jimmy O'Brien runs a YouTube channel called Jomboy Media. In that article he saw, a former Astros pitcher went on the record about one of the most absurd scams in baseball history. The Astros had a computer monitor right beyond their dugout, and they would watch the signs given from the catcher.
--:-- Jimmy O'Brien: A catcher uses hand signals to tell the pitcher which pitch to throw. Signs like one finger for fastball, two for curveball, three for changeup. So if the catcher puts down two fingers or three fingers, they would have another player or personnel bang a trash can to send the signal to the batter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If there's not a bang, that means it's a fastball. If the hitters did hear a bang, they'd know to expect a curveball or a changeup. Rumors had been out there forever, and now my jaws kind of dropped like, oh my god, this is it.
--:-- Jimmy O'Brien: As I'm reading the article, it details that Danny Farquhar, the relief pitcher for the White Sox, says that he stepped off the mound in the middle of an at-bat because he heard the banging. So Jimmy thought, that has to be on camera somewhere. So you can easily go to his game logs and see the two times you pitched in Houston and find it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jimmy wanted to see if the banging was loud enough to hear on regular TV broadcasts. It was. So he put together a video. I found the footage. Let's watch it. Fastball. No bang at all. Next pitch, there's the change up. Bang, bang. And Farquh steps off and says, hey, they got the fucking signs. We got to change this.
--:-- Jimmy O'Brien: This is super upsetting. He uploaded the video to YouTube, muted his phone. So I didn't get back home till later at night. And then I looked at my phone and it was insane. Texts, emails, calls from friends, fans, media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Jimmy kept finding more footage with the banging in the background. More evidence that the Astros were cheating. Here another one. Here another one. And then you know everyone started finding them and I would add them to the thread.
--:-- Daryl Hamilton: Stealing signs? Not against the rules. Stealing signs is part of the game. This is former pro ball player Daryl Hamilton. I mean, you know, if you're not trying to figure out what the other team is doing, then obviously you're not trying to win a game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But not all sign stealing is the same. Sign stealing is illegal if you use cameras, electronics, or any technological device to aid you in stealing the signs. The Astros trashcan method was low tech, but the camera and computer monitor live streaming the catcher's signs were not.
--:-- Daryl Hamilton: By the end of 2017, they had complaints. Players have said, we sent it up the ladder internally and complained and nothing happened. MLB didn't take any action to stop the Astros, so rival teams changed tactics. They started using sequences instead of just single numbers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The catcher puts down, you know, 1-3-3-1, and then the pitcher knows it's the third signal or it's the second signal. They have their own sequence. And they started using that in 2018 because people knew what was happening in 2017.
--:-- Daryl Hamilton: But that didn't really help against the Astros. The Astros had this thing called code breaker. It's a computer learning algorithm. So say the catcher puts down 2-1-2-3, and then the pitcher throws a fastball. Other Astros would then enter that into code breaker. 2-1-2-3, fastball.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The cheating went on for years. Then, right after the 2019 World Series, the athletic article drops, Jimmy uploads his video, and Major League Baseball starts to... Panic.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: Baseball's most iconic moments might never have happened without high-tech sign stealing. The 1951 Giants were trailing the Dodgers by a number of games going into the final few weeks of the season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dodger manager Chuck Dressen declares, the Giants is dead. The season seemed over, and then the Giants went on this extraordinary run, caught the Dodgers at the end of the year. Led by rookie Willie Mays, the Giants charged back to force a three-game playoff for the pennant.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: And then they ended up playing a very famous playoff, which ended with Bobby Thompson hitting a home run that to this day is still called a shot heard around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Back to the throne. There's a lot of fight. I tell you, I believe. The Giants won the pellet. The Giants won the pellet.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: It turns out they were using a system, a buzzer system, just the same. Basically, it was the same scheme, looking through a telescope and then buzzing different people to flash the signs to the hitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that one hurts more than the 1899 athletics because it tramples upon one of the most storied seasons in baseball history.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: As technology got more advanced sign stealing did too. Now there are many different ways to get word to the hitter. A mean a couple of years ago there was you know a small range scandal about the Yankees and the Red Sox using their Apple watches to steal signs which actually is a very smart way to do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you're going to do it, that's probably way better than a buzzer system. This century plus of high-tech sign stealing, it was frowned upon, but it wasn't technically against any official rules.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: MLB did send out a few sort of warnings over the last few decades, but high-tech sign-stealing didn't make it into the official rulebook until 2019, over a year after the Astros were banging on trash cans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's almost like baseball wanted this stuff to keep happening. Cheating is such an integral part of baseball. We're talking cheating that goes way beyond sign-stealing.
--:-- John McGraw: John Joseph McGraw, a truculent, swaggering, fiery egotist who was pure genius. He was famous for all sorts of different cheating. He used to grab a runner's belt when he was trying to tag up from third base to prevent him from scoring.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He used to have the groundskeeper not water the dirt in front of home plate so that the hitters could chop the ball into the dirt, have it bounce up really high in the air, and that way they could get singles.
--:-- John McGraw: And he did this in Baltimore, and to this day it's still called the Baltimore Chop. McGraw was the most hated, beloved, envied, admired, feared, and respected man in the game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is very much a sense within the game that cheating itself is part of the drama. It's part of the fabric of baseball. So there's always been a reluctance to, you know, make the rules too black and white, I guess you would have to say.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: Okay, but like, what does it mean to say cheating is part of the fabric of baseball? I mean, if cheating is part of the game, then isn't it not cheating? Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These are, you have nailed one of the great sort of riddles of baseball because, yes, baseball is wanted to say that cheating is cheating. You shouldn't do it. But on the other hand, cheaters are celebrated in so many ways.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: You know, I mean, there's one of the most famous players in baseball history is Gaylord Perry wrote a whole book about how he used the spitball and how he fooled people with it. Yeah, he's like an admitted, obvious cheater, and he's in the Hall of Fame.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yet, on the other hand, you look back, the greatest scandal in baseball history, other than what should have been the greatest scandal, which was segregation, but the greatest actual scandal in baseball history was the 1919 Chicago White Sox, you know, throwing the World Series, the Black Sox.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: Well, there are numerous teams in the 1910s through World Series or through games. Gambling was a huge part of the game. And baseball kept looking the other way because it was in baseball's best interest to look the other way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, suddenly after 1919, suddenly people were like, oh, baseball's not, it's not authentic. It's not real. And baseball had to come in and do something. And of course, that was the case where they drew the most famous line in baseball, which is you can't gamble on the game.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: A line that is so strict that Pete Rose many, many, many years later gambled on baseball and is still banned for eternity from the game.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's when baseball acts, when it's too late, when all the cheating has become so bad. But once you start getting to the point where people start questioning what they're seeing, which is, I think, what happened with the 2017 Astros, that's when baseball has to act and that's when baseball does act.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: I was speaking with somebody in the baseball office just after this astro scandal and we were talking about this larger picture of baseball wanting to change needing to change and yet not really wanting to change at all and he said something really interesting he said we're fighting is people's unwillingness to grow old people don't want to believe the time has gone on. They want everything to stay the way it was.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's a losing battle. For all of baseball's long history, skirting the rules has been at the heart of the game. And MLB has been reluctant to change that. But this year, the pandemic has brought about arguably the biggest changes the game has ever seen.
--:-- Joe Paznanski: Both leagues will have a designated hitter, extra innings will start with a runner on second, and no one will be allowed to even spit. On top of that, no more fans, social distancing, temperature checks, testing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Baseball has shown it can change dramatically in just a few months. But if it wants to survive, the league that's always tried to get around rules is finally going to have to follow them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noam Hassenfeld, he's the sports correspondent And over there at Today Explained, Jillian Weinberger edited the episode and Sean Ramosverham is the host. The rest of the team is Afim Shapiro, Halima Shah, Bridget McCarthy, Muj Zadie, and Amina Alsadi. Cecilia Lay checks the facts and Breakmaster Cylinder writes the jingles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts and Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.
