The Red Sox might be exonerated, but Major League Baseball certainly shouldn’t be
The sport has spent more than a century paying lip service, if that, to rulebreakers. This year is no different.
COMMENTARY
It would be disingenuous to pretend I’m not the sort to force a reference to “The Simpsons,” but I really do believe October 1999’s “Brother’s Little Helper” fits where we are today. Bart’s drug-induced proclamation that Major League Baseball is spying on Springfield with a satellite revealed as true, the still-celebrated Mark McGwire appears to offer the deal each of us has received, directly or indirectly, for the nearly 150 years we’ve watched big-time sports as entertainment.
“Do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers?!”
https://youtu.be/hxszN_1k6fQ?t=18
We answer as they did, or we probably wouldn’t be here. And Major League Baseball, then as now, knows.
“We’re not taking any victory laps or anything like that. A violation was uncovered, and that’s wrong and unacceptable,” said Sox COO Sam Kennedy on a Wednesday night conference call. “I am relieved the report got to the truth and got to the bottom of what actually happened, and people will draw their own conclusions.”
Already underway. In Houston, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, Rob Manfred’s long-awaited investigation into illicit sign-stealing allegations against the 2018 world champion Red Sox was a farce. In Boston, it is vindication, the same people eager to tell you last week that the commissioner’s office tried to scapegoat Alex Cora with the Astros findings now satisfied the extent of Boston’s misbehavior came from J.T. Watkins, an advance scouting assistant of such importance, the team’s nearly 500-page 2018 media guide references him just twice by name, and the 2020 one still has it spelled two different ways.
The truth’s somewhere in the middle, though I suspect more toward the New England argument. Wednesday’s report validates just about everything Ian Kinsler, the late-season addition to the 2018 Red Sox, said on Dallas radio back in February.
“[The Red Sox] just had a very good system at relaying from second base to home plate, and that was it. Honestly,” Kinsler said, the implication such a system was hardly revolutionary. “I truly believe that they’re not going to find anything that’s substantial. I mean, they might throw a small punishment out there because they did a report.
“I don’t know where they stand on this whole thing. We saw where they stood on the Astros thing.”
Namely, Houston took it too far. Houston took everything too far. In coronavirus parlance, they’re the idiots who got the beaches closed, whose behavior made us face some ugly truths about society’s veneer of civility.
The ones who ruined it for everyone else.
In January, Manfred blasted Houston for “a failure by the leaders of the baseball operations department and the Field Manager to adequately manage the employees under their supervision, to establish a culture in which adherence to the rules is ingrained in the fabric of the organization, and to stop bad behavior as soon as it occurred.” And yet, his eight-page report sought to tie their misdeeds in a tidy package: Their can-banging system was “with the exception of Cora, player-driven and player-executed.” Players who, even those who admitted it was wrong, weren’t properly informed of the rules.
The commissioner learned of the Red Sox allegations during the Houston investigation. He planned to pursue them quietly until The Athletic forced them into the light. Thus, we got Wednesday’s 15-pager, which may as well embrace its Foxborough inspiration and formally be, “The Houston Report In Context.”
Highlights include:
- “Watkins’s conduct, by its very nature, was far more limited in scope and impact,” MLB said, Boston’s system relying on the swiped signs getting to the hitter via a baserunner “the old-fashioned way,” to use Kennedy’s own words from Wednesday.
- Immediately stressing “proper context,” that baserunners are not prohibited from trying to steal signs, nor are teams prohibited from using video to decode signs between games. Things just as relevant in Houston, but that were scarcely mentioned in January.
- Stressing that Watkins being both the person trying to crack signs between games and also the one monitoring the live game feeds in the replay room, a clear temptation point, was “not uncommon [among] clubs in 2018.”
- Going to great lengths to say even if Watkins illegally used live video to sometimes steal signs in-game, it would only work “if the opposing team did not again change its sequence,” “if the Red Sox baserunner was able to recognize the sequence,” and if it could be conveyed to “the batter through a gesture that was understood correctly.”
- Noting the ludicrous point that after baseball stressed its rules on proper use of video equipment before the 2018 season, it left just one person to monitor both home and visiting replay rooms — among “other duties” — throughout the regular season, until finally staffing two full-timers that October.
All valid, of course. And as chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom said on Wednesday night, “no excuse for a rule violation. We’re all accountable for our behavior, and we’re all responsible for following the rules, whatever they are.”
But come on. Baseball didn’t police McGwire and Co. swelling to Michelin proportions, and they did even less on this — something that required no players union approval. The Houston partisans and the Red Sox haters are having a field day, but they’re missing the forest for the trees.
This wasn’t really about the sign stealing. It wasn’t really about “cheating.” It hasn’t been for 150 years.
Manfred shredded Houston for the “very problematic” culture in its baseball operations department, which valued little beyond results and which “led, at least in part, to the Brandon Taubman incident, the Club’s admittedly inappropriate and inaccurate response to that incident, and finally, to an environment that allowed the conduct described in this report to have occurred.”
The Red Sox front office, meanwhile, was the opposite. It made “commendable efforts toward instilling a culture of compliance in their organization,” MLB said, and failed because players read memos from their bosses about as closely as you do the ones from yours.
Their illicit activities were less severe, but so too was the rot within. Pretending both didn’t play a role in their punishments is silly.
Much like pretending, if failure starts at the top, it doesn’t start with this league office, and the league offices that came at least a full pandemic before. Cheating has almost never been adequately punished to truly halt it in baseball, again thinking back to the steroid years.
Sign stealing, however, is a particularly damning place to look. During their championship season, the Red Sox took to concealing their signs by conveying them with blinks and lip purses.
The championship Red Sox of 1912.
Earlier that year, future Hall of Famer pitcher Christy Mathewson wrote at length about how the Philadelphia Phillies buried a buzzer in their third-base coaches box, triggered by someone hidden in center field, watching the catcher with binoculars.
The 1899 Philadelphia Phillies.
“All is fair in love, war and baseball,” Mathewson wrote, “except stealing signs dishonestly.”
Ninety-five years after Christy died of tuberculosis, Kinsler went on radio and explained what really stopped the Red Sox system in October 2018 was everyone still standing being in on the scam. (If only due to their own.)
“You get to the playoffs, all the teams are really good teams,” Kinsler said. “They all know what’s happening.”
And now, you do too, though it’s difficult to believe what was presented on Wednesday afternoon is the whole story; we’ll have to wait and see if there’s a Codebreaker-type piece lurking a few weeks into the future.
It’s even more difficult to believe baseball will get the toothpaste back into the tube, cutting in-game video access and creating systems they’ve neglected to create since the days of spitballs and newspaper dominance. Especially when they’ve spent so many years not even trying.
“We ought to do everything we can to make sure these aspects of our game are beyond reproach,” Bloom said on Wednesday.
You could almost hear Rob Manfred whispering quietly from his office, echoing the unspoken words of his predecessors.
Wouldn’t you rather just see J.D. sock a few dingers?
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