WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE STEALING SIGNS SCANDAL?

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE STEALING SIGNS SCANDAL?

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Scandals have regularly rocked the world of politics and the entertainment industry. Sooner or later it was bound to strike one of my favourite worlds - the world of baseball. In the recent past, the steroid controversy rocked baseball, when many hugely successful players like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire were accused of using performance-enhancing drugs to develop more muscle mass and consequently hitting the baseball harder and farther than ever before. Steroid use is now being closely monitored, but now we have been hit by the “Stealing Signs” scandal! Say it ain’t so!

For non-baseball fans let me briefly explain what the scandal is all about. In a baseball game, the catcher uses his fingers to indicate to the pitcher what kind of pitch to throw. For example, if the catcher shows only one finger, out of view of the hitter, the pitcher throws a fastball. If the catcher shows two or three fingers to the pitcher it might indicate a curveball or a slower pitch. Baseball is a huge guessing game where the hitter tries to guess what kind of pitch the pitcher will throw so he has a better chance of hitting a fast, slow or curving pitch. At least that is the theory.

The disgraced Houston Astros team devised a scheme whereby a camera in centre field would film the catcher’s signs and then instantly transmit them to the dugout where the sign could be relayed to the hitter so that he might know what kind of pitch to expect. This dastardly crime was recently investigated and the Astros were found guilty of cheating, as in stealing signs - a baseball no-no.

Anyone who knows baseball well will explain how difficult it is to hit a round ball that is thrown from 90 to 100 miles an hour from only sixty feet away with a round bat. When the pitcher releases the pitch it takes less than half of a second to arrive at the home plate. Good hitters manage to make successful contact only three out of ten times at-bat. Enter the scandal.

My personal assessment is that it really much ado about nothing. Of course, this is a non-professional opinion based on logic and not experience. I simply can’t believe that getting a signal from the dugout that the next pitch is a curveball is really going to help the hitter. The total time for the camera to transmit the sign to the dugout, then to the hitter is less than a second. The hitter then has to process this information in a small fraction of a second and then adjust his swing and timing to hit a signaled curveball. I just don’t think that many players have that kind of reaction time or skill to really take advantage of the information in less than a second. But I repeat I am no expert.

Major league baseball however thinks much differently than I do. They have treated the episode as a major crime. The manager and the general manager of the Astros were suspended for a year, and subsequently fired by the team. The Astros were also fined $5 million and they have forfeited their first two draft picks in 2020 and 2021 (which is a fairly significant matter) in the annual draft of players. A former coach during the scandal, who was now a manager for the Boston Red Sox was also released by his team. This is a pretty serious repercussion.

I really don’t feel that the punishments fit the crime, if in effect “stealing signs” is really a crime! What do you think? And do you really care?