Spygate 2: Red Sox Stealing Signs and Relaying Electronically

Time to Mo Vaughn

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I'm pretty excited that the Red Sox signed a new deal with Samsung to replace Apple for their sign stealing technology provider. Should be way easier with VR than with a watch face.
 

lexrageorge

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I wanted him gone after last year. Anything short of winning the World Series and he should be gone. He's not part of the solution.

Unrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some gut punch trades this offseason too. I could see JBJ, Xander and Pedroia all on the trading block.
The bolded accomplishes what, exactly? And how is that relevant to a scheme to make stealing signs marginally easier, a scheme that is likely similar to schemes in other clubhouses around MLB?
 

Cesar Crespo

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The calls in this thread for firing Farrell over this minutia are almost as hilarious as the allegations themselves. Then again, if anyone involved thought this scheme as reported by the NYT (making a big assumption that the scheme is being correctly reported) would actually have any benefit, then baseball folks are even dumber than we thought.
Yeah. Some people are acting like this is DV or a murder. Morals and value? A baseball team stole signs. I'd hate to know what they think of jaywalkers.

I dunno, maybe people really are offended and appalled by these actions. Just seems absurd to me but I guess I'm morally bankrupt.
 

HangingW/ScottCooper

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The bolded accomplishes what, exactly? And how is that relevant to a scheme to make stealing signs marginally easier, a scheme that is likely similar to schemes in other clubhouses around MLB?
It's only related in that firing the manager may not be the only substantial change this offseason. I doubt this sign stealing incident is enough by itself to cause Farrell to be let go or to prompt trades, but I could see substantial changes this offseason and this is just one more reason why.
 

geoduck no quahog

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I'm playing along with the game (on Tivo).

It's consistently 0.80 to 0.86 seconds from the time Vazquez finishes the sign and Rodriguez starts his windup. About 2 seconds and change for the ball to cross the plate after the sign.

It would be great if someone else can back that up or challenge it. How do you press a button (or 3) and get that info to the hitter in time for the pitch? I'm talking from the dugout and not from a light in centerfield like the O's use.
 

RedOctober3829

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soxeast

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Yeah. Some people are acting like this is DV or a murder. Morals and value? A baseball team stole signs. I'd hate to know what they think of jaywalkers.

I dunno, maybe people really are offended and appalled by these actions. Just seems absurd to me but I guess I'm morally bankrupt.
Who said anything about morally bankrupt when it comes to this latest issue?
 

geoduck no quahog

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Let's not forget that Girardi is an asshole. Remember the thing he had with Showalter? Accused the O's 3B coach of stealing signs.

Showalter went off on Girardi, pissed as hell that Joe didn't handle his paranoia like a man, between managers.

This isn't the first time the Yankees have cried.
 

dhappy42

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Let's not forget that Girardi is an asshole. Remember the thing he had with Showalter? Accused the O's 3B coach of stealing signs.

Showalter went off on Girardi, pissed as hell that Joe didn't handle his paranoia like a man, between managers.

This isn't the first time the Yankees have cried.
It's not even the first time this week the Yankees have cried.
 

Cesar Crespo

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Who said anything about morally bankrupt when it comes to this latest issue?
I guess it's possible I misread your post and you were only objecting to what you bolded and weren't talking specifically about this incident. Other posters seem pretty offended by it though with some people going as far as suggesting the Redsox release/suspend Dustin Pedroia. It's stealing signs.
 

jtn46

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The Red Sox shouldn't have done this, and if they are punished they deserve it.

That out of the way, while I understand that people didn't know that football teams taped sidelines and thus believed the Patriots were the first team to ever do anything like that, even though they were really just the first team to be caught doing it from a particular place following a memo that forbade it, there can't be any semi-serious baseball fan that doesn't understand that stealing signs is as big a part of baseball as almost any aspect of the game. The Yankees and their fans will act like victims here, but the Yankees are stealing signs at every legal opportunity to do so, and they should be. And if Yankee fans want to pretend they never cheat, let's remember that Michael Pineda in front of the whole world had a giant splotch of pine tar on his neck.
 

Lose Remerswaal

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I wanted him gone after last year. Anything short of winning the World Series and he should be gone. He's not part of the solution.

Unrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some gut punch trades this offseason too. I could see JBJ, Xander and Pedroia all on the trading block.
I'm guessing you are either unaware of the 10-5 rule in MLB or about the value an oft-injured Pedroia has out there.
 

Flunky

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And if Yankee fans want to pretend they never cheat, let's remember that Michael Pineda in front of the whole world had a giant splotch of pine tar on his neck.
Yankees "Fans" actually interested in September baseball for the first time in 8 years don't even know who Michael Pineda is or what pine tar can be used for. So, fake news.
 

m0ckduck

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My thoughts exactly.

I doubt this goes away quickly.
We live in Berlin; my wife comes from Prague and is not even remotely interested in baseball. She just texted me at work with "Is it true????". So, no, it's not going away quickly.

For whatever reason, stories about teams cheating in certain ways have an unshakable grip on the public imagination, whereas a story about one team hacking another's database gets no traction at all. Plus the words 'Red Sox', 'Yankees', and 'Apple Watch' make the story accessible to the wider public who normally wouldn't care.
 

CantKeepmedown

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Apparently the Yankees also filed a complaint about Doug Fister on Friday night. They thought he was wearing a hearing piece around his ear. Turns out it was just his mouth guard.

Paranoia much?
 

bankshot1

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I'm playing along with the game (on Tivo).

It's consistently 0.80 to 0.86 seconds from the time Vazquez finishes the sign and Rodriguez starts his windup. About 2 seconds and change for the ball to cross the plate after the sign.

It would be great if someone else can back that up or challenge it. How do you press a button (or 3) and get that info to the hitter in time for the pitch? I'm talking from the dugout and not from a light in centerfield like the O's use.
If John Jastremski can deflate 12 footballs precisely to spec and take a leak in 90 seconds then the Sox can steal signs in the clubhouse relay them to the dugout and then signal a player on 2nd in a less than second!!!

MFY take 2nd place seriously!
 

Ed Hillel

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Apparently the Yankees also filed a complaint about Doug Fister on Friday night. They thought he was wearing a hearing piece around his ear. Turns out it was just his mouth guard.

Paranoia much?
Why the hell would a pitcher need a hearing device!? To cheat how? What is the angle they're going after?

"Hey, watch out, this guy might swing."
 

cornwalls@6

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By his comments/tone last night, seems like Manfred isn't going to treat this foolishness like a crime against humanity, much to the dismay of pearl clutchers everywhere, no doubt. I'm guessing a slap on the wrist for the Red Sox, possibly a warning to both clubs to cut the crap going forward. So, a reasonable, competent commissioner, who puts out small brush fires, rather than letting them turn into raging forrest fires........... who else could use one of those?
 

Strike4

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New York sports fans have this thing where if a Boston team wins, it has to be because of cheating or luck or whatever. The idea that New York, the biggest and best city in the country, can lose fair and square, is not something they know how to accept. I got texts immediately about this story and they all conflated this with SpyGate.

The problem is that most of them are too ignorant as sports fans to remember or connect to the Pineda thing, or ARod, or Giambi, or whatever. And I don't know any Red Sox fans who care about any of that.
 

AlNipper49

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Yeah. Some people are acting like this is DV or a murder. Morals and value? A baseball team stole signs. I'd hate to know what they think of jaywalkers.

I dunno, maybe people really are offended and appalled by these actions. Just seems absurd to me but I guess I'm morally bankrupt.

It's not stealing signs. Teams have been doing that since basically the first sign was signed (is that a word?).

While you can make a case that conveying those signs electronically to the dugout is a rounding error, the counterpoint is that it brings sign stealing to the next level by allowing real-time steal signing. This impacts things like pitch selection, hit/runs, etc.

If i had to vote I'd definitely vote in favor of not allowing electronics in baseball dugouts. Or at the very least connected electronics.
 

JimD

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Maybe it's just the different dynamic of MLB having a strong GM in between ownership and the coach/manager vs. the NFL, but I love Dave Dombrowski's strong and immediate response to this allegation. It also doesn't hurt that he came to Boston with a ton of credibility - that pushback wouldn't have carried the same weight IMO coming from a Cherington or Hazen.
 

troparra

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I'm playing along with the game (on Tivo).

It's consistently 0.80 to 0.86 seconds from the time Vazquez finishes the sign and Rodriguez starts his windup. About 2 seconds and change for the ball to cross the plate after the sign.

It would be great if someone else can back that up or challenge it. How do you press a button (or 3) and get that info to the hitter in time for the pitch? I'm talking from the dugout and not from a light in centerfield like the O's use.
Exponent could conduct some tests for the right price.
 

Mooch

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Maybe the solution here is MORE electronics rather than less. Is there any reason why you can't have the catcher and pitcher communicate pitch selection through technology of some sort? I know purists would complain but it seems to me that the NFL improved when they went to helmet speakers for the QB and defensive signal caller.
 

CoffeeNerdness

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I can see some impediments to a system that relies on technology for pitch calling. System reliability- how many times do we hear about the comms going out between the QB and the sideline? It seems almost weekly. There are built in redundancies in football as there would be in baseball, but what would be the costs of moving to a new system in baseball i.e. longer games, delays when the comms get wonky. Also, the catcher only has one free hand to free to use a signaling device. He certainly can't speak what the pitch should be with the batter right there. So he'd have to use his throwing hand to signal to hold and use a device, then store that device all while setting up for the pitch. Seems clunky. Especially when you factor in that the pitcher and catcher aren't always 100% on the same page and shake offs happen.

How would the pitcher receive the signal if it's not auditory? Maybe a haptic device that vibrates once for a fastball, twice for a curveball? What happens when a team develops an algorithm that uses a camera trained on the pitcher's feedback device that can tell how many pulses are being signaled? :)

I think you could make the argument that hand signaling is a technology, and the beauty is in its simplicity. There's a built in layer of obfuscation which should keep the other team guessing, so I believe it's a quite reliable system. Of course when teams start using more advanced technology to steal signs then maybe the old system needs to get updated.

It's an interesting idea, though. I'm sure some smart folks could put together a system that works.
 

Remagellan

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Let's face it. Boston has a long, inescapable history of cheating at just about every contest.

This goes far beyond the conniving Red Sox, the Cheatriots, or even Red Auerbach. Boston's fate as a town that celebrates cheaters dates all the way back to a fateful evening when a guy, made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, took his famous Midnight Ride.
Don't forget JFK!

Add me to the "this should just result in a slap on the wrist" brigade. If MLB wants to outlaw sign stealing, they should put a rule against it in the rulebook. There is none currently, so what is the big deal?
 
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RedOctober3829

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The Yankees more and more look like whiny crybabies who go to MLB about the Red Sox for any reason even if unfounded. Unsurprisingly, this involves Randy Levine. This is from Evan Drellich.

BOSTON -- The Red Sox may well have cheated in an attempt to steal signs. That does not eliminate a feeling for the Sox that the Yankees have been going out of their way to mess with them -- as a matter of retribution or simply regular business under team president Randy Levine.
It’s not just allegations of sign stealing via an Apple Watch that the Yankees have brought forth.

After Doug Fister’s outing Friday at Yankee Stadium in a 4-1 Red Sox win, the Yankees went to MLB with a complaint about what they thought to be an earpiece -- some sort of impermissible audio device -- that Fister was using, baseball sources with knowledge of the complaint told CSNNE.

The purported audio device was a mouthguard that Fister was wearing wrapped around his ear.

The YES Network’s telecast captured Fister walking around in the Sox dugout in the top of the eighth inning, once his outing was over, with the mouthpiece lodged around his ear. It did give the appearance of a bulky hearing aid, but also was not a mystery that required MLB's involvement to solve.

A review of the telecast did not show Fister ever took the mound Friday with the mouthguard around his ear.

http://www.csnne.com/boston-red-sox/boston-red-sox-feel-new-york-yankees-going-out-their-way-harrass-them
fister-earpiece-090617.jpg
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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Maybe the Yankees should have been watching the NESN telecast where Eck and O'Brien talked about and identified the mouthguard for what it was after it was spotted on Fister's ear.
 

kartvelo

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If the Sox were stealing signs, they should have hit better than they did. I'd fire whoever was handling it. Not for doing it; for doing it so ineffectually.
 

Remagellan

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I can see some impediments to a system that relies on technology for pitch calling. System reliability- how many times do we hear about the comms going out between the QB and the sideline? It seems almost weekly. There are built in redundancies in football as there would be in baseball, but what would be the costs of moving to a new system in baseball i.e. longer games, delays when the comms get wonky. Also, the catcher only has one free hand to free to use a signaling device. He certainly can't speak what the pitch should be with the batter right there. So he'd have to use his throwing hand to signal to hold and use a device, then store that device all while setting up for the pitch. Seems clunky. Especially when you factor in that the pitcher and catcher aren't always 100% on the same page and shake offs happen.

How would the pitcher receive the signal if it's not auditory? Maybe a haptic device that vibrates once for a fastball, twice for a curveball? What happens when a team develops an algorithm that uses a camera trained on the pitcher's feedback device that can tell how many pulses are being signaled? :)

I think you could make the argument that hand signaling is a technology, and the beauty is in its simplicity. There's a built in layer of obfuscation which should keep the other team guessing, so I believe it's a quite reliable system. Of course when teams start using more advanced technology to steal signs then maybe the old system needs to get updated.

It's an interesting idea, though. I'm sure some smart folks could put together a system that works.
If you put the signaling device in the catchers glove--the pitch is determined by which finger he taps inside the glove--it would be invisible to all.

The signal could go to a device in the pitchers glove that creates a response to a corresponding finger. It could be so subtle as to not to give any indication outside of the glove.
 

DJnVa

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Yanks trying to rattle the Sox. Just another nail in Manager John's coffin. Henry must be beside himself.

EXCEPT!!!

Ball don't lie.

Sox score 2 in 9th to tie, walk it off in 19, Yankees blow it in bottom of 9th. Karma.

#SoxStealingSigns
 

soxhop411

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This is a bold move to come on a
Boston radio station and say this Heyman


 

Salem's Lot

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This is a bold move to come on a
Boston radio station and say this Heyman


NY mediots are bigger pom pom wavers than even their counterparts in small cities like Indianapolis. I expect that stuff out of those yokels but you'd think big market "journalists" would be a little more objective. I guess not.
 

lexrageorge

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It's not stealing signs. Teams have been doing that since basically the first sign was signed (is that a word?).

While you can make a case that conveying those signs electronically to the dugout is a rounding error, the counterpoint is that it brings sign stealing to the next level by allowing real-time steal signing. This impacts things like pitch selection, hit/runs, etc.

If i had to vote I'd definitely vote in favor of not allowing electronics in baseball dugouts. Or at the very least connected electronics.
I don't think anyone is arguing that electronics should be allowed in the dugouts, or that using electronics to aid sign stealing is a good thing. We're just saying that while a violation, it's a minor one, and should be treated as such as opposed to the crime against humanity that Heyman and some posters in this very thread are suggesting. Nor should it have any impact on the "likability" factor of this team (another silly meme).
 

SouthernBoSox

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I don't think this has been posted yet...


The Yankees... CLEARLY... watching a live stream of their game in the dugout literally 2 months ago. So yea, fuck them, they come off extremely petty in all of this.
 

Sampo Gida

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Why the hell would a pitcher need a hearing device!? To cheat how? What is the angle they're going after?

"Hey, watch out, this guy might swing."
Maybe to tell him how much a pitch missed by on balls, or let him know spin and break so he can make a correction (hand grip, release etc). Might be done between innings rather than on the mound
 

Sampo Gida

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I don't think this has been posted yet...


The Yankees... CLEARLY... watching a live stream of their game in the dugout literally 2 months ago. So yea, fuck them, they come off extremely petty in all of this.
How do we know its a live stream. Could it be a previous game downloaded so players can study hitters/pitchers?
 

pk1627

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This bothers me not at all. A NY team stole signs to alert Thompson to what Branca would be throwing. Tighten up the rules if you must, but please get the steroid-enabling Yankees off their soapbox.

I love it when we get in other teams' heads. Now seal the deal like the Pats.
 

Hoodie Sleeves

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We live in Berlin; my wife comes from Prague and is not even remotely interested in baseball. She just texted me at work with "Is it true????". So, no, it's not going away quickly.

For whatever reason, stories about teams cheating in certain ways have an unshakable grip on the public imagination, whereas a story about one team hacking another's database gets no traction at all. Plus the words 'Red Sox', 'Yankees', and 'Apple Watch' make the story accessible to the wider public who normally wouldn't care.
The fact that this is a New England team is the problem - not the way they cheated. The Buc's entire roster could be networked cyborgs and nobody would care. The Cardinals could stage an armed takeover of the Brewers' training facility, and it would get crickets. Its about the teams involved.
 

geoduck no quahog

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Sometimes the way a rule is broken provides the best tell about the significance of that rule. Doing something as blatant as looking at an Apple Watch during the game, or watching a live feed on an ipad, or filming from a sideline is obvious enough to indicate that no player thinks it's a capital crime (it's already been addressed that players moving from team to team would obviously be informants).

I really think this says more about the Yankees than it does the Red Sox. At minimum, it says that their prime catcher doesn't have the brains or ability to switch up signs multiple times to defeat anyone who's trying to steal them (same with any 3B coach). Every catcher's aware of this stuff and I know of only one who needs to conference on a regular basis because he can't remember or handle the complexities of touching his chest protector.

Sign switching is apparently rocket science to some.

No wonder the Yankees complained.
 

Maximus

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NY mediots are bigger pom pom wavers than even their counterparts in small cities like Indianapolis. I expect that stuff out of those yokels but you'd think big market "journalists" would be a little more objective. I guess not.
Heyman is such a Yankee homeboy, it is ridiculous.
 

Sam Ray Not

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Now seal the deal like the Pats.
Ah, would that the Sox were actually the Pats or Warriors of baseball, where they could thrash teams just by virtue of being that much better than everyone else, and then claim they were doing it cos someone had said or done something that pissed them off.

Exacting that sweet faux-revenge is tougher when you're not actually that good. :-(
 

lexrageorge

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I like this line at the bottom of the execrable Heyman piece:
Although, he still cannot get his facts right:

Either way, people in MLB are suggesting — and probably rightly so — this isn’t on the level of DeflateGate, where equipment was altered, or SpyGate, where opponents were surreptitiously videotaped by the Patriots.
As BB himself said, the cameraman was openly walking the sideline in front of 60,000 people. Opposing coaches would sometimes make gestures at the Pats cameras. Not sure that fits the traditional English definition of "surreptitiously".
 

bankshot1

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Although, he still cannot get his facts right:



As BB himself said, the cameraman was openly walking the sideline in front of 60,000 people. Opposing coaches would sometimes make gestures at the Pats cameras. Not sure that fits the traditional English definition of surreptitiously".
I would think the MFY secretly taping the Sox better fits the definition of "surreptitiously".
 

CoffeeNerdness

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If you put the signaling device in the catchers glove--the pitch is determined by which finger he taps inside the glove--it would be invisible to all.

The signal could go to a device in the pitchers glove that creates a response to a corresponding finger. It could be so subtle as to not to give any indication outside of the glove.
Maybe. I'm not sure sensitive electronics in a piece of equipment that takes repeated blunt impacts would work all that great though.
 

BlackJack

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Although, he still cannot get his facts right:

As BB himself said, the cameraman was openly walking the sideline in front of 60,000 people. Opposing coaches would sometimes make gestures at the Pats cameras. Not sure that fits the traditional English definition of "surreptitiously".
Toucher and Rich pointed out the error to him during their interview this morning. He freely admitted to having done no research on the subject and that his knowledge of anything NFL is not good.