The Houston Astros, after just having lost their second world series appearance in three years, are now under scrutiny for sign stealing.
While sign stealing itself is legal, using electronic devices to do so is considered cheating. The Red Sox and the Yankees were both called out for doing this back in 2017–the same year in which the Astros allegedly cheated.
The Red Sox were accused of using an Apple Watch to track the Yankees signs, while the Yankees were accused of using the centerfield camera to spy on the Red Sox. It is worth noting that neither team was punished.
The Astros allegedly used the same strategy as the Yankees: observe the catcher’s signs through the centerfield camera, then relay those signs to the dugout.
This wouldn’t be the first time that a World Champion has fallen under fire for cheating. From the famous Black Sox to the steroid-era, how has cheating blighted professional baseball’s history?
1877: The Louisville Grays
As early as the National League’s second year of operation, there was already a major scandal.
On August 17, 1877, the Louisville Grays had a four-game lead for first place. Through the next 11 games, the Grays went 1-9-1, and were suddenly out of first place.
John A. Haldeman of the Louisville Courier-Journal connected four players to gambling: pitcher Jim Devlin, outfielder George Hall, substitute Al Nichols, and later shortstop Bill Craver. Known as the “Louisville Four,” they were all given a lifetime ban from organized baseball.
While they never claimed to throw games to lose the 1877 pennant, there is solid evidence that Devlin, Hall, and Nichols all took money to lose games at one point or another.
Early 1900s: Ty Cobb
Baseball was not always the squeaky-clean sport that Major League Baseball tries to emulate today. While gambling has always been taboo, other things like throwing spitballs or sharpening cleats were done practically everywhere.
For one reason or another, the player that gets pegged as the dirtiest player of the era was Ty Cobb.
The infielder for the Detroit Tigers was one of baseball’s first superstars, and his career batting average of .366 still remains the best in MLB history.
Unfortunately for Cobb, it seems like more of a reputation than any incidents that stand out. Did he sharpen his cleats and slide feet first? Of course he did, but so was everyone else back then.
Cobb was probably singled out among his peers because of one incident at the wrong time. In a 1909 game, he slid into third and lacerated Philadelphia Athletic’s third baseman Frank Baker’s forearm. The league was wanting to crack down on this behavior anyways, and Cobb got the brunt of the aggression.
1919: The Black Sox scandal
If you’ve only heard of one baseball cheating scandal, this is probably it.
The infamous Black Sox scandal is one of the most iconic moments of baseball in cheating for a reason. Eight players on the 1919 Chicago White Sox team took money from a gambling syndicate to throw the World Series against underdog Cincinnati Reds.
The Reds went on to overcome great odds to win the World Series, thanks to the eight players, who were later banned for life.
The fallout from this scandal still reaches today, Many of baseball’s anti-gambling sentiments come from the 1919 series. The office of the Commissioner of Baseball was created to prevent things like this from happening again.
1920-87: The spitball
In the 1944 season, St. Louis Browns pitcher Nels Potter had been warned by umpire Carl Hubbard to stop moistening his fingers before grabbing the rosin bag. Potter ignored the warning, and when the opposing manager complained, Hubbard had no choice but to eject Potter.
Potter was suspended for 10 days, becoming the first player in MLB history to be suspended for throwing a spitball.
The spitball was banned in 1920, but why is it such a big deal? The season immediately following the spitball ban, Yankees pitcher Carl Mays struck Indians batter Ray Chapman in the head with a spitball. Chapman was rushed to the hospital, but died the next day.
Spitballs can change the movement of a fastball without taking off much speed, so they are very dangerous. In the case of Chapman, for example, he didn’t move out of the way because he didn’t even know the ball was coming. It was so deceptive, he didn’t notice a ball going for his head.
Again, it might be unfair to single out guys like May and Potter for doing something that was common practice. Even after the ban, it still took 24 years for baseball to punish anyone for it.
Even after Potter’s suspension, pitchers weren’t done. Joe Niekro was caught with a file in his pocket, which was used to wear of the outside of the ball for the same effect. This was in 1987, so it’s still fresh in the minds of many baseball fans.
There were other incidents in the 1970’s and 1980’s, including the likes of Mike Scott, Rick Honeycutt, Gaylord Perry, and Kevin Gross.
The go-to method for altering balls today is using pine-tar, which has been caught as recently as 2014.
1920-present: The Bossard Family
This one goes back to 1920, and has been passed on from generation to generation.
Emil Bossard started out as the groundskeeper for the Indians and the Tigers in 1920. He would help the home team take advantage of anything they could, like moving the outfield walls back against the Yankees well-known power-hitting lineup.
Emil’s son Gene picked up the family trade, and even pulled some new tricks from his sleeve. The two, whose family would eventually go on to work for 11 different teams, started freezing baseballs to deaden them and churning the dirt in front of home plate to turn ground balls into easy outs.
How effective were the Bossards in giving their teams home field advantage? According to Gary Smith from Sports Illustrated:
Back in ’67 Geno pulled so many shenanigans that the White Sox, who finished the season with a team batting average of .225 and not a regular player over .241, were tied for first on Sept. 6.
The Brossards proliferated baseball so much that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the ways they altered various fields. But there is no doubt that the “first family of groundskeeping” helped sway the outcomes of regular season games and World Series’ alike.
Emil did contribute in other ways to the game of baseball. He was the one who figured out how to anchor bases to the field, he came up with the net that players use in batting practice, and he invented the system that stadium use across the word for the infield tarp.
Roger, Emil’s grandson, is still the White Sox’ groundskeeper to this day.
1951: the shot heard round the world
The New York Giants were one of the first cases of using electronics to steal signs, and allegedly used it to win the 1951 National League Pennant.
Manager Leo Durocher’s office was situated in centerfield at Polo Grounds, and was equipped with a well-positioned telescope. Throughout the 1951 season, a member of the coaching staff would look through and relay the opponents’ signs to the dugout via electronic buzzer. The dugout then signaled the call to the batter, who knew exactly what the pitcher would be throwing.
This came to a head at the end of the 1951 season when the Giants went 37-7 to close out the season. The Giants went to a three-game playoff with the Dodgers, and trailed 4-1 going into the ninth inning of Game Three.
The Giants scored four runs in the ninth, capped off by a Bobby Thompson hit a home run to clinch the pennant.
The story didn’t come out until 11 years later, and even then it was all just rumor. It wasn’t confirmed until 2001, 50 years after “the shot heard round the world.”
While MLB didn’t ban sign stealing using electronics until 1961, the practice was frowned upon even in the 1950’s.
1974-2003: Corked bats
Hitters have also been known to alter their bats since the beginning of organized baseball, but it was the preferred method for cheaters in the late 1980’s through the early 2000’s.
Even in the 1970s, the infamous Graig Nettles was figuring out ways to make his bat lighter and bouncier. He broke his bat in a 1974 game, and among the splinters fell out six super balls.
Other stars, like Billy Hatcher, 1988 Rookie of the Year Chris Sabo and home run champ Sammy Sosa, would be found corking bats. Sabo was caught in 1996, and the incident accelerated the end of his career. Sosa was caught in 2003, and like Sabo, was suspended.
But the most infamous bat-corker was Albert Belle.
For starters, Belle is what his fans would call “passionate” but his opponents would call “a trouble-maker.” He had run-ins with the police off the field and got into more than his fair share of fights off the field.
But when Belle was caught with a corked bat in a 1994 game, the umpires locked it away to send to the league office after the game. From there, one of Belle’s teammates broke into the umpire’s room and stole it.
The bat was eventually found, and Belle was suspended for 10 games. Belle would face two more suspensions in the next two years in addition to sorting through some legal troubles off the field.
1989: Pete Rose
“Charlie Hustle” remains one of the best players in baseball history, helping the Reds win back-to-back World Series tiles in the 1970s and recording the most hits in MLB history. For many fans, the fact that Pete Rose is not in the Hall of Fame is a travesty.
How can baseball leave one of it’s best players on the outside looking in? Because of his Reds’ World Championship nearly 60 years earlier.
Baseball is still skittish when it comes to gambling, but no one as high profile as the Black Sox’ eight men out had been punished.
Kennesaw Mountain Landis, MLB’s first commissioner, established Rule 21 in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal. This rule stated that no one who was playing or involved in baseball was allowed to gamble on baseball.
That’s exactly what Pete Rose did, however, as a player-manager for the Reds. In 1989, the Hit King was given a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball.
While Rose asserts that he only bet on the Reds, which wouldn’t have taken away any competitive advantage as Rule 21 attempts to do. He claims that betting on his own team made him compete even harder.
Whatever the case, there is yet more fallout from the Black Sox scandal via the Rose incident. The Baseball Hall of Fame (it is important to note that it is a separate organization from MLB) passed a rule that anyone who received a ban from MLB would be ineligible for the Hall. This ruling seemed to target Rose, since his eligibility was quickly approaching.
Whatever you think of Rose, it’s a shame that gambling is what is keeping one of the best hitters of all time out of the Hall of Fame.
1990s-200s: The steroid era
Performance enhancing drugs became more widely used in the 1980s, so MLB put a stop to them in 1991. However, since regular testing wasn’t implemented until 2003, the ban did little to stop players from juicing.
Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were among the earliest players to be suspected of using PEDs, it quickly spread all over baseball. Star players like Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, David Ortiz, and Alex Rodrigues were all suspected or confirmed PED users.
Ten players joined the 500 home run club between 1998 and 2009. Being of baseball’s most prestigious honors, six of the ten new entrants in that time span had been linked to PEDs.
It would be difficult to list every player and every offense linked to PEDs because there are just so many. To see how prevalent steroids were, check out the league leaders in home runs from 1996-2003. Names like Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, Rodriguez Troy Glaus, Raphael Palmeiro, and Gary Sheffield litter the top ten every year.
The steroid era, as this period was later dubbed, is still a black mark in MLB history. There are many fans who want Bonds’ MLB mark of 765 career home runs stricken from the record books.
Bonds was the extreme case and the wake-up call for MLB. Only weighing in at 185 pounds, he had bulked up to 228 by 2003, and exchanged his hat for one a quarter of an inch larger.
In 1998, his age 32 season, Bonds hired a new trainer who was connected to Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. BALCO, as it was known, supplied most of baseball’s PEDs.
In Bonds’ age 35 season, he hit a career high 49 home runs, then hit a record-smashing 73 the next season. Bonds continued to exceed 45 home runs every year until he was 39.
One of the last well-known steroid users, Bonds signaled an decline in the practice. What started out as something MLB turned a blind eye towards became one of the most stigmatized infractions in sports.
2017: Chris Correa
The Astros and the Giants weren’t the only teams to use electronics to their advantage. While the St. Louis Cardinals weren’t stealing signs, a member of their front office served jail time because of his infraction.
Chris Correa, the Cardinals’ director of scouting, was originally hired to computerize all of the Cardinals’ scouting data. Then some of the higher-ups in his department left for the Astros, and took Correa’s software with them.
Correa knew the passwords one of his former bosses used, so he was able to see everything in the Astros’ scouting system for several years.
The FBI finally caught up to Correa in 2017, now the Cardinals’ director of scouting, and he was sentenced to almost four years in federal prison. The Cardinals lost two draft picks in the 2017 draft and were fined $2 million for Correa’s actions.
2017: The Houston Astros
The Astros weren’t just victims in 2017. They were alleged cheaters themselves.
Former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers blew the whistle on his old club in 2019, and admitted that they were using the centerfield camera to steal signs in their 2017 championship run.
Manager A.J. Hinch was named in the investigation, along with former assistant coach Alex Cora. In 2018, Cora went on to manage the Boston Red Sox to their own World Series title. Whether the Red Sox stole signs in 2018 is still unclear, since the Apple Watch incident happened while Cora was still with the Astros.
Carlos Beltran played for the Astros in 2017, and was named in the investigation weeks after being hired as the New York Mets’ skipper.
Since this investigation is ongoing, we still don’t know how everything will play out. It’s anyone’s guess as to who is connected and how far reaching this scandal was.
It only just came to light, so we will just have to wait and see.
Obviously, there have been more cases of cheating in baseball history. There just isn’t enough room here to include it all.
Was your favorite cheater left out? Comment below if you know of any other great cheating stories.