Four former area baseball players, each with oodles of experience on the diamond, delivered the verdict without hesitation.
Stealing signs – from the coach, the manager or the catcher – and then relaying them to the hitter inflates statistics more than, gulp, steroids once did.
And that says a lot.
“I’d much rather face a hitter on steroids than a hitter who knows what’s going to be thrown,” said Bob Tewksbury, who graduated from Merrimack Valley High School and emerged as a front-line pitcher with the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1990s. “If you are on steroids but you’re not aware of the speed of the pitch or you’re not aware of where the pitch is going, you can still get him out, most of the time.”
Tewksbury won 110 Major League games and was chosen for the National League All-Star Team while pitching for the Cardinals in 1992. He moved from Concord to Maine about a year ago and continues to work as a sports psychology counselor, this time for the Chicago Cubs.
Elsewhere, I spoke to Matt Tupman, the Concord High graduate who singled for the Kansas City Royals in his lone Major League at-bat in 2008; Steve Destefano, who played Division I baseball at Maine and remains the heartbeat of the Sunset Baseball League; and Bryan Caruso, who broke all the power numbers at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., 20 years ago.
They weighed in on the latest scandal to rock baseball. Stealing signs by being alert and observant is legal and not considered a black mark against the game or the player. It’s smart baseball.
But stealing signs with the help of a transmitted signal – from a hidden camera beyond centerfield, looking directly into the finger-wiggling, sign-giving catcher, to a monitor in a private room – is not permitted. And like the affect steroids had on us fans, this thrust a mirror in front of our faces, forcing us to choose, examine, figure it out.
Do we let it go, understanding that the temptation would have been irresistible for us as well? Or do we point critical fingers at the guilty and risk exposing a holier-than-thou, self-righteous aspect to our personalities?
Meanwhile, we wait for the fallout, after discovering that the Houston Astros used cameras and monitors in a secret room to uncover pitch selection. Since then, three managers have been fired, including Red Sox skipper Alex Cora, who had been the bench coach with the Astros in 2017, the year they won the World Series.
Cora was hired to manage in Boston and the Red Sox won the World Series in 2018. Now, everyone wants to know what was going on in some hidden area of Fenway Park that season. A room with a monitor, perhaps, showing the catcher flashing signs to his pitcher so they’re on the same page?
And was Cora the mastermind of this plot to cheat, as some have suggested, first in Houston, then in Boston? A recent investigation by Major League Baseball showed Cora’s name everywhere. So disturbing was the report that the Red Sox “parted ways” with their manager this month, before even waiting to hear what the commissioner had to say about Cora’s role.
That’s how profound this rule-breaking behavior is. Asked if knowing a pitch before it’s thrown might have helped the Red Sox win the 2018 World Series, Tewksbury said, “Totally.”
For the non-baseball fan who’s curious, here’s why stealing signs give hitters such an edge: timing.
With hitting, timing is everything. Think about it. A Major League fastball can hit speeds of 95 to 100 miles per hour. Wait a fraction of a second too long, and you’ll swing late and look foolish.
And if you anticipate something hard and get a curveball or changeup, both of which travel as much as 20 mph slower than a fastball, you’ll swing too early, virtually jumping out of your spikes, lunging at a ball that hasn’t arrived yet.
“Knowing signs gave you a huge edge,” said Destefano, who runs his own real estate company in Concord. “The whole point of pitching is to keep people off stride. That’s why if you know a curve is coming, you stay back, and if you know a fastball is coming, you swing early, with no holding back. That’s why pitchers mix up pitches.”
Destefano and a backup second baseman named Wayne “something-or-other” rode the bench for the University of Maine four decades ago.
Instead of playing often, they stole signs from their opponent, and they did it within the rules of the game, using their naked eyes, not technology.
He and Wayne were told to watch closely, study the opposing manager and third-base coach, figure out where the signs originate. Then fix your eyes, not a camera, on the messenger and study, study, study some more.
The goal was to watch a flurry of signals given to the catcher – touch the bill of your cap, touch your nose, slide your hand across your chest, clap three times – and crack the code, allowing someone on the bench to signal Maine batters so they’d know what pitch was coming.
“That was our job, to sit on the bench and figure it out,” Destefano said. “You tried to tell what pitch was coming. It was part of the game.”
It was, yet it came with consequences. If your opponent suspected you were stealing signs, which is considered to be gamesmanship, you might get drilled in the ribs with a fastball the next time you stepped in the batter’s box. An unwritten rule says retaliation follows sign stealing, but it ended there.
After all, if you’re smart enough to spy the old-fashioned way, the legal way, to obtain an edge, you deserved credit from your teammates, more than you deserved a bruised rib from the opposing pitcher.
Tupman, whose rocket arm behind the plate shocked fans at Memorial Field 20 years ago, agreed that knowing what pitch is coming helps your batting average and home run totals more than the muscle-building effects of steroids.
“Hitting is all about confidence,” Tupman told me, “and knowing what is coming gives you confidence.”
Tupman is a personal trainer in Concord, and he also works with Caruso at the Concord Sports Center. Once, Caruso tore apart small-college baseball in New England.
He graduated 20 years ago, yet still holds school records for career batting average, on-base percentage, doubles and total bases, and is second in home runs and runs batted in.
He knows hitting, and, like the others on our panel, didn’t blink an eye when choosing which recent element in baseball – muscles or monitors – has a bigger impact.
“The biggest thing you can do in hitting is knowing what pitch is coming,” Caruso said during a break at the Sports Center. “It’s upsetting, but it’s naive to think the information wasn’t available.”
Tewksbury, who once told me, correctly, that he could throw a baseball up a gnat’s ass, has grown weary of changes and cheating in baseball, like instant replay and steroids.
“The integrity has slowly been changing throughout the years,” Tewksbury said, “and this is just one more thing.”
And a big thing, these former ballplayers believe. Destefano wondered if some pitchers have received less-than-market-value salaries because of the edge sign stealing has provided.
He also cited the home-run barrage that’s erupted in recent years, smashing records 30 years after now-banned steroids first surfaced in the news.
“Maybe that’s why homers have gone through the roof,” Destefano said. “If you know what pitch is coming, it’s a huge disadvantage for the pitcher.”
The Astros manager and general manager and the New York Mets’ manager are gone. Cora is still waiting to see what punishment, if any, baseball hands down.
And then?
“It will be interesting to see how it all falls,” Caruso said. “I’d be surprised if other teams weren’t mentioned.”