Originally Posted by
cspan37421
It's a good question, but I would suspect no.
Baseball has never a and b treated equally where
a = those trying to win by cheating and
b = those who try to lose/those who sandbag their efforts, thus cheating the fans of a competitive game
At least in the first case there's the chance that both teams are cheating, or pushing the envelope of what is allowable and enforceable. You still could have true winning efforts on both sides. Not so in the second case. And my goodness can you imagine what it would be like to see a game where both sides tried to lose?
Another factor is that sign stealing has never been a capital crime in baseball. Of course, you're not supposed to get caught doing so, else you're likely to get beaned. But if you've got a guy on second base ... well, it's part of the fabric of the game to try to relay a tip to your batting teammate without getting caught. (if there's something in the rulebook about it, OK, but still ... I don't even sense it's taken as seriously as pitchers scuffing, cutting, or adding foreign substances on the ball)
This scandal systematizes that to an extent that is outrageous. First and foremost, it involves people/tech that is OFF THE FIELD OF PLAY. To me that's one of the worst parts of it. And I think that part does contravene a rule, IIRC. The other thing is that you don't need a runner on second to steal signs. You don't have to have a runner anywhere. You can give an advantage to ALL your batters, ALL the time. So this is turbocharged cheating, it's not playing around the edges in special situations.
Now it would be nice if pitchers and catchers who knew about sign stealing - at both extremes - could come up with a Diffie-Hellman encryption scheme that would enable them to communicate securely even in the face of eavesdroppers. But it's not realistic to expect these guys to work on one-way functions and modular math between pitches. If the cat's out of the bag and you can't control the spying technology, well, you've got to give pitchers and catchers a way to wirelessly communicate signals in a non-visual manner. Remember Mark "The Bird" Fidrych? In such a scenario, every pitcher's going to look like they're talking to the ball, when in fact it'll be their BT mic talking to the catcher. And maybe the catcher will then be the one to shake off the proposed pitch, or agree with it. That won't help the hitter.
Sign stealing is perfectly legal and a part of the game, if done by a base runner or base coach or someone in the dugout watching signs coming from the other dugout or a base coach (steal, hit-and-run, etc.). Telescopes or video cameras or other artificial means are illegal.
Sage Grouse
---------------------------------------
'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013