The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

For a long time, I held two seemingly unrelated positions: I didn’t particularly care about the issue of drugs in baseball, from the cocaine scandals to the increasing steroids hysteria. I loved baseball and felt like without being able to discern who was cheating from who wasn’t, there was little point in condemning anyone.

At the same time, I was a huge Barry Bonds fan. I didn’t care at all that he had a poor relationship with the press, or teammates. I loved his game. Bonds was, for much of his career, the most complete offensive player I’ve ever seen: he hit for average, he drew a hundred walks a year, he hit for doubles and home runs, and he had speed on the basepaths too. I loved watching him play.

During the time we now know from Game of Shadows that he started using deca/THG/and so on, I wrote articles at Baseball Prospectus arguing that “hey, we don’t know, and he was awesome way back when” (and so on) in part because I’d followed him for so long, and felt like having seen all that, if anyone could be so productive so late in their careers, it would be him.

I look back at that, and I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how anyone could have condemned him, or any other player, for making the same decision to turn to drugs in 1998 after the Sosa-McGwire craziness. It’s especially hard to fault him for using THG when it was not only not tested for but technically legal. And yet today I look at my Bonds bobblehead and I don’t think of how much joy I used to get watching his performances at the plate, during the run where he was the best hitter in baseball and as far as anyone knows, entirely clean.

I feel the same way I do now, deciding whether I want to tune into a game and watch him possibly tie Hank Aaron’s home run record: I’m devoid of any enthusiasm, unable to find any thrill in his performance or his achievement.

I feel empty.

I’ve been out for six weeks at a writer’s workshop, and I haven’t seen a whole game in that time (which was horrible for me). I came home today in time to catch the last three innings of the Tigers-Angels game, and saw… cheating! Awesome, awesome cheating!

In the 8th inning, with the game tied 3-3 and two on, Garret Anderson hit a long fly ball to the wall, and a fan reached out to snag it. They made a great catch, home run. Detroit manager Jim Leyland went out to scream at the umps over the call, they talked it over, and let the call stand.

I wrote a whole chunk of this in the book: when fans should reach out, and when they should let the ball drop, so this made me really happy: here, the ball drops and gets off the wall, it’s a likely double. A long one, which would score Vladimir Guerrero from second at least, and Gary Matthews Jr. might even score from first. But trying to keep the Angels from blowing the game wide open, 4-3 with men on is a lot better situation than being down 6-3

Now, the Angels kept scorching Tim Byrdak, and Detroit never scored again to lose 10-3. But it was great to come back from time off to immediately see a smart play like that.

I came across a beautiful pristine copy of this book, and thought I’d write it up. It came out

The Hidden Language of Baseball is a small history of signs. And that’s it. If you liked the sign-stealing chapter in my book, you should enjoy Dickson’s work. It traces the start of signs (Chapter 1 is “From Signal Flags and Torches on the Battlefield to the Early Game”) and the increasing complexity of both signs and sign-stealing through baseball’s history.

It’s great – like every chapter, I feel like I left so much on the table when I wrote the chapter on sign stealing, and reading Hidden Language is almost relaxing for me, because I think “ahhh, that’s covered.” There’s a great bit on how Connie Mack was suspected of stealing signs in the 1911 World Series by having his hunchbacked mascot and batboy Louis Van Zelst, who supposedly could see the catcher’s signs by being “being near the ground, on account of his short stature”.

The whole book’s like that, with a chapter on what to watch for during a game, and a sweet appendix with glossary. It’s small-format, pretty quick reading, and if you’re into signs, you’ll probably enjoy it a lot.

Amazon link: