The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

Rob Muhlhausen wrote:

So, the Yankees new stadium, which is opening in 2009, is being advertised as having the same dimensions as the current Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium currently is 318ft. down the left foul line and 314ft. down the right foul line. Major League Baseball rule 1.04(a) says, “Any Playing Field constructed by a professional club after June 1, 1958, shall provide a minimum distance of 325 feet from home base to the nearest fence, stand or other obstruction on the right and left field foul lines, and a minimum distance of 400 feet to the center field fence.” Aren’t the Yankees breaking the rules here?

Yes. But the Commissioner allows them to do it. While many parks have their fences at the minimum required distance, the last wave of ballparks had many that violated the space requirements:
- AT&T Park
- Minute Maid Park is 315 feet down the left-field line
- Oriole Park at Camden Yards is 318 feet down the right field line
- Petco Park is 396 feet to center field and 322 feet to right field
- PNC Park is 399 to center and 320 to right field

In each case, the team went to the Commish and said “hey, we’d like to put the fences closer than the rules allow” and he waived the requirement. Presumably, that’s what the Yankees will do to have their new digs built with dimensions that violate the rulebook requirement.

This raises an obvious question: if the Commissioner regularly waives the requirement, why is the requirement in the rules at all?

I don’t know. The league’s argument would probably be that the rules are designed to prevent a team from building a field that’s too crazy, and that requiring the Commissioner to review plans that violate the rule ensures that they can be sure that the close foul lines (or whatever the other tweak is) aren’t egregious, and the outfield ground’s made up in the power alleys (or somewhere).

But that’s not what happens – Minute Maid Park’s played as a severe hitter’s park since its inception, dragging up the whole league’s run-scoring. If the rules are intended to ensure that the game’s played within certain general run-scoring parameters, the way this is implemented has failed.

Considered this way, there’s nothing wrong with letting the Yankees build a new stadium with the same dimensions as the old. We have decades of information on how the current park plays, and it’s obvious it plays normally. Yankee Stadium today isn’t an oppressive pitcher’s park or a band box. As long as the Commissioner’s granting exceptions, there’s no reason you wouldn’t let this by.

In another way, though, giving this discretionary power to the Commissioner is part of baseball’s long move during Selig’s reign to put more and more authority to Selig, and includes other actions like the abolition of the league presidents (which is also not reflected in the rules). All of that allows him to award or punish teams based on his own feelings about the franchise, which in turn allows him to wield a huge stick in forcing draft slotting, for instance. Andrew Miller didn’t drop to the Tigers because the other teams didn’t want him. But that’s another topic entirely.

Check out this insinuation:

Devil Rays manager Joe Maddon told Tampa-area reporters that there was more to speedy Carl Crawford being thrown out twice on the bases Tuesday than met the eye. Maddon said the dirt around first base had been thoroughly soaked and turned into a quagmire, which is why Crawford was thrown out twice in a game for the first time in his career.

“I don’t know if they had a sprinkler problem or whatever it may have been, but it was a little bit damp on the first-base side,” Maddon said.

Ron Washington notes in response that Jamey Wright’s delivery is really fast.

Speeding up or slowing down the basepaths to affect a team’s running game is one of the greatest traditions of groundskeeping. There’s a whole chapter of this in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

From the loose clippings at the Hall of Fame library, I believe this is a 1921 clipping probably from The Sporting News, but I don’t have a date. Packs in the now-jarring — well, I’ll let it speak for itself

The Pirates training at Hot Springs are enjoying the sensation of being entertained and looked after by the only woman ground keeper in baseball. She is Mrs. O. H. Wilhelmi, whose husband is the ground keeper at the other ball park in Hot Springs, used by the Boston Red Sox. She is said to be an expert and has her park in fine shape, according to Pittsburg players, bossing a gang of negro grass manicurists like a real man on the job.

It’s always strange to go back to old documents and see advertisements for cigarettes that advertised health benefits, or whatnot, but I never quite managed to adjust to seeing casual discrimination. It makes me wonder what future generations are going to see in our media that will strike them the same way.

Anyway. Yeah. Check that out.

I went to the files to pull the cite for my quote on the Babe yelling at Cleveland groundskeeper Emil Bossard which, as Deanna put it, would have to occur before Bossard’s hiring is generally placed (see here for more).

“Emil Bossard: He was an artist in his field,” The Cleveland Press, May 8, 1980, p C1

There was the great Babe Ruth who looked upon Emil like an opposing pitcher at old League Park. “Give us a break,” The Babe bellowed at Emil, who made a quagmire in right field where Ruth played and softened home plate, not allowing him a toe-hold.

League Park opened April 21, 1910, and the Indians played there through 1946. Bossard, on the generally accepted timeline, was hired on or about the 1936 season, which means that he was indeed the groundskeeper there, and also that Ruth would have played there (often, from 1914 until moving to the NL in 1935). The article even later cites 1936 as Bossard’s hire date.

Nothing in that article clears up how Ruth could have been at League Park while Bossard was a groundskeeper, and the 1936 date cited seems to contradict the alternate history where “Bossard moved the fences around in the 1920s and 1930s”. If nothing else, I’ll be reassured that no less a writer than Bob Sudyk, while in Cleveland, bit on this, like I would over a quarter-century later.

Interestingly, in the article, Veeck repeats the story that Bossard moved the fences. But here’s the thing about that — Veeck didn’t buy into the Indians until 1946. And in the rest of the article, while there are many incidents described, they all place Bossard’s antics post-1936. Bossard, for what it’s worth, denied Veeck’s story (“That would be against the rules.”) in other articles I found.

I’m a little disappointed that pulling the original article didn’t offer more specific information on the Ruth incident, but the context of the whole article makes me even more skeptical that it happened at all. If Emil Bossard started in the 1920s and there were an extra ten years of hijinks at least, wouldn’t there be at least one good, verifiable incident that would put him in Cleveland during those years, somewhere. But I haven’t found any yet.

Fun side connection: the author of this article, Bob Sudyk, wrote Gaylord Perry’s autobiography Me and the Spitter, one of the best cheating books ever written (check out the book here).

I laughed when I read the Hong Kong horse racing track story. From the New York Times:

HONG KONG, March 26 — It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg, or perhaps Wile E. Coyote. A remote-controlled mechanism with a dozen launching tubes was found buried in the turf at Hong Kong’s most famous horse racing track last week; it was rigged with compressed air to fire tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses at the starting gate.

It’s proof that in order to get humor in front of reality, you need to be pretty ludicrous. In the Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, I lay out a way teams could bury devices in the basepaths to gain an advantage, but I never even considered using darts to dope up or poison players as they took a lead at first (or for that matter, you could set them up in any position and wait until they came out to field at the top of an inning, before the cameras get on them).

I would have thought that using darts was so far beyond the pale that they’d never warrant serious consideration. Maybe this is a good argument against allowing widespread sports betting after all — it does seem likely that the vast sums of money involved in Hong Kong horse racing made this lucrative enough to attempt.

Still, I had this mental image of a guy taking a two-step lead at first, frowning – did I feel something? – yawning, and then laying down for a quick nap while the first baseman tagged him out.

It took under a day to get the first bug report. Thanks go to Deanna, of Marinerds.

On p.19, Babe Ruth is said to have yelled “Give me a break” at Bossard, who doctored the box and watered down right field for him. But Ruth played in the AL from 1914-1934, and only fielded from 1918 on.

Yet in describing Bossard’s career, I said that from 1911, it was “twenty-five years before he got his break” and took over major league grounds keeping… which puts it past Ruth’s time.

Further, it’s 1935 when Steve O’Neill took over Cleveland in 1935, and in 1936 the new GM, Cy Slapnicka, asked him to recommend a new groundskeeper, and O’Neill, who’d seen Bossard’s work in Toledo, told Slapnicka that Bossard was the best. Slapnicka gave him a two-year contract, and Bossard stayed on forever. That story’s frequently repeated, and given the people involved, it’s easy to pin down the time.

And yet Emil Bossard’s frequently credited as “a grounds keeper for the Indians in the 1920s and 1930s” and said to have moved the fences back when the Yankees visited. See, for instance, this ESPN article.

For Bossard to be there, moving the fences around, he has to have been hired or at least present in Cleveland well ahead of O’Neill/Slapnicka. Plus, reading histories, they generally say that grounds keeping as a profession came to be in the late 1930s, with Emil and his sons.

Right now it looks like there are a couple of choices:
- Bossard got to Cleveland earlier than O’Neill/Slapnicka, and started much earlier moving fences and getting into trouble
- Bossard didn’t get to Cleveland earlier than 1936, the Ruth story’s apocryphal, and I didn’t catch the two-year gap between Ruth’s career in the AL and Bossard’s career as a groundskeeper.
- Ruth, while playing in the outfield as a Yankee, played an exhibition or some other game against a team Bossard worked for

The problem with the last one is that all I have is the Ruth quote: there’s no location or date information to help me track it down.

(I tried to stall Deanna by pointing out that Ruth played for the Providence Grays in 1914 of the American Association and would have faced the Toledo Mud Hens, but Deanna was undeterred, pointing out immediately that at that time, Ruth was still a pitcher.)

And unfortunately, there’s no great Bossard biography I can read to check events against a well-documented timeline.

I’m going to try and look into this some more and provide an update.

The worst part about writing the book was cutting it down. Early drafts were much, much longer than the final product, and even the final cut came down to my editor saying “I like this long chunk too much to cut, let’s go for it”.

This meant that a lot of fun stuff was left out, and I want to share those here in the hopes that you’ll like them enough to buy the book, which has the cream of the crop. (Pre-order now!)

The other problem, which I’m also going to try and address here, is there are many great cheating stories that I couldn’t find enough evidence for to include in the book, and I want to share those, too, and talk about how far I got if I researched them, and why they were left out, and how plausible they are.

The Story of Dick Williams and the Movable Second Base
Supposedly when he was leaving the Angels in 1976, he went out to one of the grounds crew and said “I don’t recognize you, are you new?” The guy said “Kind of, I’ve been around for a while (seasons/years).” And Williams said “Well, you can put second base back where it’s supposed to be, I had them move it two feet closer to first when I got here.”

Did Williams move the bases and, if so, how big of a difference would that have made?

Let me take the last one first. Two feet off a 90′ distance is significant – it’s a 2% reduction in distance, and that would indeed make it easier to swipe.

Say that it takes a player four seconds to go from his lead into second. Moving the base two feet closer reduces that to 3.9 seconds. That’s huge – teams time pitchers and catchers in order to determine how long their delivery time home and their time from catch to throw arrival at second is, and then knowing the speed of the runner, can make decisions on whether to send them. A consistent tenth of a second advantage sounds tiny, but in execution it could be huge. If one side knew and the other didn’t, that’d be a big advantage.

Did the Angels steal more? In 1973, they stole 59 bases (and were caught stealing 47 times), and only Sandy Alomar was any kind of threat on the basepaths. In 1974, Williams came in and managed the team for 84 games, and they stole 119 (and were caught another 79 times). 106 attempts went up to 198, but their success rate wasn’t great. In 1975, Williams’ first full season, we’d expect to see them steal like crazy, and they did – 220 stolen bases, 108 caught stealing (328 attempts!). 1976, he’s fired ninety games into the season, and they stole 126 and were caught 80 times. 1977, his first year gone, it’s 159-86.

1973 (no Williams) – 106 attempts, 56% success
1974 (half-season) – 198 attempts, 60% success
1975 (full season) – 328 attempts, 67% success
1976 (half-season) – 206 attempts, 60% success

Unfortunately, personell turnover makes this tough. Sandy Alomar was the team’s only real stolen base threat in 1973, but hardly played for them in 1974. Morris Nettles stole 20 bases in 1974 and 1975 but was gone in 1976.

Look at a player like Jerry Remy, a guy with speed. You’d expect that the team would make maximum use of their advantage by having their fast players attempt steals more often. But Remy’s attempts aren’t unusual in 75/76 compared with later years when Williams is gone.

The counterexample here is Mickey Rivers, who started to steal a lot more when Williams came to the Angels, peaking with 70 SB and 14 CS in 1975, and after 1976, post-Williams, throttling back significantly. Leroy Stanton’s the same way.

And that jump in success is interesting. I’d say statistically, this is plausible.

However, in practice, the chances he pulled this off take a hit.

First, moving second towards first seems to require that you move 3rd base towards home, too, creating a rectangle:

+-----+
|     |
+-----+

Where first-to-second and third-to-home are 88′ and home-to-first and second-to-third remain 90′. Otherwise, you could look straight over from second and third base would be off the line. But in total, it’s not that huge of an area reduction that it’d be obvious – 7,920 sq ft in the shaved version, 8,100 in the other. That’s enough that you probably wouldn’t notice it if you were looking at the whole diamond.

But what if you had an on-the-field view that would be particularly well-suited for this? For parts of three seasons, opposing catchers looked straight past the mound, a viewpoint they’d have grown used to over years and years, thousands of games, and seen that second base didn’t lineup directly behind the pitcher’s mound.

Catcher ----> mound ----> second base
        ~64'         ~64'

Two feet’s not going to line up from behind home plate. They could see, for instance, that instead of being about in the middle of the rubber, it was off towards the right.

But how much? I broke out the geometry and figured that it’s under a degree difference. Here’s the thing, though – the whole pitching rubber takes up about two degrees of their vision. So where second base is usually exactly in the center of the rubber as they look out, a two foot move means it jumps all the way to one side. I think they’d catch that. And catchers, as a lot, because they’re often enlisted in cheating, do tend to have a good sense for this kind of thing.

I was also unable to find any anecdotal evidence, in papers or biographies, for this story. However, I did hear it fairly late in the process, so it’s not like Tommy John’s ball-scuffing, where I could really go to town on it.

To sum up, then –
Could it have happened? It’s possible
Is it likely to have gone unnoticed for that long? I don’t think so