So someone among the Red Sox coaching staff looked at his Apple watch during a series with the Yankees back in July and through some byzantine method of relaying information, the hitters found out what pitches they were going to get.
In simpler terms, the Red Sox were stealing signs.
Oh. The horror. Oh. The humanity.
Once upon a time, sports might have been the last bastion for people whose basic attitude about life was “deal with it.” There was some degree of shame that went with excuse-making.
You still see remnants of that today. It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction when someone mentions to a coach that his team might have had to deal with a lot of injuries.
“Injuries are part of the game,” is the usual replay. “It’s the next man up.”
As George Gershwin once wrote, “it ain’t necessarily so,” especially if the injured party is the best player on your team, and his replacement is a notch, or five or six, below.
And watch a coach the next time an official makes a mockery out of a game by butchering a call at the worst possible time.
What do you hear?
“I’m not going to talk about the officiating.”
Slowly but surely, though, that ethic is disappearing, even in the rough, tough world of sports. Now, the art of the excuse is seeping into this heretofore insulated world of stoic silence.
I get a kick out of sports fans. They are so naive. Perhaps it was all the Frank Merriwell books they read when they were kids. Perhaps it was the concerted effort of sportswriters of the day to bleach out all the misdeeds of some of the bigger miscreants of their eras. Babe Ruth was basically a glutton and a womanizer. But he told little boys he’d hit home runs for them, so we didn’t talk about the other stuff.
Whenever some issue comes up that proves that athletes are just as greedy and unethical as the rest of us, you can hear the gasps from here to kingdom come.
The best example of this is Pete Rose, who will probably never get into the Hall of Fame now that his extracurricular activities as a player reportedly involved deeds that made his gambling seem like a donation to the Albert Schweitzer fund. Yet people still debate whether such an obvious miscreant should be in the Hall of Fame.
So it’s no wonder people hear things about the Red Sox using 21st century technology to steal signs and blow every gasket in their bodies. These days, we’re conditioned to think that way. We still want these people to be Steve Garvey, the former Los Angeles Dodger who once said that he lived his life as if children were following him around. But if that were the case, the little children would have been in for one giant surprise, as apparently Steve got around when the lights went out.
This latest Red Sox episode is the biggest non-story of the year. The New York Giants went down that road back in 1951, when they used a telescope to steal signs from catchers when they roared back from 13½ games behind to overtake the Brooklyn Dodgers and win the pennant. And this included Bobby Thomson’s famous “shot heard ’round the world.”
Man, once the genie’s out of the bottle it’s useless to try to stuff it back in.
I say the Yankees, who went crying to the commissioner on this issue, are just mad they didn’t think of it first. If the Red Sox are to be believed, they’re still stuck on 20th century methods of cheating involving TV cameras. You’d think the Yankees would get with the times, wouldn’t you?
Boston sportswriters, who are very good at self-flagellation, are moaning and groaning about how this latest episode does nothing for the Red Sox’ likability. But last time I checked, few people liked Ty Cobb and even fewer liked George Steinbrenner. One’s in the Hall of Fame and the other presided over the last true dynastic in baseball. I don’t think either one of them cared whether they were liked.
About the only thing on which I find fault with this is the assertion that John Farrell didn’t know what was going on. That’s just absurd. Either he’s the dumbest guy in America or he’s flat-out lying. How in the world could he not know?
Beyond that, people just need to grow up. It’s professional sports. The money involved is just beyond comprehension, and the stakes are too high to leave much of anything to chance.
Deal with it, and stop being so naive. It’s not going to go away anytime soon.
