There’s a brand new invention called the telegraph machine (let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here). Thanks to this new-fangled machine, and the advances made in its technology, we are eventually able to make person-to-person communication easier by sending telegrams.
Once that system is perfected, it’s no longer necessary to rely solely on the U.S. mail for urgent communication.
Next comes the telephone. Even better. And with each year, our ways of communicating become less cumbersome and more efficient. By the end of the 20th century we can even email and text.
Now surely, there have been people who resisted every technological advance as if their lives were riding on it. I’m sure there’s a scientific name for such people. But “crackpot” will do here.
Now let’s translate that scenario to Major League Baseball. Flashing signs goes back to when the game began — perhaps as a survival mechanism as much as anything else. The catcher and pitcher had to be in concert on what was being thrown for no other reason than to protect the catcher’s life and limb. Balls thrown at 90 miles per hour hurt. Even dead balls.
It’s been this way for 150 years. The catcher puts down one finger for a fastball, two for a curve (this is the origin of the term “deuce” for a breaking ball).
There’s nothing too scientific about this. Nothing holy. It’s just the catcher putting his fingers between his legs. It’s not as if he’s exposing the nuclear codes to the likes of Roger Clemens.
But like the old man from the mountains who can’t figure out this new thing called a telephone, Major League Baseball has decreed that any use of modern technology to figure out the oh-so-sophisticated method of a catcher sticking his fingers between his legs, and maybe wiggling them if he wanted a changeup, is verboten.
Never mind that if your runner reaches second base, he can look right into the catcher and decipher the game plan without too much trouble. Never mind that in today’s Major Leagues, we can stop the game for upward to five minutes so that replay officials in New York (even if the game’s being played on the other side of the country) can pore over replay angles. Never mind that baseball is even experimenting with computerized strike zones.
The act of a catcher putting his fingers between his legs to signal what kind of a pitch he wants, and where, is apparently sacrosanct and impervious to modern communication.
The statistics they come up with these days … you need a computer to figure them out. No more simple math to calculate batting averages, earned run average or slugging percentages. Now, thanks to sabermetrics, we have stats like “wins above replacement (WAR).” Even after it’s been explained to me a hundred times, I have no idea how it is calculated. I don’t even know what it means. Yet it’s how we judge the relative worth of today’s players.
But goodness no, we cannot violate the sanctity of one-finger-fastball-two-fingers-curve.
How do you suppose things like “launch angles” and “exit velocity” are figured out? Do you suppose Leo Durocher or Casey Stengal were using those numbers when they were managing? I doubt it. Their sophistication ended with “he hits .350 against lefties, but only .190 against righties.” Progress in that area came when batting averages against specific pitchers began being figured.
We’ve blown past all these rudimentary stats and graduated into the esoteria of physics and geometry. But my, oh my, let us encroach on the hallowed ground of a stubby-fingered catcher’s request that the pitcher throw a slider, and, well, off with our heads.
I’ll bet that if George Scott had been able to bang out Morse Code on a dugout garbage can while Tony Conigliaro was at bat, saying that “hey, he’s coming in high and tight so be ready,” maybe Tony C would have been able to duck in time, and a career — and quite possibly even a life — may have been saved.
Look, all sarcasm aside, I understand Alex Cora broke a rule that’s pretty explicit. And if you’re going to have a multi-billion dollar business such as MLB, you have to have rules, and they have to be followed. So in the big picture, I get it. Cora didn’t just break the rule, he thumbed his nose at it. He was a serial offender. So out he goes (one wonders why there was such a rush to ride Cora out of town while Bill Belichick is still here, but that’s another story).
But it’s such a silly rule, and one that flies in the face of progress. Everything else about life has progressed in the last century, yet baseball still uses a string and two cans to relay signals? Seriously?
Memo to the Los Angeles Dodgers: at the very least, change it up. Leave the electronic peepers with egg on their faces. Either that, or come up with a way to signal that reflects 1950s technology, let alone that of the 21st century.
And if someone’s banging on a garbage can non-stop for nine innings, it might occur to you that there’s some other reason beyond boredom for doing it.
