Sports Biblio Digest, 1.19.20: Baseball’s Sign-Stealin' Cheatin’ Heart
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Teddy Roosevelt’s Athletic Bully Pulpit; The Prison of FC Barcelona’s Past; Cricket’s Multitudes in Mumbai; Sports History Weekly; Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Centennial Class; Atlanta’s Ice Society; A Philosopher in the Ring; Anti-Apartheid Sports Protests; When Numbers Broke Sports
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The fallout from this week’s epic revelations of sign-stealing involving the 2017 World Series champion Houston Astros has already been devastating, yet it feels as though there’s plenty more to come.
The Astros canned general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch after Major League Baseball investigated, then suspended them for the 2020 season. Then Boston fired manager Alex Cora, an Astros coach in 2017 and the skipper for the Red Sox when they won the World Series the following year.
After all that, the New York Mets "parted ways" with newly-hired manager Carlos Beltran, who played his last season for the Astros, although not in their supposedly magical playoff run.
But wait, there’s more: ESPN baseball commentator Jessica Mendoza, who’s somehow still allowed to hold that job while serving as a special assistant to the Mets, blasted former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers for blowing the whistle about the sign-stealing to The Athletic.
She tried to walk back her comments, unconvincingly. At least she tried to do even that, compared to Astros players, who are not surprisingly quite mum.
Do they think Fiers is a rat too? They’re not saying, and probably won’t, since MLB appears to be steering clear of any punishment for players.
If you read through the MLB report, however, this is a players’ scheme, much like the Black Sox scandal a century ago. While this may not seem on the surface to be anything approaching throwing a World Series, shading the game to get pitching signs to win a World Series is no small deal.
There’s certainly a more direct line about this form of cheating with tangible results than steroids, which may keep Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens out of the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s even prompted demands that the Astros and Red Sox should have their World Series titles stripped, an unprecedented and unlikely possibility.
Current commissioner Rob Manfred is hardly likely to go full Kenesaw Mountain Landis, especially with a powerful players’ union to back well-paid players beyond the comprehension of Shoeless Joe and company.
Nobody’s shrouded in glory here, not even Fiers, who stayed quiet for nearly two years before talking to the media in November.
Now comes Jack McDowell to say the White Sox did something similar in the 1980s under Tony LaRussa. Heck, was the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff a miracle at all? Carl Erskine, 93, one of the last of the Boys of Summer who watched Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run shot for the Giants, thinks that “those dirty birds” did steal signs from Roy Campanella for Ralph Branca.
How far back and how deep, should MLB go, to respond to any of these claims?
And where exactly does this fall along baseball’s fault line of ill repute? Pete Rose has some interesting perspective, as you might expect.
So many more questions, none of which have easy answers, including: Is baseball a victim of technology? Or should we laud high-tech, and especially some old-fashioned dogged reporting, for helping crack the case?
Unlike the steroids saga, there’s not much divergence of opinion thus far, except for this sliver of dopey contrarianism.
Of course cheating is never going to go away. But a cardinal rule of the game—and not just in MLB’s rulebook—has been rudely violated, and not just a handful of times, and the true culprits appear to be off the hook. It shouldn't be shaken off, like a signal for a curveball.
If I were an Astros fan, I would be doing some soul-searching too. A new rupture in the soul of baseball has been opened, and figures to heal very slowly, if not completely.
Pitchers and catchers report in just about three weeks. Yippee.
A Few Good Reads
Most of the Centennial Class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame has been announced, and it includes former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, late NFL Films impresario Steve Sabol, former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, longtime general manager George Young, Eagles wide receiver Harold Carmichael; Bears tackle Jim Covert, Cowboys safety Cliff Harris, Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras, Steelers safety Donnie Shell and tackle Duke Slater, who played during the 1920s for the Milwaukee Badgers, Rock Island Independents and Chicago Cardinals;
At The Wall Street Journal, a review of a recent biography of Theodore Roosevelt, taking the same title of his popular book to explain how he used his bully pulpit to implore citizens to get in better shape at a time when sports and leisure activities began to take center stage in American life;
At FC Barcelona, beleaguered manager Ernesto Valverde is out, as he struggled to live up to outlandish expectations at a club that’s become as dependent on Leo Messi as it ever has. His successor is Quique Setien, a protege of the Dutch-Barcelona legend Johan Cruyff, whose stylish playing and managerial style crafted more than 40 years ago hangs over the Camp Nou like an eternal ghost;
As that was going on, Barça topped the list of the richest soccer clubs in the world for the first time, thanks to changes in its merchandising business that gave it the edge over Real Madrid, which holds a 3-point lead over its Spanish rivals at the top of La Liga;
From the New Statesman, a reader on a collection of cricket ovals in Mumbai constantly buzzing with activity;
Peter Hain is a former British labor minister whose anti-apartheid activism against the South African regime included protests against the Springboks national rugby team. He’s featured in a new documentary, “Stop the Tour,” that revives the spirit of those clashes, which included a protest against a South African cricket tour of England in 1970;
Have a look around at Sports History Weekly, which is published by Gilbert Sports Publishing and which added a quarterly magazine in 2019. It promotes itself as no flash in the pan: “In a world of flashy graphics and streaming videos, we have elected to stay true to the past.” The site includes an historical timeline and features interviews with athletes and other sports figures, most recently golfer Hale Irwin and sports economist and author Andrew Zimbalist;
From Commonweal magazine, St. Olaf College professor Gordon Marino ruminates on his favorite subject, the Existentialists, and works in his boxing history in a telling memoir on how he fought his way out of a very dark corner in his life;
The 2010s was the decade that analytics and advanced data became hyperkinetic in the world of sports, which probably was inevitable but at times I wonder if it hasn’t come at a greater cost: The emotion, romance and passion of games by fans. The ludicrous Baeball Hall of Fame debates centered on WAR above all are killing the fun of it all. Inefficiencies are part of life, and life is messy, and I realize I’m not getting any younger, grouch, grouch, grouch. More than anything, I’d like some of the most avid of saberheads, at the very least, to better explain what the numbers all mean in plain English, which to me is the greatest deficiency in all of this;
Mathheads at Davidson College in North Carolina are staying busy this winter parsing basketball stats to help the school’s lauded men’s team (famous alum: Stephen Curry) and other sports teams there;
Here’s a blast from my past: Clayton Trutor of Norwich University in Vermont writes about the Atlanta Flames and its owner Tom Cousins, an Atlanta real estate developer who sold the team to Calgary investors during the recession of the 1970s, saddening me and other fans who went to many games and revered that team and its very accessible players and coaches (Boom Boom Geoffrion lived in the neighborhood next to mine until his death in 2006). Trutor’s at work on a book about the history of pro sports in Atlanta, which I fear may be especially grim;
After being turned down a first time, Zaha Hadid Architects got approval to build the world’s first all-timber sports stadium in Gloucestershire, in the U.K. The 5,000-seat facility will include an all-weather pitch, landscaped parking and other amenities encompassing a sustainable approach. The aptly named Forest Green Rovers of English soccer's League Two live the eco-dream, having earned carbon-neutral status and serve up vegan food on the training table.
Lodge Notes
Former USA Today and Sports Illustrated sportswriter George Schroeder has been named associate VP for news at the Southern Baptist Convention. His grandfather also served in a senior role with the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. and he’s active in his own church in Norman, Okla.;
Roscoe Nance, 71, was the first black sportswriter at a newspaper in Mississippi, at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, then covered soccer and the NBA for many years for USA Today, earning the respect and admiration of many of his subjects: “He could write like Picasso could paint a picture. He could write like Walter Payton could run. He could write like Doug Williams could throw touchdowns;”
Nelson Bryant, 96, was an acclaimed outdoors writer for The New York Times and was an avid hunter and outdoorsman on Martha’s Vineyard. After enrolling at Dartmouth College in 1942, he enlisted in the 82nd Airborne Division, and jumped with 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment the night before D-Day, as well as in Holland and the Battle of the Bulge;
The latest from Bryan Curtis of The Ringer is about the late ESPN personality Stuart Scott, who passed away five years ago;
Among the sports radio hosts and broadcasters losing their jobs this week during major layoffs by iHeart Radio is Jerry Schemmel, the voice of the Colorado Rockies for the last 10 years and a survivor of a 1989 airline crash in Chicago that killed 111 people.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 191, published Jan. 19, 2020.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.