Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 675: The Ways Teams Could Cheat, and the Ways We Would Punish Them

Episode Date: May 12, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about trees on the field and Kevin Gregg, then discuss the punishments for a few hypothetical crimes.

Good morning and welcome to episode 675 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi Ben, how are you? All right, thank you. Good, good. I'm glad to hear. All right, I don't have anything particularly to talk about. Do you? I assume you saw this tree on the high school field in Franklin, Ohio, planted between the mound and home plate. I did see that tree. Sort of amazing that this has never come up on the show.

We've discussed every hypothetical of field maintenance, and we have never come up with the tree between the pitcher's mound and home plate. Who's that benefit? What does that do to the park factor? Does it make it an offensive environment or a pitching environment in your opinion? Well, on one hand, you can't throw as hard through a tree. I'm surprised by your opinion here. To me, it's obvious. Well, I think it's

I think you would just get a lot of walks, right? It would benefit the hitter. I don't agree with that at all. You don't? No. What do you think would happen? Well, this tree was not a big bushy tree. It's not a 200-year-old

redwood. I mean, this was a, what was the diameter of the tree's, what do you call that? Wingspan. I don't know. Branchspan. No, but we're not worried. It was taller than that, right? Trunk.

Trunk. There you go. Yeah. We're only worried about the trunk. Yeah. Right. trunk there you go yeah you're only worried about the trunk yeah right because all the all the the canopy is above the pitchers pitch path so you're only worried about the trunk i would guess that this was maybe a one foot trunk if that it was less than that i mean it's probably a four inch

trunk maybe yeah i don't think i think that there would be certainly some pitches would hit the trunk of this tree and not make it to the plate, which I guess is a ball. Yes, right. And I think there would be some wild pitches, certainly, because of this, and that would help offense. However, most wouldn't, and you just would move to the side of the mound that you need to, and you'd maybe throw some breaking pitches. I mean, the pitch is not straight, and no pitch that you throw is throw some breaking pitches. The pitch is not straight.

No pitch that you throw is actually really directly straight. So you can see hooking it around this thing, spinning it around this thing a little bit, but certainly just moving onto the side of the mound that lets you get around it. And then I think from the hitter's perspective, I'm saying impossible. I think never hit a pitch. It's hard to say how close it is to the mound

because of the perspective i'm trying to figure out whether i guess it's it's well beyond the point where it would interfere with the delivery or the follow-through or anything probably so if you could if you could get it out of your head as the pitcher if it's your if it's your home field and you're used to pitching with the tree then it probably wouldn't bother you after a while. If you were a visiting pitcher who was not used to pitching with a tree, then that would probably be pretty distracting. You'd get used to it way before you'd get used to being a visitor and hitting the tree. That's probably true. I think the pitcher would get

used to it by if not the end of his nine warm-ups and he could probably go out before the game and warm up i guess it's a it's right where the batting practice pitcher would be too yeah it's it's a sapling so it's gonna grow or it would have it's been removed already sadly but it would have grown. But I guess if it grew, then the canopy would just get even farther from the field. Right now there's a branch coming off the side of it that is probably in the ball's flight path. Yeah, for the right-hander, could be. Yeah, and maybe that branch would have some leaves and would develop some greenery that could be an obstacle but but over time you'd get a thicker trunk but less canopy or branch involvement i don't know what

that would do be a very interesting experiment they should have left it because really who cares about this who cares about the results of this high school baseball team but if it had a tree suddenly everyone cares yeah no i agree so are we in agreement that this is the ideal place to put a tree though like if you're gonna put a tree on a baseball field there's really no debating this right i think so i mean it seems like it seems like the pit and the tree kind of go hand in hand as far as placement i don't know that i agree with that the pit the uh the idea for the pit the your main goal for a pit is to create the maximum amount of of laughing at them falling so you want to put it somewhere preferably unnatural where it's going to be

like having the ground pulled out from under them with a tree you want to create i think you want to create some sort of strategic amusement. And that's why I think it's good here. And I think the one case you could make for putting the tree somewhere else, it would be a totally different thing. But wouldn't it be fun if the bases were all trees so that it could be just like when we were kids and the bases were always trees, you know? You'd have some, like when you're a kid, first base is always just something, like the tractor or the stop sign or the tree. Not if you grew up in Manhattan. Ben's going to step aside and just give me a new reader, listener.

Remember when we were kids and we would play baseball on a summer day with just three of us? One was with ghost runners and clods of dirt on the field and everything. And the bases, they were always random things like your mom's van or you would just put up a, I don't know, you'd put your dad's golf clubs up, prop them up and that'd be second base. I think that that would be great if the trees, if there were trees on Major League fields that were the bases and you just had to grab it. And you do that thing that you'd always do where you're running

and then you sort of grab it, you hook your arm around it to stop yourself instead of sliding. I'd go with trees for bases. I'm going to say, I'm now going to say these Vandals screwed it up. It's an environmentally friendly ballpark modification. I'm not worried about the environment in particular case. Okay. Alright. We can continue.

Have you ever played baseball on a non-baseball field, Ben? Probably not an actual game. I played with friends just on a dirt patch in the park if that counts. But not a full game. But this on a dirt patch in the park, if that counts. But not a full game.

But this was a dirt patch without bases? Yes. Yeah, okay. I'll count it. And I assume growing up in New York, I assume that when you did play baseball on that dirt patch, Willie Mays would randomly show up and play with you? Yeah, that's how it works here. Cool.

Yeah. All right. Yeah, that's how it works here. Cool. Yeah. All right. Hey, by the way, I just want to recognize Kevin Gregg, whose career may or may not have come to an end. I would never, never assume that Kevin Gregg's career is over because it just keeps going and going. But the Reds have designated him for assignment after he posted a 10 plus ERA in 11 appearances. While everyone was wondering why they were giving Kevin Gregg

appearances but that's kind of been the case for all of Kevin Gregg's career it's a great fun career that confused everyone throughout and Kevin Gregg if this is it he retires with a 177 he retires with 177 saves career and a 102 era plus almost entirely out of the bullpen he made eight starts in his first couple years and that really sets him apart if you look at the list of pitchers with uh at least 150 saves there are 78 guys who've gotten to that total the lowest era plus is Jose Mesa at 100, but that's very deceptive because Jose Mesa was a terrible starter for much of his career. So he threw like 564 of his, I don't know, 1500-something innings as a starter with a 5 plus ERA. He was a 3.95 ERA reliever during a high-offense era,

so he is much better than Kevin Gregg out of the bullpen. After Gregg, who's at 102, you have to go up to 109 to find the next guy with 150 saves, and that is Eddie Cordato, who had more starts or more starts than Greg also. So it's a pretty unique career. So well done, Kevin Greg. You consistently defied all our expectations. Symmetric person in charge of a bullpen. He might put Kevin Gregg as the closer just because he figured that a pitcher of Kevin Gregg's quality can record the save the vast majority of the time. But probably his teams were not thinking that way. They were thinking of Kevin Gregg as their best reliever, or that's how most teams treat their closers, at least.

And so there were many teams that thought Kevin Gregg was the best guy in their bullpen. I guess it was the Marlins, the Cubs, the Blue Jays, and the Orioles who thought that. You know, it's hard to remember this, and I might be misremembering this, but Kevin Gregg actually was the stat heads sort of underrated closer in his first year or two because the angels had never really used him in leverage situations and he had good peripherals and i think maybe a good minor league track record uh despite being a low round pick so he was always kind of in mop-up work with the angels and i remember it being sort of well considered that when he was with the Angels, he was being underutilized and that the Marlins had actually done, A,

the Marlins had done a smart thing by picking up, you know, your classic, I don't know, undervalued reliever and putting him in the ninth inning and not really caring about the proven closer thing. And that the Angels had done kind of a dumb thing, trading away this guy who was going to be immediately perceived as much more valuable for Chris Resaw. And so, in fact, Kevin Gregg had his moment with us in our hearts. Designated for assignment is a bad phrase, because to me, the whole problem has been that the Reds this year have been designating him for assignments like they've had an assignment they've been like who should we

assign the eighth inning to they're like designate greg for it and that's been the problem what they should this should be designated for an assignment undesignated undesignated for assignment would be so much better ufa he just got just got UFA'd. Yeah. All right. Anyway. Yeah. Kevin Gregg and trees. Yes. Very fan friendly. Let's continue. Okay. The SEO on that is going to be incredible.

Yep. Okay. I want to talk about cheating and punishments. You know, the NFL did a thing with their football player. Did you hear about that? I did. thing with their football player. Did you hear about that? I did. So they punished Tom Brady for probably cheating or being aware that cheating might have been taking place. And I wanted to ask you about some, I wanted you to pretend that you are the commissioner and I'm going to give you some scenarios in which a modern baseball team might be cheating in a modernish or not necessarily modern way.

These are things where we haven't really seen discipline need to be meted out because either they haven't happened or nobody's been caught red-handed, but I wanted to know how you would punish them if they happened. Some of these are going to be echoes of other sports and some of them will not be. Some of them will be baseball specific. All right. So, in an echo of Bounty Gate, what if there was a team whose strategy was explicitly to go into the first game of a series, maybe a postseason series, or maybe it's just the first game of a series against a division rival, or maybe it's the last game of a series against the division rival, but all the same, it's a division rival.

And the strategy is specifically to throw a pitch and break the star hitter's hand. And you have piping hot evidence that a crime was probably committed and that they might have been generally aware. How do you punish that team? Plant a tree on their field. I don't know. That's a bad one though i would i know probably bounty gate right yeah i would i guess if i could determine who the conspirators were i would suspend them all for the series it's a is it a playoff series you said it does i'm we

can talk about that oh okay because some a lot of these will have, we can kind of debate whether it matters, whether it's a Division Series. And we can also matter whether, like with Brady, it matters who the player is. I mean, I don't know if you treat it differently if it's Matt Harvey or Clayton Kershaw as opposed to Ryan Vogelsang or Chris Heston. I don't think you do. I mean, why would you? Just because people want to see some of those guys and don't care if they see other guys. Yeah, I mean, you kind of spoil the series

if you take the team's ace away, but then their goal was to spoil the series by taking the other team's star away. So that would be a fitting punishment. If it were a playoff series, I'd probably suspend them for the postseason, effectively, which would be harsh, but that's a bad thing. Can you suspend someone for the postseason and just call it the postseason? Because then you don't—maybe that's two games, and maybe that's 19.

What do you do with the extra 17 if they get eliminated in two? Yeah, I don't know. You probably, for collective bargaining reasons, you probably have to specify some actual term so that that can be appealed or something. Let's say it happened today. So not in the postseason, but today. I don't know.

The Dodgers aren't playing the Giants. But let's say that today, just to not besmirch Kershaw twice, let's say that today Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey came up with a plan to break Adrian Gonzalez' wrist in a game. Then what's the suspension? And this is like, you know, I'm going to say that the pitching coach and perhaps manager are perhaps aware of this too well i'd say the player should get 15 games at least i mean it's kind of it's different with a starter but while he would

miss you know three starts or something i mean that seems like the minimum it does seem like the minimum so you could say what the non-minimum is you don't have to say the minimum uh i'd say i'll give them i mean it's like it's like peds you know upset the competition and they give one team an unfair advantage but they don't actively hurt anyone on the other team they don't injure anyone it's just a a sin of upsetting the competition. This is upsetting the competition combined with actual injury. So you could make the case that this is more serious.

So I'll say 30 games. So with Bounty Gate, and maybe this was more wide-ranging, and maybe this was head injuries perhaps, or maybe football injuries, serious, but you had, and forgive me, I'm going to butcher this, but you had and forgive me i'm going to put you this but i you had a player who was suspended an entire year i believe another player

suspended for half a season another for a quarter of the season uh the coach i believe the coach suspended the entire season somebody else named williams who's probably like the gm or something suspended indefinitely and you also had fines and you also had loss of draft picks so uh additional competitive sanctions and the loss of draft picks besides just missing your players so 30 is is a lot lower uh however you know it's a different kind of injury as well right if it were throwing at a guy's head or something then just like the whole season pretty much but but wrist is at least a little bit less dangerous so there's that yeah i i think yeah the thing about it is that throwing baseballs at other teams is is already almost condoned it's. It's a thing that the league has,

in effect, sanctioned by having a sort of a predetermined penalty, which is not a particularly discouraging penalty, right? I mean, if MLB says know hit a guy and you get suspended for seven games because you threw out him intentionally they've sort of said all right it's a seven game penalty and like they've there's precedent here they've made it clear what they think of throwing at baseball players it's you get punished but you don't get really super punished yeah now there's no intent there but i don't know that there's not intent there. I'm not sure how to distinguish the intent of we're going to try to throw a baseball at this guy to hurt him, and we're going to throw a baseball at this guy and hurt him. Like not to hurt him, but and hurt him.

And so I don't know that, like I would think that you could very easily make the case that attempting to injure a baseball player with a missile for the sake of injuring him, for the sake of taking him out of his career and gaining a competitive advantage, you could make the case that this would be unforgivable, a season-long suspension. But I think that it's probably not in tune with the closest precedent we have. So yeah, 30 might be close. I could see 60. I think I'd say 60 and I would include any postseason games. What do you think about the idea that it's sort of silly that if you get suspended for something, for say PEDs in September, your 50 games covers the postseason. But if you get suspended for 50 games in April, it doesn't cover the postseason. There's been

some columnists who just hate, hate, hate to see PED guys playing on the field at all and think that if you get suspended at any point in the season, you should be ineligible for that season's postseason. And I, for kind of a different reason, I'm not quite so much concerned about the frothing that it will cause in my mouth to see a PED player holding a glove. However, just for fairness, it does feel like the timing of when you take your test creates huge disparities in terms of how much it hurts your team. So just to equal things out, I could definitely see that, that if you get suspended for PEDs,

and maybe if you get suspended for trying to break Adrian Gonzalez's hand, I'm not sure yet, that you should just get suspended from the postseason regardless of when your suspension takes place, that you take your 50-plus postseason that year. Yeah, or you could try to make it variable somehow, the number of games depending on when in the year it is because April games are not as important as October games.

So if you're taken out of October games, then each of those games should count for some number of April games, so if you're taken out of October games, then each of those games should count for some number of April games, but that would be complicated. Yeah, it would be. It's all complicated. Alright, so next one. Remember the Astros, you know, what was it called?

Their system for holding all the information in one... Ground control. Ground control, yeah. Every team's got, not every, but most teams have some version of ground control. Certainly every team's got relevant information, secret information, proprietary and sensitive information that is held on their servers. It seems pretty darn easy to imagine some smart young intern figuring out a way to hack into another team's ground control. So a smart intern has hacked into another team's ground control. So a smart intern has hacked into another team's ground control and use this information to benefit themselves. What do you do?

That's tough. There's no framework for something like that, like industrial espionage. I don't know how you punish a team for that. I guess you fine them. Jeez, that's it? find them? Jeez, that's it? I mean, would you really take wins away from the players because a front office flak hacked into some other team's

system? Would you take wins away? Would you tell the players they couldn't play because of the thing that the front office guy did? That seems like it would be strange, so... Wait, should we draw a line between the actions of a front office and actions of the players aren't they all on the same team aren't they all going for the same thing i

mean it feels like more than any other time we see these guys as part of the same unit there we cheer for the gms as much as we cheer for the shortstops, embarrassingly, but we do. And so it feels kind of, I mean, yeah, you would punish the players. I mean, I'm not saying... Wouldn't you just punish the executives? You just suspend them or fire them? Because if we're treating them the same way as the players, they're the ones cheating. So they're the ones who should take the punishment, right? And theoretically, they're the ones who should take the punishment right and theoretically that hurts the team if you take the front office away yeah but it doesn't hurt the team i mean it depends it depends what you mean by taking away the front office but

generally speaking do you think that part of the point of a suspension is to hurt the team is it is that part do you think that when you suspend the guy the team the ace because he threw at somebody's head yes you're trying to punish the player by taking away his money and by making a show of how bad he's been and making him sit in the corner but do you think that part of the the discouragement the uh incentives that this is attempting to create is also that it hurts the team is that deliberate yeah or Yeah, that's part of the, right, you want to persuade other players not to do it because it hurts, well, I mean, it hurts them personally. It also hurts their team, and there's got to be some peer pressure and that sort of thing. So,

yeah, there's a team aspect to it. Yeah, I feel like there's definitely, whether it's intentional or not, I think it is intentional, but whether it is or not, definitely, whether it's intentional or not, I think it is intentional, but whether it is or not, I think that that is the most significant benefit of suspending a player is that you hurt their team and therefore you create a team that does not want their players to cheat. It puts the players and the rest of the team, each individual player and the rest of the team in the same boat of not wanting to get caught cheating and therefore presumably to not want to cheat and therefore presumably to encourage each other not to cheat, right? So yes, I think that your goal is in any suspension, your goal is partly to cost the team wins

or at least make it harder for them to win, I think. You could dispute that. I don't know that that's necessarily true but I think it is. So I think in the front office's case, it's not enough. I mean, what are you going to fire the intern? I mean, you could suspend the GM, but who cares? There's 13 GMs in every front office right now. Nobody's going to care that much. And particularly if it's not, like, when are you going to suspend him? Are you going to suspend during the winter meetings? Are you going to suspend him in like mid-May? And what does suspension mean? He can't go look at them. Like, is he still allowed to go check out the A-ball team and see how guys are developing?

Is he still allowed to scout? I mean, what does he do that he can't do under suspension? He can't file paperwork with the league, is that it? Can't do any baseball activities. What, you're going to stop him from going to a high school field in Cedar Rapids? Yeah, or telling people about it all right how long do you suspend him i don't think this works but keep going how long do you

suspend him for this i guess it maybe i mean if this was a rogue intern doing it on his own to try to curry favor or something maybe it's a little different than if the gm said hey do this but yeah a year yeah we're assuming that it's not a rogue intern for the purposes of wanting it. Okay, a year makes some sense because it's a full cycle. And yes, it would be disruptive to his activities. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure how disruptive it would be.

But fair enough. That might work. Okay, so a year suspension for the GM. That seems plausible to me. You would do this instead of say taking away draft picks from them or taking away bonus pool money or i don't there's not really what there's not much else you can do you can't like you can't take wins away you can't suspend players so i it would have to be yeah i mean my first answer was a fine Which is essentially the same as

Taking bonus pool money away Or whatever I mean, it could be a big fine Yeah, you'd have to fine a lot for it to matter I mean, you can't really fine him To cost him a win You'd have to fine him $7 million I just don't think they're going to fine anybody $7 million

For that I think you're right It's imperfect It actually doesn't do enough to discourage the practice and maybe then you just need to shame them um maybe it's the that people just don't want to get caught doing a bad thing is enough to discourage it i don't think that this penalty will discourage the behavior enough but then on the other hand maybe there's maybe maybe you don't need to maybe there's a reason

this hasn't come up by the way curry favor no that would be that sounds like a great productive outs ball player name yeah that's true it'd be like uh curry favor would be like a like a speedy right fielder for the twins uh in a twin favor. Yeah. I think the first team to try this would probably get off easy. I think if it happened once, you'd see some very strict penalties put in place for any subsequent things. But there's only so much you could do

probably to the first team to do this because as far as I know, there's no specific punishment for this. So if you want to do it, you should probably try to be the first to do it. Probably get off easy. But yeah, everyone would hate you. So you'd have probably a tough time, I don't know, getting talent in any way, hiring people, dealing with other teams.

It would be a pain. I'm not sure it would be worth it. I think that, yeah, everybody would hate you. I don't know that anybody would... I'm not sure it would stop teams from dealing with you or anything like that because people who deal with you think that they're getting a good trade from you. They still want to get that ball player.

I mean, they're not doing it for charity in the first place. You might see it initially. It should be that if you get caught doing this, you lose your internet for a year. No internet at all. Like no, nothing. No GIFs. Nothing. No John Voices YouTube series. You just can't have the internet at all. You can't access your own ground control that way either. No, you can't. All right. So you get caught with electronic, you know, assistance in the dugout. You know, you're not allowed to have your iPad in the dugout. You're not allowed to have access to, you know, all this, whatever, I don't know, whatever, you know, you're not supposed to have some stuff, right? So let's say that you're, you've got let's say that you've got a guy in the tunnel with the supercomputer.

Like he's actually got the supercomputer. He's in the tunnel. He's in the bathroom just off the dugout steps. And he's basically feeding the team all the whatever that they're not allowed to have. How do you punish them? Well, for all I know, there might actually be a punishment for this. I don't know. We're now talking about something that is specifically prohibited,

so maybe there is some sort of punishment associated with it. But I would say suspend the manager. For how long? Ten games. I think suspend the manager is three games. I don't know. If you've got a guy with a supercomputer in the tunnel, that seems more serious, more considered.

It's not like you, if you just slip an iPad into the binder at the end of the dugout or something, then you're probably getting the same information that you have in that binder in a more convenient form. That seems like a three game. If you've got a guy with a supercomputer in the video room or something who's feeding you real-time updates about pitch tendencies or something, that seems a little more serious. Yeah, the problem is that this is one of those serious, I don't know, this feels like one of those violations that falls, that could very easily roll down the side of the hill that we consider gamesmanship. Yeah, I wouldn't mind if this were allowed. Yeah, and it probably will be in nine years or whatever.

And so the only reason to even do three games, I think, is if you've got a rule on the books, you've got to enforce it. You can't, I mean, an unenforced rule is society's worst invention. And so I think that you need to do something that makes it look like you take it seriously. But I wouldn't take it that seriously. To me, it's like it's pretty close to just being smart and good cheating, you know, baseball cheating. So that takes us to another one. Man in white.

Remember the man in white? Yeah. All right. So what if we should explain what the man in white was? It is fun when we don't. Fun for us, maybe. All right. So the Blue Jays a couple years ago were accused of having a man in white standing, sitting out in a seat in like right center field, I think, and relaying pitch locations or signs via code to the hitters. Visiting clubs all were convinced that Blue Jays were doing this and that that's why they were so good at home. It was briefly a kerfuffle, then disappeared along with the man in white.

And so what if you had the man in white for real? Like he confirmed his involvement. He was absolutely doing this. And just to make it somewhat interesting, this takes place in the postseason. This is a tough one because is the guy, who is he? What position does he hold? He is the Cuban interpreter in the clubhouse's niff.

Right, so you just suspend him and there are a couple pitchers who can't talk to anyone for a few days I don't know what you do It's not even the Cuban interpreter, it's his nephew Oh, okay So you can't punish him directly So you have to shift the blame to the team somehow But this is a tough one I mean, I don't know, this isn't

Maybe there's precedent for this this isn't the first sign stealing sort of scandal so maybe there's maybe there's some precedent for this but you can't really can't really take wins away right because you can't you're not even sure that it worked you're not even sure that it did anything and just sort of like a fine slash suspend the front office or the manager or the coaches or something type of penalty nothing i can't it doesn't seem like anything where you could punish it that severely with wins taken away or you know i don't think that they would like count those games as forfeits or anything that drastic. The players are cheating, though.

I mean, every player who looks out there is cheating, or presumably is cheating. I don't know if there's a... Without electronic communication. Yeah, you can't even prove, right? Because a hitter could just say he didn't want to know the signs or he didn't know, he wasn't looking, he didn't think about it. Yeah, he could say that. So unless you had some kind of, you know.

But, I mean, as we've seen with Brady, I mean, Brady, it's not like there's a smoking gun that Brady had all that much to do with this football thing either. You're the commissioner. You get to just do things. That's the great thing about being a commissioner in sports in 2015. You get to be tough on crime. People love it. People love when you're tough on crime yeah this kind of this kind of does fall into the

i mean sign stealing has always kind of been in this in this shadowy place between rule breaking and gamesmanship right i mean this is something that teams have been doing for decades for probably as long as baseball has been around. So I just don't see it being that drastic. Yeah, I don't either. And I like I don't even know. I don't know if it does. I mean, one of the things that this exercise sort of points out is that there's not that like there's just baseball is in a lot of ways. There aren't enough variables to really punish a guy like you're not gonna like you don't want to take

guys off the field if you can avoid it and like money doesn't matter so there's a lot of fining going on in baseball that means nothing to anybody um and there aren't really any other like you can't take away their bat like what like when you a kid, or if you're a parent, either way, if your kid does something wrong and you think, oh, I need to punish them, there's a million things. You just walk into the room, you look around, and you can take anything. Like you go, oh, is this take away the puzzle bad, or is this take away the entire baseball card collection bad?

Which happened to me once for about six months. My entire baseball... What did you do? So I had my parents... My mom had gotten a couple of boxes of cards for some reason. I was a huge card collector. I think she had gotten the cards for some reason that had nothing to do with me. She had like two boxes of these and uh when she was done with them for whatever she needed them for they were still there were still a bunch of unopened packs of baseball cards and so she would give me a pack here and there as a reward you snuck you snuck into the stash i snuck into the stash and i was taking away i was taking

packs of cards and i was i did i had a sneaking problem when i was taking away i was taking packs of cards and i was i did i had a sneaking problem when i was a kid i i would i was sneaking food i was sneaking treats and so it fit the narrative that this was my weakness was sneaking things i was sneaking in to try to you know to look at christmas presents i was every kid does that. I did that. Yeah. And in retrospect, it wasn't bad. But it was like, I mean, I was definitely, you know, like Tom Cruise hanging from the rope when I was doing it at the time. It was sweaty. So I got caught sneaking the cards. And it was the last straw.

So they took my cards away from me until some months later um got them back for my birthday along with all the unopened cards which was pretty cool like i said that they probably shouldn't be giving me those in retrospect but i uh i had one card that they didn't know about that i had snuck away uh that had just sort of been it had been like in a table somewhere like in a drawer and I knew about it and they didn't know about it and so for those months this card was like

great it was the Ozzie Smith 88 tops and I would just I would caress it it was like a letter from my sweetie back home did you sleep with it under your pillow? I couldn't no way I would have gotten caught. This thing, it was kept in the table. I would go visit the table. I think at one point I took it to school which was also risky but it was

risky because the teacher could see it and take it away but it was safe from my parents. So yeah, 88 Ozzie Smith Pops. I'm going to look up that card right now. Yeah, that's the one. That's the one. All right. What were we talking about? I have no idea. We were talking about how there's not much you can do to penalize games.

Right. Can't take things away. You can't take their bats away from them. You can't take away their cell phone. You can't have them have curfew. There's just not that much you can do. You should take away their advanced scouting reports for the rest of the season. I mean, it'd be fun, right?

Ideally, maybe you could, and maybe you would, and maybe that'd be interesting. I mean, wouldn't it be fun? I'm only half kidding here. When I say, wouldn't it be fun if a penalty for something that is kind of like hard to decide what to penalize them, if the penalty was nobody on the team can use batting gloves for like three weeks, and we'd all be paying attention to that, right? Or like two guys on the field at any given time can't use spikes. They have to just use sneakers. Or one guy's got to wear jeans. sneakers or one guy's gotta wear jeans or i mean like in in soccer you lose a man off the field and you have to play shirts and in in hockey too you have to play shorthanded so what if you had

to play shorthanded for a game you know one guy gets suspended but not just suspended you can't even replace it so first first baseman doesn't get a glove First baseman doesn't He would just use the second baseman's glove Right Alright so Ben Who gives up his glove In that scenario Well the problem with the pitcher

Is it might throw off his balance And the pitcher needs the glove for safety Whereas no one else really needs it for safety Except for obviously the catcher. Probably take it away from the left fielder or something. The left fielder, though, is not going to be able to field anything. Like, you can't catch a line drive. Well, yeah, can you catch it?

How, what, okay. People used to. Let me ask you this, Ben. You hit 20 can of corn fly balls. Dad, thanks for calling me. Oh, thanks. You're welcome. All right. Okay, so Ben, let me 20 can of corn fly balls. Dad, thanks for calling me. Oh, thanks. You're welcome. All right.

Okay, so Ben, let me ask you this. You should take all her baseball cards away for interrupting the podcast. You hit 20 fly balls to the left fielder, and none of these are difficult to catch. Some you have to move, some you don't, but we're not talking about the 0% to 10% on inside edges ratings. We're talking about 50% or10% on inside edges ratings. We're talking about 50% or higher, even higher than that. How many does a bare-handed left fielder catch?

I'll say 20%. Okay. I think you give the ball, I think you take the glove from the second baseman. I mean, you're going to lose some ground balls, but the second baseman has a lot of time on a lot of these, and if he just sort of knocks it down, he's going to have time to get the guy out. And a lot of what a second baseman needs to do, the shortstop could do. The fielding throws from the catcher.

The shortstop could go over and probably cover second on a double play ball to the third baseman if you needed him to. And then the second baseman would still be able to handle the turn on double plays at the shortstop fields. So you'd lose a few, but I think you'd lose fewer. So take the club from the second baseman. Okay.

Anyway, so I would suggest some of those finds. That's the kind of find I would suggest. Yeah, that'd be fun. All right, last one. You bug the visitor's locker room in your park. And I'm not sure what the benefit would be, but maybe you bug their, you know, they have a room where they have their meeting with the pitchers before each series to talk about how they're going to pitch hitters. Your pitchers meeting, your pitchers and catcher meeting. So let's say you bug that. I mean, that'd be incredibly easy to do. incredibly easy to do right yeah i wonder if that's ever happened so you bug their uh their the visitor's locker room penalty it's a bad it's

uh it's somewhat similar to the man in white but it's worse it's definitely worse it's shady yes it's shadier it is it's possibly illegal right is it illegal i guess i probably yeah i mean you need at least one party consent in most states right so that's bad but i am running into the problem of how to punish teams for things do you i don't know do you what if the team doesn't know anything about it what if it's just the front office doing it on its own and then they put the information they learn in the team's advanced scouting reports, but the manager didn't even know

and the players didn't know that they're getting this privileged information. They just think their scouts are good. It doesn't matter. You can still hurt the players. They are the team. They are the entire team. I mean, you can't take away their income. I don't think you could get away with suspending the players for this.

But you don't have to worry about whether it affects their winning. You can disadvantage the players, I think. I think you are within your rights to disadvantage the players' competitive efforts because they're all part of a team that cheated to get competitive benefits so uh so yeah does it rise to the level of taking wins away because that is that serious wins away that you can't taking wins away is well we're talking about in the same season yeah so it would be pointless to take away wins from last season. And presumably this would require a four-month investigation. And how many pages would be in the report?

I'm always shocked by how many pages are in all reports. A lot of them. So many pages. Yeah, this would be like a 600-page report. I mean, you could do this sort of like, you know, like the Syracuse basketball punishment where they had athlete academic scandal sort of stuff in past seasons. And then they were forbidden from playing in the tournament this year, even though the players weren't the same. But the coach was, other people were, and you're just kind of punishing the current players for things that the team did in the past, which seems sort of weird.

for things that the team did in the past, which seems sort of weird. But if you, I mean, what if you found out about it a week into the season or something, where, I don't know, some guy just taps on the light fixture and the bug falls out, and it's been there for the first seven games of the season or something. Do you say you forfeit those games? You have to replay those games?

I mean, it's such a such a headache just to you benefit the team that they forfeit against do they just get free wins because that doesn't seem fair to all the other teams the 28 other teams or whatever who didn't get to play the forfeiting team yeah you could have them replay any games that went against the team that was bugged but i mean it's such a logistical hassle you can't have you'd have to you know make the other team fly back to play those games which would itself be a disadvantage for that team so that's a really hard thing to do and yet it's can't really just arbitrarily suspend your best player for 10 games or something that seems like it's just a strange

punishment so maybe maybe it does become a fine slash front office slash coaching staff suspension and firing issue probably the same sort of thing right like if you could if you could prove that the manager knew about it then you him. If it was a front office thing, you suspend them or fire those guys or find the team or something, but I can't really think of an on-field penalty that would be appropriate. I think that you make the home team switch

clubhouses forever. They now have to have the lousy visitors. Bug has to stay. What if it's a new stadium both both places have great facilities it's not like one of those you know visitors clubhouse at wrigley or something it's one of those big expansive visitors clubhouses yeah it's hard i i mean i feel like i want to say ban ban whoever knew about this uh from the front office side from baseball

for two years or something but that seems really extreme i kind of feel like this is another one where the if you got caught doing it if you were the second team my penalty would be a lot harsher there's just something about being i know this is not right but there's something about being the first person to spot the opportunity to cheat that feels more noble. The followers just feel like they're just followers. It doesn't seem as clever. I don't even want to give them clever points, but I think that I'd come down pretty hard on them

and just take away their privileges to baseball stadiums. And then any player who, in my report, was knowledgeable about this, I'd give like, I don't know, seven games, but you'd find that no players were knowledgeable about it. Right. Probably. I wonder whether it's ever been done, because it seems, I mean, it's not the sort of thing that people would probably take to the grave,

because it's not like a cute way to cheat like a just kind of oh that was smart you guys got you guys got us like where you know maybe i mean 50 years later or whatever the you know 51 giant stuff comes out where you know they were they had a guy out in the stands with the binoculars or whatever that's kind of well you know it's it's low tech and it's it's kind of almost almost quaint or endearing in retrospect but this sort of thing if you if you admitted that you bugged another team's clubhouse that would at no point would that be like you would get backslaps or or anything for for coming up with that so it seems like the sort of thing that would maybe stay quiet and you'd only have, you know, one or two people know about it

and they wouldn't talk and it would be so easy to do that it seems almost like it had to happen at some point. I don't think anything goes to the grave. I think that if it had happened, we would have at least heard. I'm surprised we haven't heard stories about it happening, even though it hasn't happened. I think that it is surprising it hasn't happened primarily to me because this has been, I mean, it's been technically possible for, you know, 80 years, like since the 40s, basically. You've been able to bug, you know you you've been able to reliably bug things

30s even 40s 40s 50s yeah 40s and 50s we've probably both been watching the americans and you can bug anything in that show that's the that's the early 80s though right anything in the early 80s uh i just read a book about the the sort of the mob wars of Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s, and bugging was a big part of it. Anyway, so given that you could do it, and given that Branch Rickey would do anything, like he had no morals whatsoever except when it came to big important things, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened to. Seems pretty obvious.

Seems like a pretty obvious one. Okay, so that's it for today. If you listened to this before our email show is up, send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Otherwise, support our sponsor, the Play Index, by going to baseballreference.com, using the coupon code BP to subscribe to the Play Index, and getting the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription.

We will be back tomorrow. 675. Is that really all? That's it.