A catcher wears a PitchCom bracelet. Photo: AP
In a sport where some stadiums still hand-adjust scoreboards, it’s no surprise that it took MLB a massive sign-theft scandal to try out the technology. The league announced that this season it will allow teams to use PitchCom, a device carried by catchers, pitchers and one or three players that allows them to signal pitches without flashing and risking painted fingernails that the opposing team decodes the sign language.
This begs the question: have the people who play baseball really not seen casinos? In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, there’s a scene where a couple of crooks cheat a blackjack table using what I consider to be a primitive version of PitchCom. However, MLB’s device does not require pitchers and positional players to know Morse code.
In addition to undermining teams looking to capitalize on lax security, it will speed up the game in ways that don’t change it with gimmicks, such as: B. Placing a runner on second base at the start of extra innings. The players on the field equipped with the devices know which field is coming and can position themselves accordingly. (I assume they can use PitchCom to set up a shift until their banishment next year.)
The early returns are as glowing as expected. Yankees pitcher Luis Severino and catcher Kyle Higashioka used it over the weekend, and Severino was so excited he plans to use it in his first start of the season.
“I think it’s great,” Severino told ESPN. “I was a bit skeptical at first, but once we started using it it was really good – even with a man in second place. I would definitely like to use it on my first start [of the regular season]. …You know immediately what pitch you’re going to throw.”
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It sounds like parents who finally got onto smartphones, or the rice cooker they got for Christmas. Was reception like this when the NFL finally put headsets in helmets?
I’m wondering why we don’t try a similar device or method for managers and base runners to have them go through an elaborate song and dance to dispatch or pin down a would-be base stealer. Also, an earpiece for pitching coaches, managers, catchers and pitchers to avoid long visits to the mound would be welcome, but we all know this is more about giving a reliever more warm-up time than necessary send wise advice.
Baseball is trying to create bigger bases in the minors this year to increase security and encourage stolen bases before they’re used in the majors, and those are the kind of weird, proactive changes they should be trying.
It’s odd that holding your hand under your crotch and giving signals has been normalized to the point that the MLB’s stance was, “That’s the way we’ve always done it, so if you cheat, that’s on you, not us.” .” It’s as if a teacher told a class they wouldn’t search the internet for potential plagiarism, and then got shocked when half the class turned in the same paper.
Former Astro and current Yankees analyst Carlos Beltran said Houston wrongfully cheated during a recent broadcast in 2017, and baseball fans and members of the media treated the admission as if he were a guy who got away with murder and then wrote a book about it , like he would do I killed these people. What they did was extremely overkill, but MLB, being largely reactive, allowed them to get to the point where cheating was so obvious that they were hitting trash cans and teams were actively protecting the Nationals from stealing Signs in front of their world warned series against the Astros.
PtichCom should eliminate the not-so-grey area of whether it’s okay to steal the enemy team’s signals, and thank goodness, because having one less unwritten rule to debate is a good thing.