![]() In order to determine whether a call merits a challenge, managers are allowed to speak with a video specialist stationed in the clubhouse who will have access to the same video available to MLB's replay command center in New York. Managers will now be able to challenge certain calls they believe to be incorrect. MLB under then-commissioner Bud Selig announces expansion of the replay review system. This, as it stands so far, is the chronological story of the sign-stealing scandals of 2017-2019. Without their work, we'd have carefully selected fragments of the story and not all these particulars and constituent moments that make up the timeline you're about to read. Most of what we know, however, comes from the reporting of writers like Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic and Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal. We know some objective facts, and we know how MLB preferred to have those objective facts rendered. Think about what we know thanks to the official channels. That current discussion, though, owns the moment in baseball, and it may not even be over yet. So if you want to add nuance to the current discussion, there it is. That's not an exhaustive listing of such pre-Astros-Red Sox behavior, but it's enough to make the point. Bill Veeck's 1948 Indians, who won the World Series, intercepted signs from the opposing battery with a telescope positioned inside the scoreboard at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. The 1951 Giants - authors of the Shot Heard 'Round the World - according to contemporaneous reporting used spies and buzzers to steal signs throughout that storied season. For most observers, that pushes it beyond the pale. What the Astros and Red Sox (and possibly other teams) did, though, was expressly against the rules because it leaned so heavily upon technology - the use of replay monitors, specifically, and even decoding algorithms built by front office quants. ![]() The pilfering of a catcher's signs to his pitcher has been a part of baseball since time immemorial and is sanctioned so long as it's achieved by dint of the intelligence and savvy of uniformed personnel. Along the way, outrage has bubbled over, and dozens of reputations - some of them mostly sterling before any of this happened - have been sullied forever. In late 2019 and early 2020, revelations of sign-stealing in both Houston and Boston have cast genuine doubt upon two of the last three World Series outcomes and scandalized baseball.
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