It’s the cheatin’ Astros, they’ve lost any right not to be gratuitously abused.
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How many teams do you estimate have or were currently stealing signs when the Astros got caught?
75% of the league?
Successfully? Probably less than that. But I assume everyone tries to cheat. Also, what are there, like two hitters left from that Astros team?
In general, sign stealing is within the rules. The part outside the rules is using tech to do so. My WAG is the tech cheating is pretty rare. Lots of folks would need to know about it, and folks tend to blab. That is in fact how the Astros got caught.
My son wore one in Little League (he’s 13 now, played when he was maybe 6-10). I don’t remember if they were required. It wasn’t bulky - basically a stretchy shirt with some padding on it. I called it his superhero shirt.
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I don’t know, the Astros were incredibly blatant with their system and only one guy said anything about it and even he waited until two years after the fact to bring it up. I think most teams probably have someone watching a camera facing the catcher trying to steal signs and the rare part is passing that information to the batters in real time.
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That’s a pretty damn significant part.
Not really. It’s generally accepted that baserunners can try to pass information to batters in real time. Like Sabo said, it’s using tech that ostensibly makes things different.
Passing information to batters in real time with tech when there aren’t runners on base is very different from using tech to get signals NOT in real time, so that baserunners can more easily read them and pass them in real time.
Yes.
Basically, though, I’m sure players on virtually every team at least flirted with using the apple watch like the BoSox did, and rabid fans of every team wouldn’t abandon their team if it was revealed that the guys in their laundry did it.
It’s fun to have a villain, though, even if a lot of the players getting booed had nothing to with it. I just find the indignance that I see on Twitter, etc, to be a bit much.
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This is the key part. Boo those cheatin’ Astros, regardless of such quibbles.
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And who better to do the booing that than the fanatics in Philly?
They are made for this. I’d expect hitting seats which some kind of stick sounds a lot like a garbage can.
https://twitter.com/phillyfanlife/status/1584925734266716161?s=46&t=cXw4kFFyRqeQhlh2-0ZiCQ
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Ha, I’m also 33 and never saw them. I figured you might be younger. Weird
The cheatin’ Astros were originally called the Colt 45s. They rebranded after three seasons when they moved to the Astrodome. The Phillies were originally called the Quakers (the logo is from a defunct NHL team). Those were different days, as nicknames were not official. They started being called the Phillies in their second season, and claim the longest unchanged nickname in North American sports.
Trivia time: what do the two current names have in common, which is unique in MLB?
And that NHL team went on to become the Pittsburgh Pirates of the NHL.
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Quite curious where you’re going with this. The Phillies are the only team that’s named directly after the city/it’s people. But the Astros are named after stars, I presume having something to do with NASA’s presence there.
I’ll guess that they’re both not “real things”. Like in any instance other than baseball, wtf is a “phillie” or an “astro”?
Edit: And don’t show me a picture of a horse and the Jetson’s dog.