“Why, I changed signs every three innings, Matty,” Kling told me afterwards in discussing the charge. “Some of the boys said that I gave the old bended-knee sign for a curve ball. Well, did you ever find anything to improve on the old ones? That’s why they are old.”
But the Cubs still point the finger of scorn at Kling, for it hurts to lose. I know it, I have lost myself. Even though the Athletics are charged with stealing the signs whether they did or not, it is no smirch on the character of the club, for they stole honestly—which sounds like a paradox.
“You have such jolly funny morals in this bally country,” declared an Englishman I once met. “You steal and rob in baseball and yet you call it fair. Now in cricket we give our opponents every advantage, don’t cher know, and after the game we are all jolly good fellows at tea together.”
This brings us down to the ethics of signal stealing. Each game has its own recognized standards of fairness. For instance, no tricks are tolerated in tennis, yet the baseball manager who can devise some scheme by which he disconcerts his opponents is considered a great leader. I was about to say that all is fair in love, war, and baseball, but will modify that too comprehensive statement by saying all is fair in love, war, and baseball except stealing signals dishonestly, which listens like another paradox. Therefore, I shall divide the subject of signal stealing into half portions, the honest and the dishonest halves, and, since we are dealing in paradoxes, take up the latter first.
Dishonest signal stealing might be defined as obtaining information by artificial aids. The honest methods are those requiring cleverness of eye, mind, and hand without outside assistance. One of the most flagrant and for a time successful pieces of signal stealing occurred in Philadelphia several years ago.
Opposing players can usually tell when the batsman is getting the signs, because he steps up and sets himself for a curve with so much confidence. During the season of 1899 the report went around the circuit that the Philadelphia club was stealing signals, because the batters were popping them all on the nose, but no one was able to discover the transmitter. The coachers were closely watched and it was evident that these sentinels were not getting the signs.
It was while the Washington club, then in the National League, was playing Philadelphia that there came a rainy morning which made the field very wet, and for a long time it was doubtful whether a game could be played in the afternoon, but the Washington club insisted on it and overruled the protests of the Phillies. Arlie Latham, now the coacher on the Giants’, was playing third base for the Senators at the time. He has told me often since how he discovered the device by which the signs were being stolen. He repeated the story to me recently when I asked him for the facts to use in this book.
“There was a big puddle in the third base coaching box that day,” said Latham. “And it was in the third inning that I noticed Cupid Childs, the Philadelphia second baseman, coaching. He stood with one foot in the puddle and never budged it, although the water came up to his shoe-laces. He usually jumped around when on the lines, and this stillness surprised me.
“‘Better go get your rubbers if you are goin’ to keep that trilby there,’ I said to him. ‘Charley horse and the rheumatism have no terrors for you.’
“But he kept his foot planted in the puddle just the same, and first thing the batter cracked out a base hit.