Is There Still Such Thing As A Cheat-Cute?

A scenario, a question, a worry, a highlight and a memory.

So, another thing about Succes—

Ah, no, okay, no Succession. No prestige television at all in this one. Just a reader engagement issue, all fun stuff:

1. Designing a charming cheat.

2. Could John Joseph McGraw really hit the ball off home plate enough to make an offense?

3. Love is like a cloud, holds a lot of rain.

4. It’s very clear what kind of move Vince Velasquez was trying to do.

5. A list of four to seven names that mean nothing to you and meant everything to me.

1. KENNY ASKS!

You once wrote something to the effect that if, once upon a time, cheating was accepted and almost celebrated in baseball, that is no longer the case following the reaction to the Astros' sign-stealing scandal. The vitriol that met the players in that scandal made it clear that the era where cheating was considered somewhat charming was over for good.

In this new baseball world where any attempt to circumvent the rules or norms isn't acceptable, are there any old-timey schemes that *would* be lauded or at least shrugged off?

There is a long-held (never proven) rumor that Jose Canseco once took an at-bat in Ozzie Canseco’s spot in the lineup while they were teammates in Oakland. What if the Angels tried this with Mike Trout and Hunter Renfroe? They are basically the same height and weight and much has been made of their similar appearance. If Renfroe started to wear a c-flap helmet and Trout started to practice Renfroe's stance and swing, it's plausible—perhaps during the late innings of a close mid-week getaway day game in Oakland to minimize the witnesses.

They would still almost certainly get caught. Would this attempt be considered "aw shucks" charming?  Or would Trout and Renfroe be booed mercilessly in every road ballpark for disgracing the integrity of the game?

SM: If they did it the other way, for some reason—Renfroe hits for Trout, for negative advantage—that seems like a potentially aw shucks move. It'd play as cute—I think—if Trout let Renfroe “be” him for a minute, like in Olivia: Princess For A Day. It'd be super funny if famously opposite identical twins Tyler and Taylor Rogers switched, for no strategic benefit at all, and with no plausible hope of deception.

But if it’s for a competitive advantage, I think the only way it gets the aw shucks is if they get away with it completely, if even rumors don’t start until after their retirement, if at least 25 years pass before they come clean, and if even then they acknowledge it only with an are-they-serious-or-'avin-a-larf tone. Conclusive evidence must never come out. If it’s merely an acknowledged mystery it might be accepted as charming.

It'd be funny to see Trout try not to run too fast. If he ran full-speed, it would instantly give up the scheme.

KENNY: Oh man, I didn't even consider running. The speed difference between the two almost certainly gets them busted. The more I've thought about this the more I've thought of silly ways they could get caught. Trout would have to buy a pair of the same spikes that Renfroe wears. If Renfroe slid or dove in the game, Trout would need to perfectly match the dirt splotches. 

The more I think about it, the more I find myself disagreeing with your opinion that "aw shucks" only happens if they get away with it.  In my opinion, they could get exposed after the fact but still during their lifetimes—even during their careers—and still get the "aw shucks" response, but only under two circumstances:

1. It doesn't work, or (and this is more important)
2. It doesn't matter

Circumstance #1 is self-explanatory. Let's say Trout struck out to end the game—I think they get off the hook. They probably get laughed at to be honest. Other than the “Trout isn't clutch” guys having a field day, this probably doesn't drastically affect Trout's legacy or reputation.

For Circumstance #2, it has to not have any lasting impact on the "story of baseball." The scheme has to happen in like a 13-1 game or when the Angels are already mathematically eliminated and playing another eliminated team. It would have to be something silly like Renfroe is a triple short of the cycle and asks his buddy Mike to help him out. It would have to be spur of the moment, Trout is wearing Renfroe's actual jersey but his own helmet/gear; Renfroe would be watching in his undershirt. If Trout gets caught by the umpire right as he slides into third, gets ejected and suspended, and the lasting image of the moment is a photo of him walking off the field shrugging, wearing a shit-eating grin, and surrounded by laughing teammates, then I think this actually helps his legacy and increases his fame.

Maybe the real issue with the Astros and the reason the anger has lasted all this time is that their scheme both worked and mattered. 

SM: Huh. While you were becoming more convinced there was a reasonable path to "aw shucks," I was becoming more convinced there was no way. The key thing for me was seeing, at the end of every half inning of ball in 2023, pitchers getting their hands checked by the umpires. Which then led me on this journey: 

I've said before, and I believe it's true, that the ethical rule in baseball was always that you could cheat, but you couldn't get caught. If you got caught you'd get in trouble, and to justify the rules existing we would shame you and wonder how you could be so ineptly underhanded and plus probably hurt your team by getting suspended. But so long as you didn't get caught it was always seen as gamesmanship. So, for example, I was just reading this great Steve Wulf article from Sports Illustrated in 1981: 

Kansas City, Sept. 30, 1980. Bill Kunkel, working the night watch out of bunco, apprehends Rick Honeycutt (male Caucasian, 26, 6'1", 190 pounds) for battery with intent to doctor a baseball. The facts: Kunkel, an American League umpire, catches Honeycutt, a Seattle pitcher, using a thumbtack taped with a Band-Aid to the forefinger of his right (non-throwing) hand to carve up baseballs he is pitching to the Royals. Let's return to the scene of the crime.

"It was the third inning." Kunkel recalls. "I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but Willie Wilson had complained about some of the pitches. I saw the Band-Aid on his finger and asked him what happened. When I grabbed his hand I got stuck. I was shocked."

The pitcher's testimony: "I thought the thumbtack trick up all by myself. Pretty smart, huh? Look, I was desperate at that point in the season [he was 6-0 on May 8, 10-17 on Sept. 30]. I figured, 'What did I have to lose?' Well, as soon as I see Kunkel coming out to the mound, I tried to get rid of the tack. But I had done too good a job of taping it on. I felt like I was being pulled over for speeding."

"I'm glad we caught him," says Kunkel, himself a former American League pitcher. "But I'm sad somebody would do something like that."

The surprise in the Honeycutt case is not that "somebody would do something like that," but rather that somebody would actually get caught doing something like that.

Birds do it. A's do it. Even educated Jays do it. Mets do it. Mess ball in glove.

Baseball players also plug bats with cork, cheat on the double play, con runners, bilk umpires and steal signs. There are a thousand tricks of the trade, and they're all done in the name of gamesmanship. They run from the illegal to the immoral to the unethical to the clever. As long as the other team isn't doing them, they're just part of baseball.

So, let's assume there's some truth to my "you're allowed to cheat but you're not allowed to get caught" ethical formulation. In 1981, it was very hard to get caught! Even if you were known to be cheating, it was hard for them to catch you and thus hard for your act to turn out to be unethical. But in 2023, it's become practically impossible to get away with anything. Just look at the examples we've come up with for how the absurd Troutfroe could be exposed: The speed he runs is measured down to inches per second and would be a dead giveaway. So modern, so Big Brother, and so hard to outsmart! The pattern of dirt on the uniforms could be captured by high-quality cameras, archived, analyzed by Reddit sleuths or the other club's video-room guys. It's like trying to pull off a heist with several million surveillance cameras now. That's how much harder it is to cheat without detection in modern baseball. A pitcher tries using grip and it immediately shows up in his spin rate, which—measuring spin rate and making that instantly available to all baseball fans—would have seemed like ridiculous science fiction as recently as 20 years ago. And, of course, they test the players' own bodily waste to see whether they're cheating chemically. 

So, to go back to the umps checking the pitchers' hands after each inning—do they do that because we've decided cheating is no longer cute and slightly permissible? Or is that, because the umps do that, cheating is no longer cute and slightly permissible? I think it's both, it's a loop, it's circular, and that the general advance in the league's ability to suss out cheating is a big part of the reason—maybe the main reason—that, culturally, cheating is no longer tolerated at all. 

And, so, that's why I come down on Troutfroe not being tolerated at all. They're too easily caught. 

Actually makes me think that the one way to make this into a truly fun, actually aw shucks scheme in the moment is: Trout pretends to be Renfroe, in a low-stakes situation. Everybody on the Angels knows they’re doing it. Maybe everybody on the other team knows they’re doing it. They don't do a great job getting away with it at all. The fans know it, the broadcasters know it, even the umpires know it. But the umpires can't prove it. They keep trying to get somebody to admit it—pointing a big bossy finger, “c’mon now admit you’re Mike Trout!”—but they have to give up, and Troutfroe gets away with it. Everybody in both dugouts laughs and laughs. The umpires are made the fools. That’s never out of style.

2. JOHN ASKS!

Is there any way the Baltimore Chop [in which 1890s Baltimore Orioles would supposedly chop the ball off the hard ground in front of the plate and beat out a bunch of those choppers for singles] was real? It seems like a very difficult thing to base an offense around.

SM: I have not done the work to answer this question with any authority. Maybe a project for another day. But this is a great question, because the Baltimore Chop is one of those ancient-days things that you’ve mentally placed somewhere on the Fable→Exaggeration←Fact spectrum. I’d unthinkingly placed it on the Fact side, but you’re right: Fable is really plausible.

The best evidence that it wasn't real is that, in 1905, a hit was described in a newspaper as an "old-fashioned Baltimore chop." 

That was hardly a decade after the thing was supposedly at peak use by the John McGraw Orioles. If they were already referring to it as "old-fashioned" by 1905, it seems to suggest that maybe it was always more legend than practice. Something that out-of-towners heard about in stories. 

On the other hand, an 1898 newspaper treats it as real strategy: 

One more important clue is that what you think a baseball swing looks like is completely different than what a baseball swing looked like in 1900. It’s hard to believe it could be that different, but it was. According to Peter Morris’s great book A Game Of Inches, swings with follow-through went out of fashion around 1870, and “before long, the follow-through seems to have passed entirely out of baseball. In 1906, sportswriter George M. Graham wrote as though the follow-through was unheard of in baseball.” Around 1910 it began making a comeback, though “it was not until Babe Ruth initiated the home run revolution that it became common for batters to follow through on their swings.” In the 1890s, swings weren’t about generating power to hit the ball hard, but generating aim to hit the ball in a direction. The no-follow-through was also partly to help batters run out of the box more quickly, to beat out groundballs. Knowing that about the swing, it’s somewhat more plausible to imagine hitters with the directional touch of coaches hitting fungoes.

But my current mental assumption is probably that the Baltimore club really did have the groundskeeper make the area around the plate very hard, and that really did lead to some hits, but that the Orioles weren't actually able to deliberately steer the ball hard off the ground like that with any offense-producing consistency.

3. SCOTT ASKS!

I'm a Cubs fan, and this has been a particularly odd season (read: it sucks) for me from an emotional perspective. 

If your team has bad results and is supposed to be bad (2022 Cubs), expectations are calibrated and it's easy to appreciate the season for what it is, invest in the prospects, etc. If your team has bad results and is supposed to be good (2019 Cubs), that's a tough one, but the experience is accessible and explicable. You have an identity! You have a right to be MAD (BULLPEN! MANAGER! INJURIES!)!

This season, after some high highs followed by some low lows, it's averaging out to a mid-talent level Cubs performing like a mid-level team. Which is frustrating. Inexplicably frustrating. They're close to being good, but not close enough to matter. And that's correct. And I'm finding myself having a hard time enjoying it at all, really. 

How would you enjoy a season where a meh team, projected to just miss the playoffs, is performing exactly at expectations and will likely just miss the playoffs?

SM: I think I can offer you two paths. I'm not sure either one will be satisfying, but, as we'll get to, that's arguably okay. 

The first one is, what are you doing talking yourself out of the possibilities! Some "mid-level" team ends up overachieving and making the playoffs every year. The 1916 Giants were a mid-level team who finished in Fourth Place! and whose achievements that year were nevertheless so great that they launched this entire newsletter. Let me give you another one: Gabe Kapler is managing his sixth season. His team's record has been within a single game of .500 in five of those seasons—counting this year, with the Giants at .500 on the dot as I’m writing this to you. That seems like as mid-level a period of life as one could have. Except in the sixth of those seasons, his team—which had no more expectations than your Cubs do—won a franchise-record 107 games and the greatest regular-season pennant race of all-time, and gave ol' Sammy over here the most rewarding experience of his baseball-watching life. So, sure, maybe this mid-level Cubs team will end up being mid-level, or worse, just as even very good teams often end up being mid-level, or worse. But maybe it'll win 27 in a row and compete into September and maybe even win the whole thing. You don't get any points for being the first fan in the stadium to give up!

The second approach is tougher. It does not come easily. But it's to accept the sadness, the boredom, the frustration, without judging those feelings. I'm not saying you should try to spin those into good emotions, the way you say you're able to in the hypothetical bad/bad and good/bad seasons; or even ignore them by shutting the team out of your mind. I mean that you can't outrun every hard emotion or bad expectation. When they come, it can be best to simply observe those emotions, be curious about them, know that they are temporary, let them be real. In fact, here’s the A3 advice box in today's New York Times, responding to you, personally!

People fare better when they accept their unpleasant emotions as appropriate and healthy, rather than trying to suppress them. When we perceive our emotions as bad, we pile more bad feelings onto our existing ones, which makes us feel worse. It's likely to increase the intensity of our negative feelings and the amount of time we suffer from them. 

What I’m really saying is give yourself a break from the wanting; be sad without wanting to be not sad. Let your want muscles lie fallow for a season, and accept all of life.

Personally, I'd recommend the first one, but only because I've never come anywhere close to pulling off the second.

4. MATT SAYS!

One play I think about maybe as much as you think about the Brian Anderson play is this one, where Vince Velasquez takes a comebacker off his throwing arm and makes the play to first by throwing a dart with his left hand. 

I look like a toddler trying to throw anything with my non-dominant hand, so I just find this totally remarkable, especially for the presence of mind to even try that. And he does it while he's hurt, too! [Note: Velasquez spent more than a minute on the ground after this play, left the game, and missed his next start.] Every time I think about great fielding plays, this one pops into my head and precludes me from thinking about anything else for a few seconds.

SM: That is the perfect improv play. Just.... imagine watching this in real time and reacting to what he’s doing. He flings off his glove mid-play, and you think—what is that about? He’s like a busted spaceship shedding parts? If you manage to figure out that he’s going to try throwing with his wrong hand, you’re screaming "no no no no no no no anything but that!" Pitchers can already barely throw accurately to bases as it is, and this guy's going to make his first ever left-handed throw (at least, in a game) and expect it to go well? I'm not even sure I'd expect him to be able to correctly plant his feet for that throw—having never done it in a game before—let alone have the arm and accuracy to deliver it. And, for good measure, the play ends up being that close and saves the run that we see coming home in the same camera shot? Amazing, amazing.

If I'd been in that situation, I would DEFINITELY have tried some stupid, desperation flip, or maybe even kick, to try to get the runner out at home. (It’s not clear what kind of move I was trying to do.)

I just can't get over how goofy this Velasquez play would have looked if it hadn't worked. The true measure of improvisation, really!

1. KENNY FROM BEFORE IS BACK!

Yeah, I generally agree with the "you're allowed to cheat but you're not allowed to get caught" theory. And that's not just a baseball thing but I'd argue also a societal thing. Rolling stop signs, underage drinking, chewing gum in the classroom, there are hundreds of examples of everyday behaviors that are wrong and carry consequences but are impossible to enforce on a large scale. Hell, even the way we prepare and submit taxes in America probably fits this theory.

For Troutfroe, I think we both eventually landed on the same conclusion that it has to be played as a joke that everyone is in on. If it's done for an edge in serious competition, you're right, they'd be vilified—because they'd certainly be caught. But if everyone is in on it and having a good time then it's probably closer to the Bobby V fake mustache thing. It's always a good thing when the joke is at the umpire's expense. If it happens in the 13-1 game and Troutfroe faces a position player pitching I don't think they even get suspended.

Okay, one more scenario: this happens in the All-Star Game. Trout (obviously) starts the game, Renfroe (obviously) does not.  Renfroe comes into the game in the later innings and the broadcast split-screens his face in the outfield and Trout's in the dugout to display their similar looks to the national audience. "Renfroe" later comes up to bat but something doesn't seem quite right. The NL pitcher is smiling and shaking his head. Maybe the catcher jogs out to the mound for a quick chat. The AL dugout is all on the top rail, watching intently, and some are laughing. The broadcasters don't immediately know what's going on—the fans watching at home catch on before Smoltz does. I think this is the ideal scenario for the ruse and am generally in favor of doing more silly stuff during the silly exhibition. 

SM: “The fans watching at home catch on before Smoltz does.” That’s ice cold.

So I think where we come down is that rule-breaking can be acceptably rakish and rogueish in modern ball, so long as its in service to entertainment, whimsy, prankishness, fun; but we don’t see a lane for competitive advantage seeking as long as detection remains all but assured.

By the way, if they did this and Trout reached first, he'd have to run the bases without the oven mitt, because Renfroe runs the bases without the oven mitt. The ultimate irony would be if he injured a thumb or finger diving into a base.

5. ZACH ASKS!

How many favorite players have you had in your life? What’s your average favorite player length? I thought of seven in 25 years of knowing baseball (3.5 years per favorite). Some of those longer than others, but I still feel weirdly guilty it’s only 3.5 years for my *favorite* player.

SM: So my best attempt at an honest answer is:

• Brett Butler for three years, but there were periods in those three years I would have also convincingly said Dave Dravecky was my favorite; 

• Darren Lewis for about three years;

• Salomón Torres for about one year;

• William Van Landingham for about two years;

• J.R. Phillips for about one year, overlapping a little bit with Van Landingham;

• Bill Mueller for about five years;

• Pedro Martínez for about nine years;

• Buster Posey for about five years;

• Mike Trout for about five years;

• Buster Posey for the past three years, even though he hasn't played in almost two years.

So that's 11 terms served by 10 favorites in 35 years for an average of... 3.5 years per favorite! Just like you. But they're extending. It's conceivable Buster Posey will be my favorite player for the rest of my life. Are yours also extending?

ZACH: I'm not extending, I'm shortening. I'm guessing this is an MLB.tv phenomena. Before I would watch only the Cubs and only have one of 15 "regulars" to pick. All of a sudden my player pool ballooned and I could actually watch the fun players on the magazine covers play. A little paradox of choice, a little replacement level being raised.

SAM: MLB.com has caused me to like a ton more players but in diluted ways. There are some similarities here to “favorite band” or “favorite album” experiences, which change as one gets older and probably changed as we all moved from finite CD collections to infinite downloads and streaming. From about age 12 to age 22 I had a new favorite band and album every year, but from 30 to now I'm barely capable of picking one, let alone changing my mind once I do.

I couldn’t even tell you why I loved Darren Lewis back then, while I could tell you very easily why I love Andrew McCutchen, Jesús Aguilar and Rich Hill today. And yet I can’t tell myself how to love McCutchen in quite the same reckless, give-it-all-away manner that I loved Lewis. It only lasted three years between me and D-Lew, and yet I might never love like that again.