(01-16-2020, 10:55 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: The Astros were stealing signs before and during the world series they won, using a camera in center field. 

What I am wondering is, it's so easy to do this, and so easy to prevent, why don't teams prevent this sign-stealing by encoding their signs?   Create a code where one sign affects another sign.  Now a "1" doesn't mean fastball; it means curveball, or whatever.  It's so easy to do this.  You can make one sign mean a switch, or you can have dummy switches, and you can change the whole code during a game.  

Or, you can say, today each batter gets a sign switch on the first pitch.  Really simple.  Or you can say, today, in the third inning, the second sign is the real sign.  How hard is that?  Or, catcher walks to the mound and says, next pitch is a sign switch, and then the pitch after that is the real sign.  Or, today, if I rub my leg a certain way, it's a sign switch.  ANYTHING.  

It seems so stupid in this day and age to have the catcher making such obvious signs to the pitcher as "one finger means fastball."  It's so easy to steal signs like that, and so easy to prevent it.

The point is, the batting team is only allowed to use their own eyes to try to steal the signs. The batting team is not going to have a man in center field. 
In order to decode the sign, you have to see exactly what the sign was, and know exactly what pitch was attempted.
The guys in the dugout and the two coaches on the baseline don't have the perfect view of what pitch was thrown. They may not see the difference between a curveball or an errant fastball. The batter may know after missing the ball, but usually all the batter knows is that he missed. He may not be sure why.
football fans may not get this, because we're used to having coaches up high with radio headsets and a bird's eye view of slow motion instant replay.
What the Astros did would be equivalent to installing microphones on the other team's sideline in football, or intercepting the radio signal between the coaches and the booth and the coaches on the sideline.
And I bet it's a matter of time before we find out that the Patriots did exactly these two things for over a decade.

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