Stealing signs is a tradition almost as old as the game itself. What was the trick to making it disappear?
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very now and again, a perfect story falls into your lap, one that hits all the interests in your life. This is one of those. This is the story of how two magicians changed baseball.
Nobody can say for sure exactly when catchers began signaling signs to pitchers, but we know that it predates the creation of the National League in 1876. Peter Morris, in his essential book, A Game of Inches, quotes Henry Chadwick in 1871 griping that a pitcher shouldn’t let the catcher tell him how to pitch.
“While the catcher should be allowed to have some influence over the pitcher in directing his fire,” Chadwick wrote, “the pitcher ought to be master of his own actions.”
Still, by the 1880s—when the curveball was very much part of just about every pitcher’s arsenal—catchers were almost universally calling pitches in what would become familiar to baseball fans for the next 140 years: One finger for a fastball, two fingers a curve, and so on.
Shortly after catchers’ signals became ubiquitous, the obvious happened: Teams began stealing signs. This is one thing you can always count on in baseball—if there’s a way to bend or break the rules for an advantage, teams and players will ALWAYS do just that.
Then again, it wasn’t exactly against the rules to steal signs. In 1889 and 1890, the Brooklyn Bridegrooms won the pennant (first in the American Association and then in the National League), and when asked how they did it, their famed shortstop, Germany Smith, said, “It was done by our studying and learning the signs of the opposing pitchers. There wasn’t a club in the league last year that we didn’t know the signs of the pitchers.”
By 1896, catchers were doing all they could to counter the sign-stealing, using their arms, feet and “in order to be even more puzzling, several league receivers give signs with their mouths.” This little game would go on for more than a century, teams and players coming up with more elaborate ways to protect signs, and teams and players coming up with even more elaborate ways of stealing them.
In 1951, the Giants famously came back from oblivion to win the pennant, and they used an intricate system involving a spy with a telescope, a buzzer system and special signs from the bullpen. While “honest” sign-stealing was not illegal—players were allowed to look in and try to steal the signs—this sort of sign-stealing, using electronics, most definitely was illegal. There’s every reason to believe that when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ’Round the World, he knew what pitch was coming.
And so it went. In 2017 the crescendo happened; the Houston Astros won the World Series and were soon outed for a blatant sign-stealing scheme that involved cameras, detailed analytics and players pounding on a garbage bin in a not-so-subtle method of communicating what pitch was coming.
The Astros were not the only team using intricate sign-stealing systems. But they were the ones who got caught. And baseball was scandalized.
That’s when a retired patent attorney and professional mind-reader named John Hankins thought: “Wait a minute, there’s got to be a better way.”
No, Hankins was not the first person to think that. People had been for years and years trying to come up with a more secure way for catchers and pitchers to communicate. But the truth is that none of the new ways quite worked. Buzzers didn’t allow enough information to be passed along. Flashing lights? In certain sun conditions, you wouldn’t even be able to see them. Codes were way too complicated, particularly in the heat of competition, and anyway were dangerous because of the obvious potential for cross-ups.
How about using a Bluetooth device so the pitcher and catcher could just talk with each other? Well, in the words of Craig Filicetti, one of the world’s great builders of magic devices, “Bluetooth sucks. It’s completely unreliable and nobody can figure out how to connect and disconnect. It will never be Bluetooth.”
In fact, every direct communication device suggested to baseball proved faulty or bulky or unworkable, and in all cases, the signals were easily stolen.
So why did Hankins think he had an answer to baseball’s eternal question? Two reasons:
- He had Craig Filicetti to help him.
- They are both magicians.
The second reason was key. This, John realized, is exactly what magicians do.
Joe Posnanski has been called "contemporary sports writing's biggest star." For more stories from Joe, subscribe to his Joe Blogs Substack newsletter at joeposnanski.com, where he writes about sports, pop culture, life, and all manner of nonsense.
When John Hankins called Craig Filicetti to first talk about their plan to change baseball, the conversation felt surreal. They didn’t know anybody in baseball. Craig was not even a baseball fan*.
*At one point during that first spring, Craig asked, “Where is the World Series going to be held this year?”
But there was something utterly familiar about the challenge. How do you allow a pitcher and catcher to communicate surreptitiously without anyone else being able to pick it up? You know what? That’s not a baseball problem. That’s a magic problem, one that mentalists and mind readers (and spiritualists going back to Harry Houdini’s time) have been wrestling for more than a hundred years.
John knew from his own mentalist act that Craig had come up with some of the most novel solutions to the endless problem of secret communication. Craig was an electrical engineer when he began performing magic to entertain his son’s classmates on one of those “bring your dad to school” days. Craig’s son was naturally shy, and soon, to help him break out, father and son began performing magic together at birthday parties and book launches.
At one point, Craig wanted to do a trick with a candle that would light up and go out on command, but he couldn’t use real fire. There was nothing on the market quite like that, so he built the device himself. And that’s when Craig realized that he could build better magical devices than he could buy.
“Craig makes literal James Bond-type devices for mentalists,” renowned magician Joshua Jay says. “He makes hidden speakers, dice you can inspect, roll and the magician can tell you the number, secret angle devices, he markets the popular trick where you can pick up any object from a table and put it in your pocket and he can tell you what you moved and where it is. It’s as close to magic as you can get.”
John used many of Craig’s devices in his own mentalism act, “Open Minds,” and he instantly saw the possibilities for baseball.
“Let me tell you something about Craig, because he wouldn’t brag on himself,” John says. “He made it impossible. That’s what makes him different. We’re talking about tricks that had been done in other ways, but he made those things impossible. He made it so that there was no way, no explanation.
“And he made it easy for magicians. Now you see so many magicians who call themselves mentalists because he made it so easy for them.”
Craig, as mentioned, was not steeped in baseball knowledge or history … but he instantly grasped the puzzle. Baseball needed a magical device with a signal that could not be stolen. It needed to be invisible. It needed to be virtually indestructible. It needed to transmit signs in an instant—there’s no time between pitches for a long sequence—and ones that could be heard and understood in a 110-decibel stadium with 50,000 people going absolutely mad.
And, most of all, it needed to be so simple that it could be operated every time in the most pressure-packed moments.
“John and I instinctively understood the challenge because we’ve both been on stage,” Craig says. “We know that unpredictable stuff is going to happen. Many engineers I work with don’t quite get it. I would say to them, ‘No! This has to be foolproof!’ And they’re like, “It is foolproof, all you have to do is hit these nine buttons in sequence every time, and it will work perfectly.
“And I tell them, if you’re on stage, and you’re sweating bullets up there, you can’t even remember your own name, much less pushing a nine-button sequence. John’s a big baseball fan, and we would talk about how these guys really are on stage, performing in the worst possible conditions—dirt, sweat, stress, noise, I mean, just all this stuff. This cannot work 99% of the time. This cannot take them out of their zone. This has to be foolproof, and it has to feel entirely natural.”
With that knowledge, he and John immediately wrote off the idea of it being a direct communication, walkie-talkie-like device. There was simply no way to make that work. They wouldn’t be able to hear each other. The signals would be stolen. Forget it.
Instead, Craig went back to a device he’d invented for magicians called “Live Show Control.” It’s a tiny MP3 player that magicians (or really any performer) can surreptitiously hide in their palms or behind the microphone, and it allows them to control the music or sound effects of the show. All the performer has to do is press a button and the music plays. Press it again, the music stops. Press it again, the next song plays.
It isn’t immediately clear how a device like that could solve baseball’s problems. But John and Craig realized that if they could create a tiny device like that, a device catchers could wear stealthily on their wrist or thigh or wherever, one with unbreakable security so signals that could not be stolen, well, that could work, right? The catcher could press different buttons to send certain signals to the pitcher—maybe a voice that says “Fastball” or, more specifically, “Fastball down and away” or even more specifically “Four-seam fastball, down and away, you got this!” That could work, right?
They built a prototype within a few weeks. And they were really excited. But they faced two problems. One, John didn’t really know anybody in baseball. And two, they built this prototype right in the middle of the pandemic, when there was no baseball going on.
And then, once baseball began again and John was able to connect with some people in the game, he came upon a third, even more stubborn, problem. Baseball people were skeptical. They’d been presented with so many so-called solutions to the stolen signs issue that many had simply come to accept that it was an unsolvable problem.
But finally, through a connection with attorney Don Gibson, who had worked in the commissioner’s office, John and Craig were able to demonstrate their new device for executive vice president for baseball operations Morgan Sword. They put the receiver on Sword’s head and pressed a button.
“Did you hear that?” John asked former big league catcher Nick Hundley, who was standing right next to him.
“No,” Hundley said.
“I did,” Sword said. “I heard, ‘fastball, high, inside.’”
And then Sword turned to John and Craig and said, “Can you guys really do this?”
“We said ‘Yes,’” John said. “I mean, we’re magicians. This is what we do.”
That is how PitchCom was invented and baseball was forever changed.
There are three ultra-cool things about PitchCom, in my view as a big fan of both baseball and magic.
No. 1: PitchCom is such a magical little thing. A brilliant magician named Jamy Ian Swiss once explained to me a key difference between music and magic, and I’m probably getting it wrong, but the main idea was that the musician happily lets you see how it’s done. With magic, as the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik wrote, “The better it is done, the harder it is to see that anything has happened at all.” PitchCom is so small, the signals are so simply entered, the voice is so quiet for everyone else, that there’s a good chance you have never even noticed it.
No. 2: It made the problem entirely go away. Think about it: It was basically just yesterday that a multi-billion dollar industry had no better way of signaling signs than having the catcher hold up a certain number of fingers. We put a man on the moon more than 50 years ago, but the one-finger-is-a-fastball system was still cutting-edge technology in 2021. Of course, signs were stolen. How could they not be? If you put your life’s savings in a paper bag marked “All my money!” there’s a good chance someone would take that.
But PitchCom has so entirely changed the dynamic that it’s hard to even remember what it was like before. PitchCom was key in allowing MLB to add the pitch timer because signals are now so easily and quickly transmitted. Cross-ups have pretty much gone away. Sign-stealing is virtually impossible (though as we saw with the Aaron Judge kerfuffle the other day, people are still worried about batters peeking in to see where the catcher is setting up*). The game has other problems, for sure. But the sign thing is gone.
*I do not believe at all that this is what Judge was doing, by the way. But him simply being distracted and glancing to his right caused a bunch of back-and-forth accusations.
No. 3: The possibilities for PitchCom are limitless. At first, you would think that the only thing you’re trying to get across with PitchCom is pitch type and location. Curveball, down and away. Fastball, up and in. That sort of thing. But the truth is that you can say anything. Teams will have the voice firmly saying, “Throw the ball over the damn plate” or happily shouting “What a great pitch!” or “You’ve got this, come on!”
You can have a full discussion between pitcher and catcher in a matter of seconds.
Catcher: “Fastball.”
Pitcher: “No. Curveball down.”
Catcher: “Trust me. Fastball.”
Pitcher: “Curveball. I have conviction.”
Catcher: “OK. Bring it.”
Because of the design of PitchCom with its nine buttons (some for the pitches, others for location, there are also buttons to cancel signals), it’s super-intuitive for the players to go back and forth with phrases like that. And John and Craig say you wouldn’t believe the creativity that teams bring to it. One team, they say, uses Morgan Freeman’s voice (though they think it’s a voice changer; Freeman was probably too expensive). The voices are in different languages, of course. It’s really quite an incredible thing.
A couple of other PitchCom things. The original version—the one Morgan Sword heard on that first day—used technology called bone conduction, which sends sounds through the skull rather than through the ear. John and Craig pretty quickly realized that they could never make the signal loud enough to make that technology work in stadium conditions (“It would break your skull apart,” John says), so they switched it so that the PitchCom receiver is in the player’s hat and the sound comes down to the ear. They can dangle a tiny and almost imperceptible wire from the hat to make the sound a bit clearer in especially loud circumstances, like the playoffs.
Here’s something I didn’t know: Five players on the field are allowed to wear the PitchCom receivers (and nobody off the field is allowed to wear it, including managers, which make a lot of sense. Let the players play). Obviously, pitchers and catchers wear it; typically, teams will have the up-the-middle players have it on—the shortstop, second baseman and centerfielder.
I asked John why MLB limits it to five, I mean, that seems kind of arbitrary:
“I think it’s about balancing traditional baseball with the new technology,” he said. “Traditionally, only those five players would know what the sign was. And the others—the corner infielders, the corner outfielders—they might get the signal relayed to them or they might not. So that’s how it is now.”
Yep. That sounds like the baseball we know and love. Tradition!
John and Craig told me a whole lot about the super-intense encryption of PitchCom and how nobody is allowed to record any of the data and how baseball teams across America (minor league teams, college teams, high school teams, travel teams, etc.) want some version of PitchCom. The invention has changed both of their lives.
But yeah, mostly what they wanted to talk about was how much fun PitchCom is.
“Look, I’m a kid at heart,” John says. “I think every magician is a kid at heart. And every time I hold the device and play with it, I think, ‘God, this is cool.’”
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