Baseball's cheating history includes its most famous home run, the 'Shot Heard 'Round the World'

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Retropolis

Baseball’s cheating history includes its most famous home run, the ‘Shot Heard ’Round the World’

Sign-stealing hardly started with the Houston Astros. The New York Giants used a similar system when they won the 1951 pennant.

By Tom Jackman
Feb. 13, 2020 at 11:44 a.m. EST

If you think the Houston Astros pulled off a feat with their sign-stealing en route to the 2017 World Series title, they’ve got nothing on the 1951 New York Giants. A highly similar scheme by the Giants not only sparked an amazing run to the National League pennant but also led to the most famous home run in baseball history: the “Shot Heard ’Round the World.”

Both teams used a “spy” in center field to steal the opposing catcher’s signals and relay them to the batter. For the Astros, it was a center field camera feeding a monitor in the dugout. For the 1951 Giants, it was a handheld telescope manned by a coach, who then pressed a buzzer that sounded in the bullpen. Both teams then signaled the pitch to the hitter — the Astros by banging a trash can, the Giants by having a player in the bullpen either toss a ball in the air or hold it still.

The Astros dominated their competition during the regular season, then won a pair of seven-game series against the Yankees and Dodgers to take the 2017 crown, winning eight of nine postseason games in their home park. On Thursday, their players apologized for the sign-stealing.

[The world just learned of the Astros’ cheating. Inside baseball, it was an open secret.]

But the Giants were 7½ games out of first place on July 19, 1951, only six games above .500, when manager Leo Durocher called a team meeting to announce the new sign-stealing scheme. The Giants roared back into contention, going 49-17 the rest of the season, and finished tied for first with the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the era before divisions and wild cards and games in November.

So in the last game of a three-game playoff series, the Dodgers took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth. Then the Giants pushed across one run and put two runners on base for third baseman Bobby Thomson, whose base-running blunder earlier in the game set him up to be the goat. Instead, he cracked an 0-1 fastball from Ralph Branca over the left field wall, unleashing a now renowned delirium in New York and the legendary radio call by Russ Hodges:

“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

But while the Astros were exposed two years after their scam, the Giants were largely able to keep their secret for 50 years, until reporter Joshua Prager exposed it in the Wall Street Journal in 2001 and then in his exhaustively reported 2006 book, “The Echoing Green.”

Thomson and his teammates admitted to Prager they had been involved in sign-stealing. Thomson, who had enjoyed a half-century of fame from one swing of the bat, said he felt as if he had been released from prison, the burden of the secret scheme finally released. But he denied receiving a signal on the fateful home-run pitch. Then late last year, Prager unveiled a crucial final piece of the 1951 puzzle.

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Tom Jackman
Tom Jackman has been covering criminal justice for The Washington Post since 1998 and anchors the True Crime blog. He previously covered crime and courts for the Kansas City Star. Follow https://twitter.com/TomJackmanWP

[CaptYossarian]

1. Why couldn't Leo do that with the '69 Cubs?

Maybe he wanted to, but Ronnie, Billy, and Fergie said no.