[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

There is, because it is baseball, a lot of data out there: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/which-players-might-have-benefited-from-the-astros-sign-stealing/

And, if the results were not compelling, why did they continue to do it?

Baseball was my first love. I played in college until I was hurt. I am frankly somewhat a disinterested fan unless the Giants are in the mix...I haven't watched a regular season game in 20 years.

That said, what the Astros did matters.

Yes, absolutely, what they did matters. A lot.

I have never liked baseball. Probably more due to my early exposure - our games were on crappy dirt fields, where any hot grounder was going to hit a rock at the last second and either hit you in the teeth or in the nuts. I quit long before I was old enough to play in a league that played on "nice" fields. Soccer was my game - played that through college, then in adult leagues until I was 40.

Baseball and football both really rubbed me the wrong way from a different perspective. Both have "favored" positions that, at least as kids, the coaches or the coaches' buddies kids get to play. Both favor physical size as well. Soccer isn't like that, at least not as much. Interestingly, with both big pro sports in America suffering cheating scandals, it strikes me there are no similar ways to cheat in soccer.

Originally Posted by speeder

It was pretty demonstrable that it was effective in the 2017 WS games played in Houston. No one could figure out how their batters were destroying our best pitchers when the exact opposite was happening in the Dodgers Stadium games.

If you are a MLB player and I tell you which pitches are coming in advance, it's no longer baseball. It's fking batting practice.

Yes, I can see that at that skill level, if you know what's coming it makes your job far easier.

What about the pure fastball pitchers? The only Mariners pitcher I can even name is Randy Johnson, who was known for his. I got the impression that the vast majority of his pitches were simple fastballs, nothing fancy. So damn fast that most hitters simply couldn't deal with him, even knowing full well that was what was coming. So, isn't this more of an advantage over the guys who might not have the speed, so they mix it up more?