Baseball is a Cheating Sport: The Story of MLB shows us that the game has been full of people who seek to gain an advantage against the rules and win at all costs: Since the scandal of the Chicago “Black Sox”, even the famous “salivated ball “by Gaylord Perry, passing of course for the Age of Steroids and more recently, the signal theft scandal of the Houston Astros and illegal substances used by pitchers.
While the Houston Astros scandal was something that was expected to be “in the past” after all the noise of the “hits,” MLB Network reporter and analyst Ryan Spaeder uncovered a giant MLB sewer by reporting. in a series of tweets (which he later deleted) that the Astros were not the only ones cheating by stealing signals using cameras, but that many teams also did it, even before the Astros themselves.
In his series of tweets, he mentions that the Kansas City Royals were the “pioneers” in this type of cheating by using their analytics and video team in their dugout, implying that they somehow illegally stole signs during his season of champions in 2015, which was imported by other organizations years later.
Spaeder also implicated the two teams most “aggrieved” by the Astros’ cheating, the Dodgers and the Yankees, who also cheated in the 2017 season, with the Yankees allegedly having cameras in their stadium in center, right and left field to steal signs, plus the Astros surprised a Dodgers employee installing a camera at Minute Maid Park during the 2017 World Series.
Other teams reported to have also used a tactic similar to that of the Astros are the Colorado Rockies, Texas Rangers and Detroit Tigers, with all using one or another variant of the scheme introduced by the Royals and perfected by the Houston Astros.
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