Spying Has a Long History in American Sports

Dan McQuade

June 18, 2015

St Louis Cardinals espionage claims: US sports’ dark arts go back 100 years 

The news, out of left field, was quite shocking. One of baseball’s premiere franchises had been accused of electronic sports espionage.

On Monday, it emerged that the federal government was investigating whether St Louis Cardinals’ front-office officials had illegally accessed a proprietary database of the Houston Astros.

Cardinals officials are believed to have consulted a master list of passwords created by a former executive, Jeff Luhnow, who left the Cardinals in 2011 to become general manager of the Astros. It is alleged Luhnow created a proprietary database (Ground Control) in Houston that was similar to one he created while in St Louis (Redbird). It’s not clear which Cardinals employees were behind the alleged intrusions into Houston’s database. “This wouldn’t be cheating in the classic baseball sense,” Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan wrote. “It would be a crime – a literal crime – borne of stupidity and hubris.”

For fans of other teams, the revelations were a chance for a good bit of schadenfreude. Cardinals fans are already known as the “Best Fans in Baseball” (sometimes pejoratively.) Fans and media rushed to make jokes at the Cardinals’ expense. “To be fair,” Chris Driver quipped on Twitter, “the Cardinals’ mascot’s full name is Fredbird Snowden.”

It is believed that the Cardinals’ case is the first known allegations of corporate espionage in American team sports. Such schemes may be common, but not in the sports world. But using technology to steal from your opponents is not new in US sports. Technological espionage of another sort has happened for ages.

Perhaps the first attempt was made by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1889. An engaging retelling was recorded in Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson’s 1912 book, Pitching in a Pinch. Mathewson said sign stealing could be considered ethical in baseball, but certainly not when using artificial aids. During the 1899 season, opposing players were aware the Phillies were stealing signs. But how? It came to light during one September game against Cincinnati.

Former major leaguer Arlie Latham told Mathewson he noticed the player coaching third-base for the Phillies, Pearce “What’s The Use” Chiles, standing in a puddle. “Better go get your rubbers if you are goin’ to keep that trilby there,” Latham said to Chiles. When the Reds returned to bat, Tommy Corcoran checked the coaching box.

“He went over and started pawing around in the dirt and water with his spikes and fingers,” Latham told Mathewson. “Pretty soon he dug up a square chunk of wood with a buzzer on the under side of it.” Corcoran was soon running through the outfield, pulling up a wire as he went along. “It led straight to the clubhouse, and there sitting where he could get a good view of the catcher’s signs with a pair of field-glasses was Morgan Murphy,” Latham said. “The wire led right to him.”

The plan was quite clever. The Phillies’ Murphy would sit in the outfield with a spyglass directed at the catcher. He’d relay the pitch information through the wire – which would deliver a light shock to Chiles’ foot at the third base box. The strategy seemed to work: the Phillies’ .618 winning percentage that season is the fifth best in the team’s 133-season history. A 2010 incident echoed this incident: Phillies bullpen coach Mick Billmeyer was caught using binoculars during a game against the Rockies. The Phillies’ winning percentage was .599 that year, though Billmeyer was caught in May.

Chiles was caught, but he did get a manner of revenge on the Reds the next day. “He switched to first base and started his leg twitching again,” Ron Schuler writes in the SABR baseball biography project, “But this time, when the Reds stopped the game and dug out the coach’s box, they found nothing.” Schuler writes that teams wised up to look for similar schemes, and the idea died out. But it showed up again, a half-century later, during one of the most famous baseball plays of all time: The Shot Heard ’Round the World.

The game, the first nationally televised baseball contest, ended with the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson homering off the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ralph Branca. The three-run blast gave the Giants a 5-4 victory, and also a win in the three-game playoff series that decided the NL pennant. Russ Hodges’s call remains among the most famous in all of sports: “Branca throws. There’s a long drive. It’s going to be – I believe! The Giants win the pennant!”

But the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2001 that the Giants had won the game with the help of an elaborate system, similar to the one concocted by Chiles and Murphy. After rain washed out a doubleheader, Giants manager Leo Durocher concocted his plan. The Giants would steal signs from their clubhouse, high atop the centerfield wall, using a telescope and relay them to the bullpen via a buzzer hooked up by electrician Abraham Chadwick (coincidentally, a Brooklyn fan). The Giants went on a 37-7 run to end the season and set up the three-game playoff against the Dodgers.

Thomson told the Journal he didn’t know what pitch was coming on that famous home run: “I’d have to say more no than yes. I don’t like to think of something taking away from it.” Oddly enough, Branca knew the Giants had stolen signs that season for decades. “I’ve known it since 1954, but I never said anything,’’ Branca said after the Journal story ran. “I didn’t want to cry over spilled milk. I became friendly with Bobby and I didn’t want to demean his home run. I didn’t want to cheapen a legendary moment in baseball.”

Electronic espionage isn’t limited to baseball, of course. There are two different 2007 sports scandals nicknamed Spygate: One in the NFL, and the other in Formula 1.

First, the NFL. Eric Mangini, an assistant with the New England Patriots, had been hired to coach the New York Jets in 2006. Mangini then turned in his former employer after the 2007 opener between the two teams, accusing New England of filming the Jets’ signals on the sidelines. Video assistant Matt Estrella had his recording equipment confiscated by NFL security. The NFL cracked down, fining Patriots coach Bill Belichick $500,000, the Patriots $250,000 and taking New England’s first-round draft pick from the team.“This episode represents a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid longstanding rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wrote in a letter to the Patriots. The punishments didn’t matter: The Patriots won their first 18 games that season before losing in the Super Bowl to the Giants.

The other Spygate was a much larger affair. It began when Trudy Coughlan, the wife of McLaren Formula One chief designer Mike, brought a large number of pages into a copy shop with a request to scan them on to CDs. Unfortunately for McLaren, the clerk who took the order was a Ferrari fan. He emailed the team when he noticed its logo on the pages.

“F1 teams routinely sneak peeks at one another’s cars, mostly in tacitly condoned ways: hiring photographers at the opening of each season to document competitor’s cars, watching news feeds of vehicles being lifted by cranes for transport to estimate weight distribution, exchanging gossip and secrets with insiders from other teams,” Mark Seal wrote in Wired. “Such light espionage has long been part of the game.” Right before the scandal broke, two former Ferrari employees were convicted of industrial espionage [and got suspended sentences].

The first-place McLaren team had 780 pages of Ferrari documents. That was a little more than “light espionage.” The investigation centered on a Ferrari employee, Nigel Stepney, who was reported to be the source of those pages. In 2007, McLaren were eventually excluded from the constructors’ championship and given a $100m fine. (Don’t feel too bad about the fine; it was a tax-deductible business expense.) Stepney was sentenced to 20 months in prison, but didn’t serve any time. He died after being hit by a lorry in 2014.

Espionage is a tradition in sailing as well. In 2009, Alinghi accused a BMW Oracle employee, Jean Antoine Bonnaveau, of taking photographs of its boats in order to glean technical data from them. Seventeen years earlier, the victorious America boat was accused of using scuba divers to photograph opponents’ boats underwater.

Teams have been accused of espionage (or at least something approaching it) in Olympic sports as well. A 2012 New York Times article detailed the lengths nations went to produce more gold medals: a custom-built $121,000 search engine (France), taciturn research departments named Top Secret (Canada) and Secret Squirrel Club (Great Britain), a reconnaissance mission that included “taking video, 3D-, engineering-type images” (United States) and nighttime trips to the marina (virtually every team).

The use of electronics isn’t limited to espionage. Sometimes it’s for simple cheating. A chess grandmaster was caught sneaking into a bathroom stall to check an iPhone for strategy between moves. Chess hasn’t resorted to metal detectors yet, though. “If we asked players to take their shoes off and strip-searched them before every game,” Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis head Tony Rich told NPR, “I doubt you’ll find many people who’d want to come out to the chess tournament.”

Electronic espionage in sports seems to be so ingrained that José Mourinho’s favorite restaurant was once bugged. Sports espionage is likely here to stay. Baseball has come a long way since elaborate buzzer schemes were used to steal signs. Teams have known to look out for subterfuge around their signals from pitcher to catcher. Now they know to establish more secure databases.