You've gotta love baseball. It's the only sport where certain practices that would normally be considered cheating are time-honored traditions -- unless of course you're talking about the NFL's New England Patriots, for whom cheating is also something of a time-honored tradition.
And so maybe we shouldn't be surprised it's another Boston team that just got caught ... well, cheating. Sort of.
It seems the Red Sox got busted for stealing signs by their ancient rival the Yankees, which is not exactly the crime of the century given that, yes, stealing signs is a time-honored baseball tradition. It's not even against the rules as set down by Major League Baseball.
Where it got ethically sticky here is that the Red Sox injected technology into the equation.
It seems one of their assistant trainers, during a recent series in Fenway Park, was using an Apple Watch to steal the Yankees' signs. This is apparently a no-no according to baseball etiquette, which is an elaborate construct that says it's OK to do stuff that might be regarded as shady, but only if you do it in a certain way.
So you can steal signs manually, because that's how it's always been done. Using technology to do it, though, is strictly prohibited.
I know. It's one of those weird baseball things.
Another of those weird baseball things is the Yankees likely wouldn't have raised a stink about this had it not worked (and also, perhaps, had it not been the Red Sox). But it did work. In that particular series, the Red Sox batted .375 with a runner on second base. After they got caught, they went 0-for-22 in the same situation in the ensuing series at Yankee Stadium.
The moral of the story: If you're gonna cheat, don't be modern about it.
I know. Weird.
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