…gonna be honest, I thought I’d already written this review.
In 21st-century baseball, fans see cheating as universally scandalous. From the steroid-aided sluggers of the Aughts through the 2017 Astros and electronic sign-stealing, players and teams receiving the “cheater” label have been booed unceasingly, had calls for a championship to be stripped, and been kept out of the Hall of Fame.
In such an environment, it’s easy to forget the way baseball has treated cheating for over a century: it’s only cheating if you’re caught.
The 2022 book Intentional Balk, by Daniel R. Levitt and Mark Armour, takes fans on an exploration of the history of cheating in baseball, going through various methods by which players and teams have sought advantages over their opponents and what was long considered “fair” cheating.
“It struck us that the recent sign stealing scandal was perpetrated by a team on the cutting edge of innovative baseball management,” Armour said in an exclusive 2022 email interview (…like I said, I thought I’d written this review a couple years ago). “The smartest/most innovative players and teams are more likely to find themselves stepping up to … and over … the line.”
Indeed, the authors open the book citing Rogers Hornsby, one of the greatest hitters in history and a man who freely stated that he’d witnessed cheating in baseball since his career began in 1914. They dub this observation the Hornsby Doctrine (“Baseball players and others within the game will and should find ways to break the rules. It is the job of the authorities to stop them”), one of several doctrines such yclept throughout the book.
Given the book’s conception during and following the fallout from Houston’s scandal, it’s unsurprising that the book devotes multiple early chapters to sign stealing. In reading this section of Intentional Balk, I compared it with a chapter on sign-stealing from Tim Kurkjian’s 2007 book Is This a Great Game, or What? Kurkjian talks about sign-stealing almost exclusively from the view of players and coaches spotting and deciphering signs using only eyeballs and brains. Only about two-thirds of a page discusses how electronic sign stealing is considered cheating in contrast to the gamesmanship of using your eyes alone. But Levitt & Armour use Chapters 2 and 4 exclusively for discussing sign stealing, from 19th-century binoculars to the advent of the PitchCom system in 2021.
Through their writing, Levitt and Armour maintain a light tone where lightness is indicated, such as in the chapters on corking bats and groundskeepers manipulating the field, while still pointing out that these actions are at best unethical and at worst rule violations.
“The decades-long tradition of doctoring the field (making the mound too high, watering down the basepaths) is often considered funny, even if you are caught,” Armour said. “The worst is something that is perceived to dramatically change the game.”
That game-changing cheat? Steroids.
The authors acknowledge the difference between healing or restorative drugs and performance enhancers and take a more serious tone when discussing them, going through the timeline from steroids’ initial widespread usage through the decade-plus it took for MLB to enact and enforce a ban. Steroids have also produced baseball cheating’s most prominent black hats: “The biggest villains of the story are undoubtedly Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. This does not necessarily reflect the views of the authors. but they have dominated the ‘bad guy’ side of this story for more than 15 years,” Armour said.
With a new baseball season coming up and fans in need of further baseball reading, Intentional Balk (a title which, per Armour, predates the Kenley Jansen play) is a book I fully recommend, a sojourn through baseball’s side winks and blind eyes that knows the tone with which to treat its material.
“Intentional Balk: Baseball’s Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating” can be purchased (among other places) through Bookshop here and Amazon here.
Apologies to Levitt, Armour, and Smith Publicity’s Jane Reilly for taking more than two years to write this. An unintentional balk on my part.