Watch Out For the Cheater

In this limbo between the end of the World Series and the commencement of the Winter Meetings, the biggest story these days revolves around the Houston Astros and their various efforts to game the system. Baseball has always been rather proud of its long history of skullduggery, but certain methods of beating the rule book have always been regarded as beyond the pale. Furthermore, the traditional solution to teams stealing the catcher's signs seems to have fallen out of use.  Danny Farquhar spoke of how angry he was to hear the bashing of the bat before he threw a changeup. It seems not have occurred to him to greet the batter hanging over the plate looking for a breaking ball with a fastball up and in. (It used to work pretty well. The batter's life would flash before his eyes and the banging on the drum would henceforth only bring back scary memories. I suppose that's just a little too old school.)

Anyway, we can expect MLB to be chatting with Jays hitting coach Dave Hudgens, among many, many others. And it's extremely unlikely that the Astros are the only team up to this sort of high jinks - the Astros merely seem to be unique in the modern game for their general disdain for what anyone thinks of anything they do.