SIGN STEALING HAS BEEN PART OF THE BASEBALL TRADITION

By Pete Avila
Special to El Rrun-Rrun
Russ Athletic Club All-Star

After more than six decades of playing baseball, fast-pitch fastball, and coaching kids in the intricacies of the game, Pete Avila has a different take on what he considers to be self-righteous calls for stripping the 2017 World Series championship from the Houston Astros and the firing of their coach for stealing signs between the catcher and pitcher of the opposing team.

Boston Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora, who was the bench coach with the Houston Astros before going to Boston. The Astros fired manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow after the scandal broke.

Avila would have done something entirely different.

"They ought to be given them trophies or a raise for thinking about how to make it possible for their team to win," he said. "Sign stealing has been a part of the game ever since I can remember."

Avila says that in all the games that he has played one coach would keep an eye on the other coach in the dugout as he signalled plays to his gteam.

"If they had a man on first or second and the other coach gave the signal for him to steal, the other coach would catch the sign and warn the pitcher and infield about the impending steal," he recalled. "Then the pitcher would throw a pitch out so that the catcher would have a chance to get the runner. It was part of the game."

Unlike the Astros and Red Sox who used the sign stealing to alert their batters to the coming pitch, in the past it was used to stop base stealing.

"It was for a different purpose then," he said. "You saw what the other coach was telling his players on the field  and you warned your team of the possible steal."

Squeeze plays - that is, bunting to move the runner from third to score - was also another sign that coaches looked for and when they saw the opposing coach sending the signal, the coach would yell to his players to watch out for the squeeze.

"Back then sign stealing was usually used by the defensive team," he recalled.

As far as stealing the signs sent by the catcher to the pitcher, Avila says it takes a creative person to be in centerfield with a camera and then transmit the signs to the dugout where a confederate would bang a trash can with a bat and transmit the signal to the batter.

"One bang was a fastball, two was a curve, three bangs a drop, and so on," he said. "But just like Mr. Jesus Rodriguez wrote on April 9, even if you  knew what was coming, you still had to hit the ball."

In fact, Avila said, he remembers in 1985 when his Brownsville team played in the Latin American Fast-Pitch Softball tournament in Houston and the opposing pitcher - "El Indio" Lopez - was known for his wicked knuckleball, or change-up.

Alex Anzaldua was pitching for the Brownsville team. The game went 17 innings before Brownsville lost by one run.

At one point, as the game dragged on into the later innings, a player from Matamoros playing with Brownsville named "Chava" miraculously hit a double off Lopez and was at second when an umpire saw the coach give him the signal to steal third.

He then warned Chava that it was getting late and he wanted to go home and if Chava tried to steal third he was going to all him out.

But knowing what the pitcher was throwing - like "El Indo" who threw the knuckler 90 percent of the time - did not guarantee a hit.

"We knew what he was going to pitch," Avila recalled. "In those days we used to call the knuckleball - or change up - "La Chencha" in Spanish and everyone would be yelling at the batter 'Cuidado con la Chencha, "Cuidado con la Chencha' and El Indio would still strike them out."

(Ed.'s Note: Avila was inducted into the Rusk Athletic Club Latin American Fast-Pitch Softball Hall of Fame in 2008. He said there are only three other players from Brownsville who have received such an honor. They are Felix Buentello (2000), Alex Anzaldua Sr. (2004) and Jesus Perez (2012).