Dodgers News: Dave Roberts Addresses Allegations of Team Cheating
Earlier this week, a new book by Evan Drellich came out in which an anonymous Red Sox source accused the Dodgers of being the "biggest cheaters in the whole [bleeping] industry" and saying LA actually got caught cheating during the 2018 World Series but Major League Baseball chose not to do anything. Another source said Chase Utley and an MLB official were hanging out together in the video room, apparently while Utley cheated. It's some real tin-hat stuff that doesn't hold up to even a tiny bit of scrutiny unless you're blinded by fandom and desperate for someone else to have cheated the way your favorite team did.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts heard about those claims, and he says there's nothing to them, as Bill Plunkett reports in the Orange County Register.
“To be honest, I haven’t thought too much about it. I’m not going to go there with that,” he said of defending his team. “All the things that went down, punishments and all that stuff, MLB did a great job of being thorough. That’s not my job to be the judge and jury.”
Roberts confirmed that the Dodgers were one of several teams investigated by MLB after the 2018 season “and they came away with nothing.”
MLB made some adjustments to crack down on the use of video to steal signs following the 2018 season. Roberts said there was a lot of gray area before MLB’s crackdown but “they were very clear about it once they started digging in. And we adhered to everything baseball asked us to do.”
While Roberts didn't come out and say it in so many words, he definitely implied that some people aren't smart enough to understand what constitutes cheating and what doesn't.
“I think that sometimes people can’t differentiate between a competitive advantage and using your baseball acumen – talking about sign stealing – within the scope of the nature of the way the game was created versus cheating,” he said.
“Our guys did do a great job of relaying signs and looking at sequences when the catcher gave them. That’s the school of baseball. That’s gamesmanship. There was never anything illegal about that. … That’s part of having smart baseball players and looking for every advantage. If you can’t give good sequences then that’s your problem. If you can’t disguise them well enough, that’s on you.”
Take the Twitter account @MLBMetrics, for example. This tweet is a perfect illustration of someone who doesn't know the difference between cheating and not cheating.
The person behind the account specifically says the Dodgers were cheating, but if you read the article — the actually screenshots this person is using to support his or her assertion! — you'll see no mention of cheating. Why? Because even now, to this very day, there's nothing against the rules in using video to try to decipher another team's signs. There is a rule against doing it during a game and using that information in real time, but nowhere in Verducci's article does he accuse the Dodgers of that.
In fact, the context of the article makes it clear Verducci is specifically not talking about in-game deciphering, because he compares it to "three years ago," when the only person you would ever find in the team's video room was Zack Greinke, "pouring [sic] over video of opposing hitters." Do we think Verducci was saying Greinke did that during games? Of course not, and there's plenty of video evidence showing Greinke in the dugout during games in 2015.
Clearly, Verducci meant between games, before games, after games, etc., but the wizard behind MLB Metrics is one of those people Roberts is talking about who "can't differentiate" between legal methods and illegal.
That's why nebuous, anonymous allegations are meaningless. Without specifics, we have no way of knowing if the person who said the Dodgers are the "biggest cheaters" knows what cheating is or is as dumb as an anonymous Twitter account.
Good for Doc for telling it like it is, even if he couldn't quite bring himself to use the word "moron" like he probably wanted to.
