Cheated

Chapter 1

How We Got Here

Were the Astros part of a long tradition of sign stealing? Or were they outliers, worse than anyone else in history?

The answer is, well, both. What Houston did was the logical extension of more than a century of teams looking for an edge on the fringes of legality. But it was also new and different from anything that came before it.

It’s important to understand the history.

The art of sign stealing stretches back at least to the days when Chester A. Arthur was president. It began with eyes, opera glasses, primitive buzzers, and scoundrels who sang in a cappella groups. As the twentieth century progressed, sign stealing claimed victims—most memorably, it rattled the gentle soul of Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca—and expanded to include new tools. By the turn of the millennium, Branca’s son-in-law Bobby Valentine would innovate the use of scouting cameras to decode opponents’ signs. Later, the Astros pushed more advanced experiments with tech beyond the bounds of legality.

Those characters and teams would all emerge as important points on the continuum. But our story begins with the most notorious sign thief of baseball’s early years, a man clever enough to pull off a scheme remarkably similar to what the Astros would execute a full 117 years later.

In the winter following the 1899 season, a lifelong reprobate and current Philadelphia Phillies utility man named Pearce Chiles, whose nicknames included “Petey” and “What’s the Use,” spent a day at the racetrack in New Orleans. When Chiles looked through a pair of field glasses to better see the horses, he noticed something else just past the track: a high school baseball game—and a clear view of the catcher’s hands and signs.

Chiles had an idea.

This was a man always willing to bend rules, not to mention laws, in the name of personal gain. Born Pearce Nuget Chiles on May 28, 1867, in Deepwater, Missouri, he was a baseball vagabond by his teens, drifting for many years between minor league teams in cities ranging from Topeka to Little Rock, Scranton to Hot Springs. When opposing batters would hit pop-ups, Chiles often mocked them by shouting, “What’s the Use?” before catching them with a flourish. By 1895 newspapers were using that as his nickname.

During that period, Chiles acquired more than just a memorable sobriquet. He also built a criminal résumé. On July 10, 1895, Chiles’s mother died, and he likely traveled to Missouri for her funeral. The following February, when Chiles was in Phoenix for a winter league, the Los Angeles Times reported that he was “wanted in Missouri for illicit relations with a sixteen-year-old girl [in Deepwater]. As the age of consent in that State is eighteen years, the charge against him is constructive rape.”

Chiles managed to escape Phoenix before the authorities caught up with him, and he played that summer in Shreveport and Galveston. Over the next few years he continued to get himself into and out of trouble with local law enforcement.

He also developed a reputation as a savvy baseball man. In 1898 he signed on as player/manager for the Atlantic League’s Lancaster Maroons, and led the team to an 82-50 record. The following year, he received an invitation to the Phillies’ spring training camp in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Chiles was a thirty-three-year-old bench player who had never reached the big leagues. But in Charlotte, he clicked with his new team, which included future Hall of Famers Ed Delahanty, Elmer Flick, and Napoleon Lajoie. Initially playing against the Phillies on an intrasquad team called the Yannigans, Chiles performed well enough to get reps with the varsity. He also fit in socially, earning the respect of his new teammates by knowing his way around a pool hall—and, of all things, an a cappella singing group.

That spring, first baseman Duff Cooley started a quintet with third baseman Billy Lauder, pitcher Red Donahue, and shortstops Monte Cross and Dave Fultz. The group serenaded local women with hits of the day like “The Bridge the Heart Burned Down” and “You’ll Get All That’s Coming to You.”

Noticing that the ladies of Charlotte were sufficiently impressed, catcher Morgan Murphy wanted a piece of the action. He formed a rival group, harmonizing with Chiles, Delahanty, and Flick, and focusing more on comedic material.

Chiles broke camp with the team, and performed well that season in a reserve role, batting .320 in 356 plate appearances, with 76 runs batted in. He also contributed as a part-time baserunning instructor.

The Phillies invited Chiles back for the 1900 season, and used him as third-base coach on the many days when he was not playing. It was in that role that he would make his mark as one of the earliest known adopters of methods that laid the groundwork for the Astros’ later trickery.

Thinking back to that winter day when he saw the high school catcher’s hands through his field glasses, Chiles hatched a plan with his singing partner Murphy, who, as the backup catcher, did not often play. While Chiles coached third, Murphy would position himself beyond the center field wall, looking at the opposing catcher with a pair of opera glasses. The two wired up a system where Murphy could send a small electric shock to a device under the dirt in the third-base coach’s box, indicating what pitch was coming. Chiles, feeling the pulses through his feet, would then relay it to the batter either verbally or through hand signals.

For months, opponents muttered about suspicious activity. Why was Murphy never in the dugout? And why did Chiles always stand in the same spot in the coach’s box? And what, for that matter, was with all the twitching?

The gossip and innuendo escalated as the summer progressed, but no one could prove what Chiles and Murphy were up to. By mid-season, a Philadelphia paper joked that Chiles had the disease of Saint Vitus’ dance, but only in his legs.

In September, suspicion boiled over during a doubleheader in Philadelphia between the Phillies and the Reds. In the third inning of the first game, Reds shortstop and captain Tommy Corcoran sprinted to the third-base coach’s box and dug frantically at the dirt with his spikes.

The Phillies’ groundskeeper quickly followed and confronted Corcoran, angry that someone was destroying his work. Both benches emptied, and soon police were on the field, trying to settle the commotion.

Corcoran had dug deeply enough to find a wooden board, which turned out to be the lid of a box containing a tangle of wires.

The Reds felt validated, but the Phillies continued to deny any sign stealing. Umpire Tim Hurst ordered the teams to resume play.

The day after the kerfuffle with Corcoran and the Reds, Phillies manager Billy Shettsline publicly denied any knowledge of a buzzer device. Opponents and reporters remained skeptical, and the papers began referring to Morgan Murphy as “the Thomas Edison of baseball.”

On September 19, Chiles conceived a mischievous response to the Reds’ accusations. Arriving at the ballpark early that day, he dug a hole in the first-base coach’s box and buried a single piece of wood.

That day, coaching first instead of his usual third base, he began twitching and shaking his legs. That provoked Corcoran and several teammates to rush from the dugout and repeat their aggressive digging. But this time they turned up only the lone piece of wood, and Chiles had a good laugh.

Nevertheless, anger and suspicion followed the Phils. When the team played in Brooklyn on September 26, Brooklyn Superbas manager “Foxy Ned” Hanlon accused Shettsline of stationing Murphy in a tenement building beyond the center-field wall, using a newspaper to flash signs to Chiles.

“You’re dreaming,” Shettsline said.

“I know that Murphy was up in the room reading the catcher’s signals with a field glass that cost seventy-five dollars,” Hanlon said. “It is so powerful he can see an eyelash at two hundred and fifty yards.”

Flustered, Shettsline accidentally conceded his team’s guilt.

“There is where you are way off,” he said. “The glass cost only sixty-five dollars.”

Despite Chiles’s puckish humor and Shettsline’s clumsy denials, the Phillies did see a marked decline in their batting average at home after Corcoran discovered the box.

Before that game, the Phils batted .336 at National League Park, better known as Baker Bowl. After Corcoran and the Reds dug up the wires, the Phils’ home batting average dipped to .292.

Though the Phillies were the most egregious sign stealers that year, they weren’t the only team doing it. On September 29, the same Tommy Corcoran led teammates on a mission to center field in Pittsburgh’s Exposition Park.

There, they found a corner that was fenced off. A Reds player mounted the fence and found a trap door on the other side—mission control for a cheating scheme less sophisticated than the one Chiles and Murphy had run with the Phillies.

The Pirates had stationed a person behind that fence who would use field glasses to steal signs, then operate the hands of a clock to replay the pitch to the batter: twelve o’clock for fastball, nine o’clock for outside curve, and three o’clock for inside curve.

It turned out that the Phillies and Pirates knew about each other’s methods and had entered into a gentleman’s agreement to not steal signs against each other. To prove their sincerity, the Phils agreed to keep Murphy on the bench during games against the Pirates.

The season ended amid rising tension over sign stealing in the league, with the Phillies a particular target of suspicion.

During the annual postseason meetings in October, owners argued about the issue. Brooklyn president F. A. Abell wanted the Phils’ batting averages expunged from the record books, and their wins vacated.

On October 2, the Phillies’ majority owner, Colonel John I. Rodgers, delivered his response in a defiant speech. Teams, he said, had been stealing signs to gain an advantage since the game began. There was nothing wrong with this, provided it was done with the naked eye.

Sure, there had been some talk of field glasses, Rodgers continued. But it was absurd to think that those could actually help.

As for the wooden contraption under Chiles in the coach’s box, and the wires inside it? That was easy to explain, Rodgers said. An amusement company had used the field in July and brought electric lights. They must have left some equipment behind.

“It is absolutely too silly to further discuss the subject, and I therefore dismiss it,” Rodgers said. “I will certainly not dignify the charge by pleading ‘not guilty,’ because minimis non curat lex (the law does not cure trivial matters).”

The issue did not strike Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson as trivial. In a book written years later, Mathewson asserted that the sign stealing had convinced opponents that the Phillies were an excellent fastball-hitting team—and as a direct result of that false perception, they were fed an inordinate amount of breaking balls for several additional seasons.

The team’s denials did not prevent reporters from continuing to probe. Charles Dryden, a traveling beat writer covering the Phils, laid out the scheme in an October 8 article in The North American and traced its origins to Chiles’s trip to the racetrack in New Orleans the previous winter.

Dryden reported that, with the Phillies, Murphy had first used a rolled-up piece of paper, holding it horizontally when a fastball was coming and vertically for a curve. Opponents soon began to notice, so Chiles thought back to a time earlier in his life when he’d been shocked by a live wire. That gave him the idea of adding electricity to the scheme.

It did not turn out to be Chiles’s most serious infraction during this period. On a train bound for Hot Springs on February 15, 1901, Chiles and a friend named D. B. Sherwood ran a confidence game on a soldier named Benjamin F. Henry. After initiating a confusing wager and argument, Chiles and Sherwood made off with ninety-five dollars belonging to Henry. A state ranger apprehended them on the train and jailed them in El Paso.

As a contemporary press account described it soon after:

“Pearce Chiles, the famous coach and buzzer manipulator of the Philadelphia club, is now lost in the sea of despair. He has signed a new contract, but not for any $2400, nor will any American League team try to steal him away from his new employers. Chiles is to do two years on the Huntsville convict farm, and his uniform will be black and white, with the number 24876 across his back. He will not stop at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but will sleep in an abandoned hog pen, and his daily menu will include sour bacon, hominy, corn bread and pure water. Incidentally, Chiles will be allowed to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the work will be so different from that of last year that it will be an interesting novelty. . . . ​Such is the fate of Pearce Chiles. How this man ever got on the Philadelphia team is a mystery. He was run out of Kansas and Texas years ago for serious crimes, and now gets the two-year trick for working a flimflam game.”

On August 19, 1902, Chiles escaped from the Huntsville prison. From there, he continued to float around the country and even play minor league ball.

Other than a few more newspaper mentions of his criminal behavior—the Portland Browns of the Pacific Coast League released him in 1903 after an arrest for punching a young woman in the face—“What’s the Use” Chiles drifted into anonymity, his mark on baseball history already made.