Benefield: Sonoma County baseball veteran knows all about stealing signs

Marshall Brant calls the Houston Astros sign-stealing hullabaloo the biggest scandal to rock baseball since the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds and ever after became known as the Black Sox.

Brant, 66, played baseball at Rancho Cotate, Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State. In 2015 he was inducted into the International League Hall of Fame along with the likes of Cal Ripken Jr. and Jackie Robinson. In 2015 his number was retired - the only player ever so honored - by the Triple-A Columbus Clippers.

All this to say, Brant knows baseball. And he knows better than most the fine, weird line between cheating and other shenanigans that are not exactly allowed, but which are relatively commonplace.

This Astros thing, which has oozed into a Red Sox thing and a Mets thing, is cheating. Players and staff, at least with the Astros, used a center-field camera to record catchers from opposing teams giving signs to pitchers.

You can’t do that.

“As soon as it went electronic and technology was involved,” said Brant, “it’s really cheating.”

What’s not cheating? Stealing signs with your own eyeballs. That’s perfectly OK. And pretty funny.

Brant did that. And reaped the benefits.

Brant recalled a stretch with the Columbus Clippers, when Johnny Oates was the first base coach. A particular catcher wasn’t shielding his signals and Oates could see them from 90 feet away.

“He said, ‘Hey, big guy, you wanna know what’s coming? I can see the signs from the catcher,’” Brant recalled.

Brant didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely.”

They worked out a system. Oates would stand up for certain pitches, crouch to his knees for others, maybe touch his hat.

It happened with more than one team.

“On the teams that did that, I bet my batting average was 30 points higher,” Brant said.

So those teams that didn’t hide their signs well? Well, Brant said that he and teammate Steve Balboni ate them alive.

“Steve Balboni and I just made hay on the teams that didn’t hide that very well,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we got hits every time, but it meant you wouldn’t be fooled.”

Not every teammate was down with the plan, he said.

“Get this: I said something to (Don) Mattingly after Johnny told me the first time,” he said. “He said, ‘I don’t want to know, that will just mess me up.”

At other times, players who made it to second would pay careful attention to the pitcher’s movements. Any signs or tipoffs would be shared.

“Ken Dayley was a really good pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. Ken Dayley would hold the baseball behind his back,” Brant said. “If it was a fastball, he would continue to twirl it … if it was a breaking ball, he would stop twirling because he would try to get his slider grip.”

The signals to the batter could be any number of things - a particular stance, or where a player pointed their arms or hands.

“We just throttled Ken Dayley every time that season,” Brant said.

But those bits of intelligence gathering are within the bounds of baseball rules.

So much so that, as Brant recalled, at the end of the season his coaching staff alerted Dayley’s about the pitcher’s tipoffs so that he wouldn’t get eaten alive at the next level.

That’s fair play, according to Brant. Buzzers under uniforms and cameras in the outfield are not.

But Brant was quick to fess up to any number of techniques, plots and machinations that were either dancing on the line between fair play and foul, or plainly verboten.

It’s called getting an edge, he said.

“Yeah, they cheated but everybody cheated,” he said. “Everybody cheats.”

“In AA I corked a couple of my bats,” he said. “In AA in Jackson I burrowed out the end of the barrel, maybe a dime or nickel (sized), drilled down three or four inches. All you want as a hitter is to lighten the end of the bat so it’s not too heavy, but you want the meat of the bat to be solid, real wood.”

But he was terrified that an opposing catcher would get a good look at his tampered tool.

“Me, Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Worry Wart, I spent so much time worried about where I was going to throw my bat after I hit the ball, I couldn’t hit,” he said.

He stopped trying to use those bats after “three or four games.”

But he did cut grooves into his bats. He’d drag a nail down the grain of the barrel, then wipe oil over it to cover his tracks - literally.

“Stop and think about hitting a round ball that is slippery with a round bat that is slippery and trying to hit it square,” he said. “The face of a golf iron, why do you think it has all those grooves? ... For me, it was better bite, better lift. If you are a golfer, you totally get it.

“Was it illegal? Of course,” he said.

But it goes back to that getting-the-edge thing. Brant spent years just trying to get a real crack at the big leagues. Everyone around him was trying to get a foot in the door, too. And everybody - well, almost everybody - was doing what they could go get there.

“When you are on the bubble, you think anything you can do to help or get the edge,” he said. “If you are Wade Boggs or Don Mattingly, I guess it wouldn’t matter.”

Brant earned scads of awards and kudos in college and the minors and still only got six at-bats for the New York Yankees and 14 with the Oakland A’s in his career. So trying the corking thing? Yep. Cutting grooves in your bat? Yep. Getting intel on what that guy on the mound is going to throw? Yep.

Sign stealing the good old-fashioned way? It happens, and it happens because the impact is huge. So huge that if teams couldn’t get that intel with the naked eye, they went high tech.

Baseball minds way smarter than mine contend that knowing what pitch is coming, and even where it will cross the plate, is like knowing test questions in advance of the exam. Brant doesn’t disagree.

“There wasn’t a guy on the planet who could throw a fastball by me if I knew it was coming,” he said.

Just ask Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood. His tweet on Jan. 16 saying “I would rather face a player that was taking steroids than face a player that knew every pitch that was coming” got nearly 162,000 likes.

The Dodgers, of course, were on the losing end of World Series matchups not only with the Astros but with the Boston Red Sox, who are also under a pretty thick cloud of suspicion because Alex Cora was believed to be deeply involved with the sign stealing in Houston before he was hired away to Boston in 2017.

He, like Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, were recently fired. Mets manager Carlos Beltran is out, too.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred hasn’t singled out or sanctioned individual players in this one, yet, mostly because it was felt that there were so many who participated. That seems like an odd policy.

But it also follows Brant’s idea that everybody cheats. In baseball, I guess it’s just a matter of degree.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.