August 4, 2015

Sign Stealers

Gregg Zaun stole signs when he was with the Blue Jays, but chides the Royals for making it easy:

Zaun’s biggest point was that teams like the Royals needed to use more complicated signs if they didn’t want them stolen but, in conjunction, if they wanted to throw inside at teams they think are stealing, please do, because that’s old school. It’s also kind of dangerous, but does that matter when trying to uphold the game’s integrity, such as it is?

It’s all about the entropy. In general one wants to code so that the fewest number of bits needed to send a message get transmitted. That means it gets through easily on a noisy channel. In baseball, when the other team can see what you’re doing, you want to add noise. I guess the Royals aren’t doing that.

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