Baseball Cheating: ’51 Giants vs. ’17 Astros

Baseball Cheating: ’51 Giants vs. ’17 Astros

By Robert Malchman

June 25, 2025

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Back when Alex Bregman was on the market this past winter, I said that I did not want

any of the 2017 Houston Cheatros on the Yankees. They are forever tainted and should be

forever shunned by the Yankees.

Paul made the argument that the 1951 Giants were exposed as cheaters and asked if I would likewise shun Willie Mays if free agency had existed back then. Here is the link:

https://www.startspreadingthenews.blog/post/willie-and-the-breg

(if I misstate any aspect of Paul’s inquiries, arguments or conclusions, first, my apologies, and second, I welcome correction.)

First, let me dispose of the “but we already have had Marwin Gonzalez and Cameron

Maybin on the roster” argument. On the Yankees, they were minor, back-up players, and frankly, I didn’t focus at the time on their roles in the Cheatros’ season. If I had, I would have been opposed to their acquisition, too. In any event, the making of one or two mistakes is not grounds for opening the floodgates for more. If Bonny and Clyde, and then Dillinger successfully robbed a specific bank, that shouldn’t give Willie Sutton a free pass to do the same.

It’s the same specious argument that some suspected PED users are now in the Hall of Fame, so let’s let all the crooks in! I reject that line of thinking completely.

Second, I think one has to consider generally the natures and severities of baseball

“crimes.” Scuffing a baseball is nowhere near as bad as throwing World Series games in

exchange for payoffs from gangsters. Appropriately, the two are punished differently – a 10-day suspension vs. a lifetime ban. The argument that Player A broke Rule X, Player B broke Rule Y, and Player C broke Rule Z, so we should treat A, B and C all as rule breakers and condemn them uniformly as such does not even rise to the level of speciousness, and as with the bank-robber argument, I reject it completely.

The degree of actual or potential corruption of the sport should be the measuring stick for

the severity of the offense and thus the severity of the punishment. This is why I find PED abuse so offensive; it corrupts the sport by forcing players to choose between their career success and their health. That Whitey Ford scuffed a baseball did not put pressure on Early Wynn to do the same. By contrast, we know Bonds started taking PEDs when he saw the effect they had on McGwire’s and Sosa’s statistics in 1998. That’s why PEDs are evil and their use should be punished severely.

Sign-stealing, if it’s done on the field, is not cheating. A runner on second signaling

location may get thrown at the next time up, but it’s a part of the game, just like watching a third base coach to figure out the indicator and signs. But even outside-the-field, electronic-aided sign-stealing at its worst is not as bad as PED cheating because it corrupts one season, not the entire sport.

Third, how does the Giants’ cheating compare to the Astros’ cheating? I agree with Paul

that they were materially similar. In Paul’s post, he links to an excellent SABR article

https://sabr.org/journal/article/focus-on-the-giants-cheating-scandal-of-1951/ regarding the

history of sign-stealing and the mechanics of the Giants’ scheme.

In short, they used a spotter in their clubhouse in dead center field. A wire ran from there to the bullpen, which was in fair territory 440+ feet from home plate. The wire was connected to a buzzer, and the bullpen catcher would either hold a baseball over his head or toss it in the air to indicate whether it was a fastball or a breaking ball. As I’m sure everyone knows, the Astros did basically the same thing: electronic surveillance and communication, and trashcan banging to communicate with the hitter.

The Giants cheated their way to the NL pennant, though they lost the World Series to the

Yankees, including dropping two of three at the Polo Grounds. Houston won both home games against the Red Sox in the ALDS. They won all four home games in the ALCS against the Yankees, two of them by one run. They won two of three home World Series games against the Dodgers, Game 3 by two runs and Game 5 by one run in 10 innings. They literally cheated their way to a World Championship.

Fourth, there was nothing MLB could do 50 years after the fact when the Giants’

cheating became public. However, it blundered horribly in giving immunity to all the players in

exchange for their evidence when the cheating was revealed in November 2019. As anyone who ever watched a police procedural TV show knows, you flip some low-level guy in exchange for immunity, and then you go after the crooks up the chain. Bregman, Correa, Altuve and others all should have been suspended for a year. Instead, only some management types paid the price, which they should have, but there should have been more.

Additionally, MLB should have taken a page from the NCAA and stripped the Astros of

their titles and banned them from selling additional 2017 World Series merchandise and

displaying any pennants or signs at the aptly named former Enron Field.

Finally, we get to Paul’s excellent Willie Mays question. To track the Astros’ timeline,

assume the cheating became known in November 1953, and Mays became a free agent in the

winter of 1957-58. I’ll also assume none of the Giant players were punished or expressed

contrition. I’d give Mays more consideration than Bregman because he was a 20-year-old rookie and a Black man playing just four years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier; the pressure on him to conform and stay silent would have been enormous. Bregman was 23 and had exceeded his rookie limits the year before, but 2017 was his first full year, so he was still a young player.

What we can’t know is what Mays might have said after the scandal was exposed. In real life,

Mays was 70 years old when that happened, and there is no record of him ever addressing the cheating (at least according to Google AI).

Bregman in 2024 was a very good, 30-year-old player, with 15.8 WAR over the previous

four seasons. Mays was a superstar, 26 years old, 35.5 WAR over the past four seasons, with one MVP award and another two he easily could have won (in both cases, it went to a member of pennant-winning team). Moreover, in the 9 years from 1958 through 1966, he led MLB in WAR 7 times – that’s how great he was.

In that same time, the Dodgers won 4 pennants (including 3 World Series) even without

Mays. In 3 of the other years, they were so far out of it that not even Mays could have lifted

them to a pennant. But in 2 of those years, 1961 and 1962, they finished second, 4 and 1 games back, respectively. In real life, Willie Davis was their centerfielder, with 2.4 and 5.8 WAR. In those years, Mays put up 8.7 and 10.5 WAR. Single-handedly, he would have given the Dodgers two more pennants. (Bregman is currently on pace for a 6.2 WAR year; very good, but not Maysian.)

Notwithstanding the enormous potential benefit (even without the benefit of hindsight), if

Mays were as unrepentant in 1957 as Bregman is today, if I were the Dodgers, I would not have signed him as a free agent, nor any of the other cheating Giants, like Monte Irvin, Alvin Dark, Eddie Stanky or Bobby Thomson.

That doesn’t mean that Mays or Bregman should have been shunned for life by all teams; this isn’t betting on games in which they participated. But if my team has been specifically victimized by cheaters, I do not want them playing for my team or seeing them in its uniform. I’d rather lose with honest players than win with someone who cheated me.

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Note - The grahpic was created by Google Gemini responding to the following prompt: "Can you create a graphic with a player that looks like Willie Mays in an old NY Giants uniform sitting next to a player that looks like Alex Bregman wearing an Astros uniform?