MLB: Moor's Law Baseball

Baseball, America’s pastime, is a game with many unique aspects. If you view the game with a very broad perspective, it seems very simple. Each team takes turns batting and fielding, with the goal of the batting team to get as many players to home plate as possible and the fielding team to prevent this. At the end of the game, the team with more runs wins. While this is true, it fails to explain parts of the game that make it so unique. It isn’t until you start to examine every facet of the game that you notice all of these unique intricacies; one of which is sign-stealing. 

Sign-stealing is an attempt by the batting team to decode the signs that the pitcher receives from the catcher. These signs indicate what pitch the pitcher is going to throw, and thus successful sign-stealing grants the batting team a massive advantage. Throughout history, teams have found ways to illegally steal signs, and this has continued to this day. As technology has gotten better, teams have found new ways to illegally steal signs. This follows quite closely with Moor’s law, which states that as technological revolutions increase their social impact, ethical problems increase. 

Starting in 2008, Major League Baseball (MLB) adopted instant replay, which meant that a wide array of cameras would be required in every ballpark. Nine years later in 2017, the Houston Astros began using these cameras to steal-signs, granting them an advantage that eventually led them to a World Series victory. In that same year, the Boston Red Sox were caught using Apple watches to relay signs that they had stolen. In both scenarios, these new technologies were used to gain an upper hand, which is a huge ethical problem in a game where knowing the opposing teams’ pitches likely changes the outcome of the game.

Major League Baseball will find a way to prevent the exploitation of these technologies from happening again, but that doesn’t mean that illegal sign-stealing will come to an end. Going forward, as brand new technologies develop, teams will again exploit them in order to gain an advantage, and again the league will find a way to stop it. You may be thinking, “Who cares? It’s only a game!” and while this is true, you must realize that this same scenario applies to essentially all technologies that are developing around the world today. As ethical problems continue to evolve into the future, we must work hard to limit and prevent them, not only in Major League Baseball, but throughout all technological endeavors.