Have Some Fun Watching This Old Cubs-Dodgers Game With Us: Part 2 - The Eye in the Sky

[Matthew Trueblood]

Yesterday, we began a festival feast of old baseball by talking about the unique aspects (good and bad) of a 1990 Cubs broadcast. Today, let's tackle the game that was played that day, itself.

Image courtesy of YouTube

The funny thing about baseball is that every time a team tries something novel and interesting, they are lampooned for their ridiculousness, or else they instigate moral panic. Yet, everywhere you turn throughout the (more than) 150-year history of the game, there have been teams innovating, trying new things both legal and otherwise to gain small advantages within games or across seasons. This has become a more divisive and uncomfortable subject since the Astros were found to have cheated through the use of technology-assisted sign stealing, of course, but again, the Astros were just one in an unending line of teams both before and after them who were shopping for edges in ways they thought of as more creative than truly nefarious.

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For Part 1 of our discussion of this game, click here.

Less well-remembered, but about equally recent, is a controversy between the Mets and Dodgers in 2016. Los Angeles asked permission to paint markers in the Citi Field outfield prior to a game that spring, but after it was determined that they were using electronic positioning devices—laser-based range finders, basically—to pinpoint the marks they wanted to put down for their outfielders, the league forbade them from doing it. What's notable, though, isn't that the measure was barred, but that it was something the Dodgers wanted to try at all. Teams are so precise and so focused on defensive positioning that they wanted to deploy high-tech means of ensuring they got it right, even though there are myriad ways—certain visual cues, the positioning cards all outfielders now seem to carry, coaches shouting and waving their arms—to do it without that rigamarole. They trust the technology, and they want to use it to increase the precision of their work.

That's not anywhere close to new. What does it have to do with the game played on May 23, 1990, between the Cubs and Dodgers, though? I'm glad you (well, I, but kind of you) asked.

In 1990, the league restricted the number of coaches teams could have in uniform and in the dugout during games. This was in response to a rising tide of teams employing more coaches than ever (hey, we've come full-circle, there). Back then, it was less because teams wanted to have three hitting coaches to implement highly individualized and evolving plans for each player than because they thought themselves engaged in a tense game of chess every day, against the opposing team and its manager. The coaches who clustered in the dugouts tended to be advisors on strategy and deliverers of signs, rather than instructors and biomechanists, but anyway, they were growing in number, and the league decided it was getting out of hand. Previously, six coaches had been explicitly allowed, and teams were often able to fudge it and get a seventh involved. The NL forced them to come back down to five for 1990. The Dodgers begrudgingly removed ex-catcher Joe Ferguson from their dugout staff.

But the Dodgers didn't want to lose the value they were getting from having an extra set of eyes, so they (and a couple of other teams) simply pivoted to radio. Ferguson took up residence in the press box each day, and would radio down instructions on (among other things, probably) positioning defenders to Bill Russell, manager Tommy Lasorda's right-hand man. On May 23, 1990, it looked like this.

Plainly, this is not a clandestine operation. You've gotta love the 1990 vibes of that headset. The league was aware of the process and allowed teams to use it—until barely a year later, when "reports of abuses" of the system were lodged by various opponents and the league banned radio communication in the dugout. The Dodgers were mad.

"Football teams do it, why can't baseball teams do it?" Lasorda asked, rhetorically. He had a fair point—but maybe the motive for that protest was really that the team was finding too many edges, after all.

It's funny how it's always the Dodgers, isn't it? Throughout baseball history, while the Dodgers might not originate a given innovation, they tend to be the ones most eager to adopt and expand it. They were, of course, the first organization to break the color line, which is sold to us in textbooks as a moral choice but which history suggests was much more about gaining a leg up. They were among the first teams to create a full-fledged farm system, an innovation Branch Rickey brought with him after creating the modern farm while working for the Cardinals. It was while in the employ of the Dodgers that Tommy John underwent and recovered from the surgery that now bears his name. Rickey made famous the Dodger Way, including little things like "coconut snatching"—a ham-fisted metaphor for finding opportunities to move players to new positions, especially sliding them up what we would later come to understand as the defensive spectrum—and physical training tools like string-frame strike zones and stride-correcting bands.

I often lament that the Cubs have not taken a turn as the powerhouse of the National League for a decade—or even been consistent enough to post seven winning records in a stretch of 10 full seasons—since the 1930s. It's not a coincidence, unfortunately. There have been times when their ownership should have spent much more on the team, and opportunities were missed. More often, though, the Cubs got beat—they keep getting beat, even—because the Cardinals and Dodgers were better and earlier than them, at things like building a farm, integrating the roster, codifying player development, and seeking tools to stay ahead of the competition. That doofy-looking headset on Bill Russell is an imperfect metaphor for the problem, but it's one symbol of it, nonetheless.

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Here endeth Part 2 of our discussion of this one random game from nearly a quarter-century ago. Tune in tomorrow, when I actually talk about the players who played in this game (and how it went) for the first and only time!

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