Major League Baseball investigators have determined that the Boston Red Sox used an Apple Watch to illegally steal signs from their archrival New York Yankees and other teams, The New York Times said in a shocking report Tuesday.
There’s nothing shocking about a ball team stealing signs — which is just picking up on the secret codes, like hand signals, that teams use to strategize. What’s surprising is that someone found an actual task perfectly suited for the Apple Watch.
According to the Times report, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman filed a complaint with the league commissioner’s office about two weeks ago that included a video purporting to show a Red Sox employee looking at an Apple Watch in the dugout and subsequently relaying information to players during a three-game series held at Boston’s Fenway Park.
Those players could have used that information to anticipate the type of pitch that would be thrown, putting them in much better position to make a play on it.
After verifying the Yankees’ complaint with its own video evidence, the league approached the Red Sox. The team “admitted that their trainers had received signals from video replay personnel and then relayed that information to some players — an operation that had been in place for at least several weeks,” the Times reported.
Naturally, the Red Sox filed their own complaint Tuesday, accusing the Yankees of using cameras from its team-owned broadcast channel, the YES Network, to steal signs.