There might be no crying in baseball, but there has always been cheating. This season, though, it will be harder to walk on the wild side of America’s pastime because of a fancy new tool targeting one aspect of the age-old vice.  

The methods of cheating have been as various as the devil’s designs. Sometimes this has meant scuffed balls — cut so that pitches danced away from swung bats at the last moments. Pitcher Gaylord Perry made the Hall of Fame hurling balls lathered with saliva, whose trajectories neither he nor batters could track. Just last season, baseball banned the “sticky stuff” that pitchers grip in their hunt for the most minute of advantages.   

Then there are more serious infractions. The White Sox threw the 1919 World Series, and the summer of 1998 — when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased the single-season home run record — to many fans now feels like a steroid-fueled haze. That same scarlet letter has kept superstars Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, among others, out of the Hall of Fame.    

In 2017 the Houston Astros developed a sign-stealing system that featured clandestine cues, MI6-style espionage, and a garbage can deployed as a drum. They went on to win the championship, a title that many around the league view as swiped. In response, the barons of the game turned not to timeworn indulgence — this is 2022, after all — but to technology. 

Enter PitchCom, which baseball made available to all 32 clubs this spring for use throughout the season. The system features transmission between the pitcher and catcher that obviates the need for hand signals, the ritual and protocol of shakes and nods that signals that the battery mates are simpatico on what type of pitch is coming next.

PitchCom had a test run in the minor leagues last year, and now is operative in major league ballparks. Here’s how it works: The catcher presses a button on a device he sports on his wrist that sends a signal to receivers sewn into the caps worn by the pitcher and select fielders. Five players can be hooked up to the device. 

One pitcher, Adam Ottovino of the Mets, said it “just sort of whispers to you.” Half of major league teams are currently using the technology as the season gets under way, with more expected to sign on as its effectiveness is proved in the heat of battle. 

It is a delicious irony that PitchCom, which seeks to clean up the game, has its origins in the manufacture of tools for those who live by sleight of hand. It was developed by ProMystic, a company that describes itself as “at the forefront of electronic mentalism, pushing the boundaries and exploring new advances within the art.” 

In addition to assisting pitchers in making decisions to throw fastballs or curveballs, ProMystic’s products help mentalists “truly get into the head of your spectator” and testify “to the power of inception,” by supplying the infrastructure for illusion.

The science fiction author Arthur Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but there are some who believe that when it comes to baseball, too much technology banishes the magic from the game altogether. 

PitchCom is just the latest incursion of the digital into this most analog of games. Baseball adopted instant replay in its present form in 2014 to address the scourge of human error, and experiments are being conducted to supplement home plate umpires with a machine called “Hawk-Eye” that can distinguish between balls and strikes more effectively than the human eye. 

Hawk-Eye pitches products like “optical tracking, vision-processing, video review, and creative graphic technologies” as innovations that “make sport fairer, safer, more engaging and better informed,” presumably by minimizing the messiness of the human element.  

Striking a similar tone, baseball’s chief operations and strategy officer, Christian Marinak, says that PitchCom “basically eliminates all need to create a sign system. You literally just press a button and it delivers the pitch call to the pitcher.” Inquiring minds might wonder why bother with human ballplayers at all.  

Technology, magic, messiness — baseball is always engaged in a tug of war between the timely and the timeless, tradition and transformation. The diamond is a place set apart, but its lines are porous and far from impregnable against the technology that is changing how we live, and the games we play.