Thu, Jul 07, 2005 page20

• Few signs are real in major-league baseball

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  From his coaching box alongside third base, Tom Foley's hands are a flurry of motion, as if he's brushing away a pesky fly.

  They touch the bill of his Devil Rays ballcap, his chest, his wrists, his legs, his ears, his belt in no discernible pattern. Or, they don't move at all.

  It is the game within the game, the silent art of subterfuge and secret communication that is an intrinsic element of baseball and has been throughout its history.

  The chief practitioners of the craft are third-base coaches, who get busy with their sleight of hand when a batter reaches base. The hidden messages they send to batters and runners -- orders conveyed with equal stealth from the manager in the dugout -- often dictate the flow and strategy of any given game.

  Miss a sign and you may botch an at-bat or cost your team a win. Or maybe, as Foley once did while playing for Montreal, you dodge a bullet.

  "I was in New York playing the Mets and facing Ron Darling," he said. "Man on first and second, nobody out. The bunt was on, but I missed the sign. Fortunately, I hit a three-run homer. When I came in the dugout and the manager, Buck Rodgers, said to me, `You were supposed to bunt!' I said, "Well, I saw the pitch pretty good. I thought I could hit it.' I was just joking around. But if you mess up and hit into a double play, well, man, that's a big mistake."

  Given the importance of signs, it's no surprise that teams routinely look for ways to decode the hand and body language of third-base coaches -- and why other teams frequently change signs to prevent them from being stolen. (Or, as legendary manager Casey Stengel was quoted in the Hidden Language of Baseball by Paul Dickson: "I ain't gonna change our signs. I'm just gonna change what they mean.")

  But here's one trade secret to consider next time you watch Foley or one of his coaching counterparts with their hands flying rapid-fire: Much of it means nothing.

  "In the course of a game, say there are 100 pitches thrown or better, and of those 100 pitches, you only give signs when somebody's on base," Seattle third-base coach Jeff Newman said. "So if I give 40 signs a night, I'm really only giving probably no more than five real signs. The rest are decoys. So the key is making your decoys look like good signs.

  "It's a cat-and-mouse game," he added. "And there are only so many places they'll allow you to touch without it being obscene."

  Foley echoes the deception theme: "I may touch eight or 10 spots every pitch. And I may not put a sign on the whole game."

  There's a good reason to always touch every spot.

  "If it's late in the game and all of a sudden you might want to put a hit-and-run on, and you go to that one spot you never touched before, it's a red flag to the opponent," Foley said. "Because the other dugout is watching you. Somebody is always watching."

  It could be anyone from a wily coach or bench player to stars such as former Milwaukee teammates Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, who prided themselves on winning some games for the Brewers in the 1980s by swiping signs, Dickson wrote.

  "If you are able to steal a bunt, a hit-and-run, get an out and win an inning, you can win a game that you otherwise might have lost," Molitor told the author. So how do third-base coaches ply their sign craft? Naturally, systems vary from team to team. But one common element is the indicator: a sign or touch that means the real signal is coming right up.

  Foley gave some examples, stressing that none was part of his top-secret repertoire. "You could have an indicator, where you touch a spot, and then it's not on unless you lock it in," he said.

  And how do you lock in a sign?

  "Well, if I give you a sign and put something on, let's say the left wrist is the lock-in," he said. "That means it is on if I touch it. If I put a sign on and I don't go to that left wrist, then it's not on. Then again, I could put no sign on and end up touching my left wrist -- and nothing's on."
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