A Very Brief History Of Cheating In Baseball

Bradford Doolittle of ESPN, writing about the punishment meted out to the Astros by MLB for cheating during the 2017 season, had a great idea. He would scour the internet and comb through many baseball books and "compile a list of every documented instance of a player or manager working the edges to gain a competitive on-field advantage that I could find".

He soon discovered that "the exercise was too daunting, even though I was going to summarize all performance-enhancing-drugs-related beefs with one line and assign anything related to gambling to a different category. In other words, to say that cheating has always been a part of baseball is more than a true statement. It's a massive…