EDITORIAL: Major League Baseball reels over sign-stealing scandal

These are fighting words in Alabama, where sports are so important that streets and stores are deserted when a college or high school football team is playing a significant game.

But unless you’re drawing your paycheck from it, a sport is an avocation no matter how many tickets you buy, how hard you cheer, how much team gear fills your closet or how many knickknacks line your shelves.

That’s why there are so many examples of people to whom sports is an actual vocation pushing rules to the limit, or willfully and unashamedly violating them.

Auto racing legend Smokey Yunick once brought one of his creations to a NASCAR event. Inspectors pointed out numerous rule infractions on the car. Yunick said something along the lines of “add one more,” and hopped into the vehicle and drove off — sans the fuel tank.

There’s steroid use, with people trying to gain an edge through better chemistry, and pitchers loading up baseballs with saliva or other slippery goo, or nicking them with sharp objects, to make them more difficult to hit. There’s the various “-gates” — the suffix that signifies nefarious behavior — attributed to the NFL’s New England Patriots, like using under-inflated footballs.

Now, the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox — World Series champions in 2017 and 2018 — are embroiled in a scandal over the use of technology such as video cameras to steal opposing teams’ signs and communicate the information to players in real time.

The technology and the “real time” aspect are at issue here. People have remarked that sign stealing has been going on for years in baseball and other sports. However, it generally has happened via the eyes, wits and intuition of players, coaches and managers, although there have been some brushes with technology.

For instance, one of the Patriots’ misbehaviors — “Spygate” — was using video to record opposing teams’ defensive signs. The team wasn’t penalized for stealing the signs, but for recording the video from an unauthorized area. The romance of Bobby Thomson’s famous pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in 1951 has been tarnished by the revelation that the Giants had someone stationed in the clubhouse in center field at the Polo Grounds with a telescope, stealing signals and relaying them via an elaborate buzzer system.

The current fallout: Houston’s manager and general manager were fired. Boston’s manager, a former bench coach for the Astros whom according to investigators was up to his nostrils in the sign stealing plot, resigned in what was billed as a “mutual decision” with team officials. The New York Mets’ manager, a former Astros player also linked to the plot, resigned on Thursday.

There are rumors that other teams are involved; we imagine some of those folks are sweating a bit. Conspiracy theories also are simmering online.

The late George Bamberger, a former pitching coach and manager, summed up a pro athlete’s mind-set to author Tom Boswell in his book “How Life Imitates the World Series”: “We do not play baseball. We play professional baseball. Amateurs play games. We are paid to win games. There are rules, and there are consequences if you break them. If you are a pro, then you often don’t decide whether to cheat based on if it’s ‘right or wrong.’ You base it on whether or not you can get away with it, and what the penalty might be. A guy who cheats in a friendly game of cards is a cheater. A pro who throws a spitball to support his family is a competitor.”

That’s a compelling argument, but we doubt Bamberger in his most bizarre dreams ever envisioned what technology would do to sports. We don’t see electronically stealing signs in real time as gamesmanship or competing. It’s unleashing not just a full worm can, but a snake pit, and MLB seems serious about making it stop. Teams should heed the message.