Kansas City Royals: What if Royals had cheated in 2014-2015?

Baseball fans have officially started the “shame tour” for the 2020 Houston Astros. Fans of other teams have had their signs stolen literally and have openly voiced their displeasure with the team that cheated their way to becoming the 2017 World Series Champions.

Let’s take a look back and ask the question – What would it have been like had the Kansas City Royals cheated in 2014-2015 by stealing signs?

We don’t need to assume this for 2015 because the Royals won the World Series. Let’s just leave that season alone and say they stole signs and ended up World Series Champions. For this particular hypothetical scenario, let’s simply look at how Game 7 of the 2014 World Series would have changed had the Royals as a team been able to know what pitches were going to be thrown.

So, for Game 7 the Royals could have placed a spy out somewhere around the scoreboard and would have had the ability to relay signs to lets just say someone like Eric Kratz or Christian Colon somewhere in the dugout.

Let’s use the game footage of the Fox Broadcast from that night and pretend that we are the individual stealing the signs and relaying them to Kratz or Colon. There’s no reason to debate how the team is going to relay the pitches (trash can, whistle, buzzer) other than the guy at the plate as well as the runners will be aware of what pitches will be thrown.

Yes, the runner will know the pitch also. This is something that has yet to be mentioned, as an advantage the Astros had while stealing signs. More to follow on this.

Only the camera view on Fox will be used to “steal pitches”. Only those pitches we can clearly see where Giants’ catcher Buster Posey place down a sign will be stolen. We will also put into consideration that solid pitches that aren’t clear mistakes will have the exact same results.

The Giants will get the same results they had that game. They scored three runs (two in the second and one in the fourth) that night.

The Giants’ starter was right hander Tim Hudson. He is the oldest pitcher to ever start a World Series Game 7 at 39 years and 107 days. Hudson was mostly known for mixing it up with sinkers, cutters and split-fingers.

Tom Verducci that night on the broadcast said that the key to success that night was going to be Hudson’s ability to keep pitches low and away from the Royals hitters, specifically the right handed bats.