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Joshua Prager

The Echoing Green

Joshua Prager

The Echoing Green

The Echoing Green

Sign Stealing

Jul 10

Written by Josh Prager

The right-field bullpen at the Polo Grounds, 1957. Here Giant pitchers warmed up and here, in 1951, Giant batters looked to catcher Sal Yvars for the sign.

The oblong park featured the only bullpens in baseball located in fair territory as well as a clubhouse aligned with home plate. It was suited to the stealing of signs. The field on September 29, 1954.

Baseball has vowed for more than a century to ban the stealing of signs by mechanical means. But as artist Amadee Wohlschlager illustrates here in the July 4th, 1956, edition of The Sporting News, the game has not done so.

The 1951 Giants one day before the Thomson home run. Visible on the right side of center window is the hole cut into the wire mesh through which the telescope spied.

From a distance of five hundred feet, this thirty-five-millimeter Wollensak telescope could distinguish a catcher's fingers spread at least two-tenths of an inch apart.

Durocher

Polo Grounds

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