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Curtis Granderson fakes recording Lucas Duda with an MLB iPad
On Wednesday night, New York Mets first baseman Lucas Duda hit a home run in the fifth inning of their game against the Atlanta Braves, his second of the night. To capture the moment for posterity, Curtis Granderson whipped out an iPad (branded with the MLB logo) to apparently capture the moment for posterity.
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If that's what Granderson was doing, he'd be violating the restriction on electronic equipment in the dugout. That's not an official MLB rule, but the restriction was created in a 2000 memo from Sandy Alderson, then-VP of Baseball Operations, to combat sign stealing.
Please be reminded that the use of electronic equipment during a game is restricted. No club shall use electronic equipment, including walkie-talkies and cellular telephones, to communicate to or with any on-field personnel, including those, in the dugout, bullpen, field and–during the game–the clubhouse. Such equipment may not be used for the purpose of stealing signs or conveying information designed to give a club an advantage.
But Granderson wasn't actually recording anything. According to the New York Post, it was all for show.
“It doesn’t have video or photo features. … We’re just doing it more for prop purposes. They don’t want us to have any recording device, which is a little … interesting … considering all the cameras that are in the ballpark. So we can’t do that,” Granderson said.
The iPad Granderson was using was most likely issued by MLB, as part of a partnership with Apple that was announced in March. iPad Pros were issued to all teams, along with an app called MLB Dugout, which allows teams to preload video and scouting data for use during games (without an internet connection, of course). And he's using it just to simulate recording Lucas Duda, which he does often as one of the founders of We Follow Lucas Duda, an Instagram account dedicated to, well, following the life of Lucas Duda.
Granderson also knows the rules on phones in the dugout, since last month he used one to record — who else? — Duda celebrating a home run. From the Post:
“MLB said we can’t use the phone. That’s an MLB rule,” Granderson said.
Granderson can't possibly be the only player who wants to record home run celebrations among teammates, or even just regular dugout happenings. He's making a show of recording it by not actually recording it, which ends up making MLB and their rules look like they're stuck somewhere in the black and white pre-cell phone days.
[Elsewhere: Fan takes opportunistic selfie with player who fell into stands]
It’s time for MLB to reexamine their rules — official or unoffical — about devices in the dugout. Alderson’s memo from 2000 was well-intentioned, and it was in direct response to a pressing issue of the time. But in the 16 years since, technology has gone through an astronomical evolution. The traditional cell phone that Alderson referred to barely exists anymore. Those phones could only really be used as phones. Now, they’re called smartphones and they do incredible things.
They could, of course, be used to steal signs, but they’re also used to document people’s lives, and they don’t have to be connected to the internet to do that. Baseball players have some incredible things to document, and allowing them to do so would only make the players — and, by extension, the game itself — more attractive to fans and potential fans.
With baseball continuing to struggle to appeal to a younger audience, making this change (along with some common sense rules about what can be recorded and when it can be posted) seems like a no-brainer. If only that meant they'd actually do it.
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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
