The Main Event

  • September 17, 1900 – Reds captain Tommy Corcoran discovered a buzzer and wires buried in the third-base coaching box at Philadelphia Park, exposing an alleged Phillies sign-stealing scheme that reportedly used a spyglass positioned above center field.

Long before the Houston Astros were banging on trash cans, the Philadelphia Phillies were burying wires under third base. On September 17, 1900, Cincinnati Reds shortstop Tommy Corcoran dropped to his knees in the coach’s box at Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl and started digging with his spikes. What he pulled out of the ground, a wooden box wired to a buzzer, exposed one of the strangest and most elaborate cheating schemes in baseball history, and it happened 120 years before Houston made sign stealing a national scandal.

A backup catcher with a beagle’s eyes

The scheme’s central figure was not a star but a career backup. Morgan Murphy was a third-string catcher who rarely played, yet teammates marveled at how sharply he read opposing signs, a skill he had picked up from Hall of Famer King Kelly while the two were teammates on the Boston Players League club in 1890. The Phillies realized Murphy’s talent for spotting a catcher’s signals was valuable whether or not he ever put on a glove.

The idea to turn that talent into a mechanical operation is generally credited to Pearce Chiles, a utility infielder and coach nicknamed “Petie.” While wintering in New Orleans around 1898, Chiles was watching horse races when he noticed a group of boys playing baseball nearby. Looking at them through a pair of opera glasses, he realized he could read a catcher’s signs from a remarkable distance. Chiles brought the concept back to Philadelphia, and he and Murphy began building an operation that would run through the 1899 and 1900 seasons.

Wires under the dirt

At first the setup was simple. Murphy, stationed in the clubhouse or in a rented room overlooking the field, used powerful field glasses to steal signs and relayed them by hand signals or a hidden newspaper. By 1900 the Phillies had wired the whole operation for electricity. Murphy sat in a hidden perch in the outfield clubhouse at Baker Bowl with his binoculars trained on the opposing catcher. When he read a sign, he tapped it out on a telegraph key. Insulated wire ran from his hideout, down the scoreboard, and underground to a buzzer buried beneath the third base coaching box.

Chiles, coaching third, stood over the buzzer with one foot planted in what opposing players noticed was a perpetually damp patch of dirt. When the device vibrated against his foot, he passed the pitch type along to the batter through a pattern of coded chatter and gestures from the coaching line, all while keeping his foot conspicuously still. Cincinnati’s Arlie Latham later joked that Chiles looked like he had “a serious case of the jimmy leg.”

How Corcoran blew the whistle

Rival teams had grown suspicious well before the scheme unraveled. Reds manager Bob Allen noticed wires running into an upper clubhouse window days before the September 17 doubleheader and tipped off his players. During the game, Corcoran left his position and began digging in the coach’s box with his cleats. A groundskeeper and a police officer rushed over and insisted he had struck a drainpipe, but Corcoran kept working until he pulled the wired box free. Umpire Tim Hurst, unbothered, reportedly waved play on with the line “back to the mines, men,” and the Phillies went on to win the game.

The exposure made national news. One newspaper editorial called it “one of the most despicable artifices ever used by a team of baseball players to gain an advantage,” and researchers later found that the Phillies’ home batting average had dropped sharply, from roughly .336 before the device was found to about .294 afterward, a strong hint that the system had been doing real work.

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Denials and consequences

Team owner Colonel John I. Rogers tried to laugh the story away, issuing a lengthy statement claiming the wires had been left behind by a traveling carnival that had strung electrical lights at the ballpark that summer. Newspapers mocked the explanation as absurd on its face. Because no league rule explicitly banned electronic sign stealing at the time, no formal punishment followed from the National League, though the episode helped push officials toward tightening the rules around coaching box conduct.

The players involved fared worse than the team. Murphy was released and left baseball for good after a brief 1901 stop with the Philadelphia Athletics. Chiles stayed on the roster for one more year, but his story took a darker turn. He was arrested in Texas in February 1901 for running a con on an elderly war veteran, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to two years in Huntsville prison, from which he escaped more than a year into his term.

A crooked tradition

The Phillies were merely the first team caught, not the last to try. In 1951 New York Giants manager Leo Durocher revived the telescope trick almost exactly, installing coach Herman Franks in the center field clubhouse at the Polo Grounds with a telescope wired by buzzer to the Giants bullpen, a system that many historians believe helped fuel the club’s stunning comeback to force the playoff that ended with Bobby Thomson‘s pennant winning home run.

Technology only made the temptation greater. In 2017 the Boston Red Sox were fined after a trainer was caught relaying stolen signs through an Apple Watch in the dugout, with the Yankees separately fined for their own video room violations. That controversy looked almost quaint two years later when Major League Baseball found that the 2017 Houston Astros had built a video based operation nicknamed “Codebreaker” to decode signs and had players bang on a trash can to signal pitch types to hitters. The fallout cost general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch their jobs, brought a five million dollar fine and lost draft picks, and reshaped how baseball polices technology in the dugout.

More than a century separates Pearce Chiles standing in his puddle of dirt from an Astros hitter listening for a bang on a trash can, but the impulse is the same. Baseball has always rewarded a player who can guess what pitch is coming, and teams have always been willing to bend the rules, or bury a wire in the ground, to make sure they knew first.

Philadelphia Baseball Events for September 17

  • September 17, 1906 – Eddie Collins made his major league debut with the Athletics at shortstop, playing under the assumed name “Sullivan” to protect his remaining collegiate eligibility at Columbia University; he went 1-for-4 with a stolen base against the White Sox.
  • September 17, 1964 – The Phillies signed minor-league free agent Manny Muniz.
  • September 17, 1984 – Rookie Dwight Gooden struck out 16 Phillies but the Mets lost 2-1; Gooden committed an error and a balk, Shane Rawley scored the winning run and pitched a complete-game five-hitter for Philadelphia.
  • September 17, 1996 – Glenn Dishman became the 54th player to appear in a Phillies uniform that season, tying a National League record.
  • September 17, 2005 – The Phillies scored 10 runs in the ninth inning on eight hits and four Marlins errors for a 10-2 win; Endy Chavez and Shane Victorino entered as pinch-runners and batted later in the same inning.
  • September 17, 2011 – Raul Ibanez‘s eighth inning grand slam powered the Phillies to a 9-2 win over St. Louis, clinching their fifth straight NL East division title.

ICYMI

Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for September 17

  • Otto Krueger (born 1876) – Infielder who closed out his six-year major league career with the Phillies in 1905, his final stop after Cleveland, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.
  • Frank Schulte (born 1882) – “Wildfire” Schulte was the 1911 NL MVP and a four-time pennant winner with the Chicago Cubs who wound down his career with a brief 1917 stint in Philadelphia.
  • Whitey Glazner (born 1893) – Right-handed pitcher who split his five big-league seasons between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, finishing his career with the Phillies in 1923-24.
  • Sheriff Blake (born 1899) – Right-hander best remembered for a decade with the Chicago Cubs, including a 1929 World Series start against the Athletics, before a brief final season with the Phillies in 1931.
  • Ernie Koy (born 1909) – Outfielder acquired by the Phillies from Cincinnati in May 1942, playing 78 games that season before wartime Navy service ended his major league career.
  • Bobby Wine (born 1938) – Gold Glove shortstop (1963) who anchored the Phillies infield for most of the 1960s and famously played the late innings of Jim Bunning‘s 1964 perfect game; he later served as Philadelphia’s bench coach on the 1980 World Series championship staff.
  • Jim Woods (born 1939) – Third baseman acquired by the Phillies in the January 1960 trade that sent Richie Ashburn to the Cubs, playing parts of two seasons (1960-61) in Philadelphia.
  • Greg Golson (born 1985) – Phillies’ 2004 first-round draft pick who made his MLB debut with the club in 2008, appearing in 6 games as an outfielder.
  • B.J. Rosenberg (born 1985) – Right-handed relief pitcher who worked out of the Phillies’ bullpen from 2012-2014, going 4-2 over 57 appearances.
  • Kyle Dohy (born 1996) – Relief pitcher whose only major league appearance came with the Phillies on October 2, 2021, a scoreless inning of relief against Miami.

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