Coded signals
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Gil Thorp, 4/23/22
Despite having become, late in my life and to my own surprise, a fervent Dodgers fan, at first I was unable to get that worked up about the Houston Astro’s sign-stealing scandal of the mid-to-late ’10s that probably cost the Dodgers the World Series in 2017. After all, surely if it’s legal to for one teammate to try to surreptitiously convey information to another during play, it should also be legal for the other team to try do figure out the content of that communication if they can? Well, it turned out that the Astros were dirtier than that — they made use of the cameras in the reply booth to observe other teams’ signals and sent information via electronic buzzers taped to their own players’ bodies — but I still felt like the whole thing raised some interesting philosophical questions, questions which this brewing Gil Thorp storyline is also going to explore! For instance: if it’s legal for the catcher to use hand gestures to send encoded information to the pitcher, why shouldn’t it be legal for the catcher to instead send that encoded information to one of the infielders, who then encodes that information in baseball chatter for the pitcher, who can’t see the catcher because he’s secretly and tragically going blind? I’m very intrigued, though I assume Gil’s typical response to philosophical questions is the same as his typical response to everything else, which is to say three months of ignoring it followed by a lot of yelling.
Mary Worth, 4/23/22
“She’s in her forties or fifties, medium height, short straight hair … I don’t know why I’m giving you a physical description, that’s not what you asked for! … unless you’re standing by the sink, silently staring off into the middle distance with steely resolve, like you’re thinking of paid killers you can hire … ha ha, just kidding, of course … but what if…?”
