Intentional Balk: Baseball's Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating

From the moment of its inception, the quintessentially American sport of baseball has included cheating. Sometimes that rule-skirting is embraced as ingenious hijinks; other times, reviled as an unforgivable trespass. But what exactly is the difference? Why is skipping bases less egregious than signing underage players? Is sign-stealing evidence of ingenuity, or does it fundamentally change the nature of the game?

In Intentional Balk, nationally-recognized baseball historians Dan Levitt and ...