Little Leaguers accuse rivals of stealing signs

Another Boston-area team is accused of using nefarious spy methods to get ahead: the Barrington, R.I. Little League baseball team.

Barrington beat Goffstown, N.H. in the New England regional final on Saturday to qualify for the Little League World Series. Goffstown manager Pat Dutton then accused the Barrington players of cheating in the regional tournament.

“You can see [them] leaning in, looking in and they're doing hand gestures to their kid indicating what kind of pitch it is and where it's located,” Dutton told the New Hampshire Union Leader. “You can do that in big league ball, but in Little League it's unsportsmanlike, it's dishonorable, and it's disgusting.”

While Dutton sounds like a massive whiner calling it “dishonorable and disgusting,” “unsportsmanlike” has a very specific meaning in Little League. In professional baseball, sign stealing is simply against the sport's insufferable and ever-mutating unwritten rules. But in Little League, as ESPN points out, stealing signs is punishable by ejection.

Barrington Little League denied the sign-stealing, and turned around and accused Dutton of breaking Little League rules by making “disparaging comments.” In a statement to Boston.com, Barrington said, “The article in the Union Leader is unfortunate, and its premise false.”

But you can see in video from the game that a runner on second base was seemingly trying to communicate with a Barrington hitter, and the umpire actually stopped the regional championship to deal with it.

Barrington will be one of eight American teams in the 16-team, 11-day Little League World Series, which begins in Williamsport, Pa., on Thursday. No word on whether they used smart watches to text each other the stolen signs.

“They did it the whole tournament and got away with it, and now that's what's representing New England in the Little League World Series,” Dutton said. “It's just a bad look.”

Not as bad a look as publicly ripping a bunch of 12-yearolds. To his credit, Dutton said that Barrington was the better team anyway, that “clearly they were playing better than we were. They didn't have to do that.”

Dutton didn't have to take this to the media, either, but here we are.