Chris Young Says He Brought The Apple-Watch-Cheating-Idea To The Red Sox From The Yankees

Peter Gammons told an interesting story yesterday:

The Red Sox and Yankees had the dueling Apple watches. One of my favorite human beings to ever play, Chris Young, the outfielder, played for the Yankees in 2016 [actually 2015], came over to the Red Sox, and he told me, "Kind of my idea. I shared the whole Apple watch thing. I got it from the Yankees."

(It's hard to tell whether Gammons says "I shared" or "I started".)

On August 14, 2019, the Globe's Alex Speier wrote an article headlined "Why Red Sox Pitchers Are Looking Inside Their Caps":

In an era when catcher mound visits are finite, and when teams are changing their sign systems all the time to combat increasingly sophisticated sign-stealing, the Red Sox have, in essence, a sign-system cheat sheet inside of their hats. ...

[C]oncerns of in-game espionage have mushroomed in recent years. Increasing technological sophistication — the Hawk-Eye system that beams every camera feed into clubhouses for replay purposes ... have introduced the architecture for newfangled forms of espionage.

"If you're not paranoid about something," said [Heath] Hembree, "you can get got."

That lesson was offered to Hembree in 2016, with the arrival of teammate Chris Young, who signed with the Sox after spending some of 2014 and all of 2015 with the Yankees.

"Once C.Y. got here from the Yankees, he spilled the beans," said Hembree. "It was, 'Oh, OK.' Then [former Yankees catcher Brian] McCann went to the Astros and you were like, 'Oh, OK.' It's everywhere. It's spreading everywhere. Marwin [Gonzalez] went to the Twins [from the Astros], McCann went to the Braves, so it's spreading. You've got to be on top of it."