Giant Gamesmanship or Rockie Roguery?

Coors Field humidor room: “These aren’t the super-dry baseballs you’re looking for.”

I’m not attending the Orlando Winter Meetings, but personally I would be sorely tempted to skip out and catch a show or two at Disney World. For the benefit of any GMs that might be reading this, perhaps our NotGraphs readers can help prioritize between “Fantasmic” and “Philharmagic?” Pat Gillick and Ed Wade will be watching the comments section and thank you in advance.

In the meantime, our heroes are hard at work discussing issues like the Rockies’ baseball humidification process. Background: this September, the Giants (and apparently at least one other team) complained to Major League Baseball about the level of independent oversight surrounding the Coors Field humidor. The Giants were bothered by the fact that, since a batboy periodically brings balls out to the umpires during games, the Rockies could theoretically be providing humidor balls when visiting teams were batting and then carrying out non-humidified baseballs when the Rockies were up.

The Rockies responded by letting umpires personally collect the entire stock of game balls from the humidor, but it looks like this issue isn’t dead yet. It’s tempting to chalk it all up to gamesmanship on the Giants’ part; they were just starting an important September series against the Rockies when they made the complaints which initiated the change. Of course, lots of people had that reaction when the Patriots Spygate allegations first came out, and that stuff kind of turned out to be semi-true.