Why do catchers paint their nails in baseball?

gamesigns

Dear Sports Fan,

I stayed up late last night to watch the exciting playoff game between the Kansas City Royals and the Oakland As and one image kept jumping out at me: the catchers and their BRIGHT YELLOW finger nails. Why do catchers paint their nails in baseball?

Thanks,
Vera

— — —

Dear Vera,

I noticed that too and did some research about it this morning. Catchers paint their finger nails (or color them in other ways) so that their fingers are more easily visible to the pitchers on their team. Before each pitch, the catcher and pitcher need to communicate about what pitch to throw and where to throw it. This communication is important for practical reasons — the catcher needs to be able to catch the ball and he can often do subtle things to help fool the batter and even the ump — and for tactical reasons. Catchers have the primary responsibility for what pitches get thrown when and where. So, how do they communicate? And why does it involve colored nails?

Catchers communicate with pitchers through an occupational sign language. From their catcher’s squat, they stick one hand between their legs and flash a series of hand signals. There’s a simple standard for these signs. Baseball-catcher.com lists the simplest version of the language:

One Finger = Fast Ball
Two Fingers = Curve Ball
Three Fingers = Slider
Four Fingers and/or Wiggle Fingers = Change Up

Major league catchers use far more complicated signs because, even shielded between their legs, the signals might be seen by an opposing player, coach, or even a plant in the audience with a set of binoculars and a cell-phone.

The pitcher stands over sixty feet away from the catcher. We know from David Epstein’s amazing book, The Sports Gene, that baseball players have extraordinary eyesight. Major league players average 20/13 eyesight, which means they can see from 20 feet what the rest of us can see from 13. Even if sixty feet looks to them like 39 feet would look like to a “normal” person, that’s still pretty far. I just measured out about 40 feet in my apartment. From that distance, I could easily see a hand size object but I’m not sure how well I’d be able to translate fast moving hand signals with close to 100% certainty. Add to that the pumping adrenaline of performing in front of 40,000 screaming fans, the overwhelming pressure of a close game, and the mental sloppiness that comes from pushing your body to its limits of exertion, and you can understand why any visual aid would be useful!

So, catchers started adding a bright, contrasting, easy to see stripe of color on their fingers. At first it was just white tape on the fingers or finger tips. Then catchers like Yankees Russell Martin started painting their finger nails. In a 2011 Newsday column, Martin was quoted commenting about his bright orange nail polish:

“At first, I just put white on it. I used to use Wite-Out and then I’d have to take it off after games and it was messy. I just decided to put on a color that kind of pops out.”

[begin rant]

A quick aside about nail polish on male athletes and coverage of it.

I get that men don’t normally wear nail polish. In our culture that’s more common for women to do. I think it’s probably fine to recognize the humor of some of the most stereotypical masculine people out there, professional athletes, adopting a stereotypically feminine habit. The Newsday article does a good job with this by asking whether the Yankees were going to hire a staff manicurist and by describing Martin’s use of nail polish as a sign of his commitment to his team and to winning. Contrast that with the purely offensive way For the Record sports covers Russell Martin. In one short paragraph, they suggest wearing nail polish may be “how you get gay” and predict a homosexual “love triangle” between Martin and his teammates. Nice work guys — I guess that’s what we should expect from a site whose site’s main navigation bar’s first four categories are Pro, College, Hot Chicks, and Title IX. Here are a few of the headlines from their Title IX section:

  • Kate Upton in classy animal print photo sheet [VIDEO]
  • Slovenian triple jumper Snežana Rodić and her awesome butt
  • [VIDEO] When girls try to be coordinated
  • Diana Taurasi likes ironing her man clothes

This is everything wrong with one segment of sports culture. Even if you’re okay with a sports site having a “Hot Chicks” section, naming a section of your website after the landmark equal rights law that mandated equality for women in educational or other federally funded programs, which included almost all youth and college sports, and then filling it with sexist, disgustingly insulting junk is totally unacceptable. How more insulting could you possibly get?

[end rant]

From nail polish, the evolution continued to custom-made finger-stickers. The catchers in last night’s game looked to me like they were wearing the neon green stickers made by a company called Game Signs. Game Signs boasts that their “signal enhancement stickers are easy to use, easy to remove and durable enough to withstand the roughest of games.”

The stickers look great, and I’m sure it’s nice to be able to peel them off after a game, but I think that if my hands were going to be shown in close-ups on HD TVs around the country, I might just get a manicure anyway!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

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