At the heart of baseball’s sign-stealing scandal is the sport’s long struggle with technology and its inconsistent drawing of a line between gamesmanship and cheating.

Baseball’s mythos is immersed in cunning larceny and wily deceit. So is its vocabulary: Nice guys finish last. Bases are “stolen.” Balls (and some players) are “juiced.” The entire point of pitching is to elude batters with speed or crafty deception. In 1974, Gaylord Perry confessed in a midcareer autobiography to throwing a spitball and was still voted to the Vaseline wing of the Hall of Fame.

Artful trickery makes baseball endearing, helps keep it relevant. It is, at its essence, a game of boundless futility. Even the greatest hitters fail to get a hit seven of every 10 times at bat, a reminder that we are all hugely imperfect and must rely on shrewdness and cunning to succeed.

Well, to a point.

It is O.K. for base runners to steal a catcher’s signs, but not for anyone to use a television or computer to decipher the sequence of those finger-wagging signals. Then caginess is deemed an unfair advantage and, as we have seen in recent days, a fireable offense.